Music helps reduce effort and increase endurance.
Maybe you have a favorite playlist to go to the gym or park. Even if you haven't already, you'll certainly have seen joggers walking with headphones in or on their ears. Many of us love listening to music, the feeling that it helps to reduce effort and increase endurance.
Music brain research
One thing is for sure, the answer lies in our brain, not the muscles we train. An indication comes from an ingenious study, which has managed to separate the benefits of exercising a movement from the benefits of training the muscle that does the movement. If you think this sounds peculiar, several studies have shown that the imaginative ability to make a move produces significant gains. The advantage is not great, as if you really made the movement, but still the benefit of thinking about the movement can account for more than half the benefit of the practice. So, by asking people to perform an imaginary practice task, we can see the benefit of just thinking about a movement and separating it from the benefit of making it. Imaginary exercise helps because it increases the strength of the signal sent to the muscles from the brain's areas of motion. With the help of electrodes, you can record the size of this signal and show that after an imaginary exercise, people are able to send a stronger, more coherent signal to the muscles.
