Personalised music helps you stick to exercise schedule

Syncing music to the prescribed pace of exercise can significantly help patients adhere to their workout schedule, says a new research.

The use of personalised music playlists with tempo-pace synchronisation increases adherence to cardiac rehabilitation by almost 70 per cent, the findings showed.

"Cardiac rehab has been proven to improve long-term survival for someone who's had a heart event by 20 per cent," said David Alter, senior scientist at Toronto Rehabilitation Institute in Canada.

"Our challenge is there is a high drop-out rate for these programmes and suboptimal adherence to the self-management of physical activity," Alter pointed out.

Thirty-four cardiac rehabilitation patients participated in the study: one third of the patients did not have any music during their cardiac rehab exercises; and the other two-thirds had audio devices with personalised music playlists during their cardiac rehab exercises.

Among those who had music, half received tempo-pace synchronised audio devices, which means their music playlists were sonically modified by embedding extra rhythmic beats--called rhythmic auditory stimulation (RAS)--to further enhance tempo-pace synchronization.

Patients receiving RAS were unaware that their music playlists had been modified. The patients who used the personalised music playlists with tempo-pace synchronization did an average of 105.4 minutes more exercise than patients who did not use music.

Patients who received RAS had the greatest increase in their total physical activity, achieving 261.1 minutes or more of weekly physical activity than their music or non-music playlist counterparts--corresponding to a 70 per cent increase in weekly exercise.

The study was published in the journal Sports Medicine -Open.