Applications to Real Life Research

Music and running can be applied so many places in real life.
​

We have discovered that running with music does increase your speed, but while doing this we also learned many other thing. Running has hundreds of health benefits and music has tons of mental benefits. Listening to music and running are two of the most beneficial things in life, so running with music not only is beneficial to you but can keep you motivated and keep your speed up in long distance, races and many other everyday activities. Understanding how music affects you both mentally and physically can and will forever effect your quality of life. Exercising and listening to music at the same time effects you in many ways, it stimulates breathing patterns, keeps the cadence correct and reinforces the ‘effort/relax’ aspect of ideal running, helps the muscles to relax during a long run resulting in better capillary blood flow and  less muscle fatigue, improves the ability to use fat as a fuel source, and ​improves the muscle’s ability to store glycogen. Those are only a few ways that listening to music affects you while running not to mention increasing your speed. As for your brain while running and listening to music your brain goes into a state that many people call "in the zone" which is the state of being extremely mentally focused. Running while listening to music can also greatly effect your intelligence, one study done by Clinical psychologist Charles Emery of Ohio State University tested peoples verbal fluency after exercising without music and then after exercising with music. On average, the participants performed more than twice as well on a verbal fluency test after listening to music while exercising than they did after exercising without the music. Music and running together does not only need to be applied to complex situations and things like intelligence it can also be applied to simple things like running a race where you need an endurance and speed boost. There are hundreds of ways you could apply music and running together in real life situations, this is only a few. It doesn't have to be super complex like raising your verbal intelligence or IQ nor does it have to be as simple as increasing speed, listing to music and running effects everyone differently but it effects everyone positively. One thing we know for sure and we have learned from our experiment is that your brain reacts positively to running and to music, music makes your running speed increase and faster paced music makes it even better, so next time your going for a run wither its to stay in shape, boost your mood, or to relieve stress kick up the speed a bit by putting in headphones and listening to some music.