Does music affect the way you run?

As you may or may not know, I have recently been running everyday in the evening, and that has given me time to ponder some important things.

I always listen to music when I run, I just find it dull otherwise. However, today when I was running, I was wondering whether it actually made any difference to how I run.

Now believe me, I do not run fast or far - I'm really not a sporty person - but I do have a few favourite songs to listen to when I am running.

At the moment, I am loving Radioactive (Imagine Dragons), Demons (also Imagine Dragons), On Top of the World (once again, Imagine Dragons), Stitches (Shawn Mendes), 7 Years (Lukas Graham), Little Lion Man (Mumford & Sons) and just generally songs like that.

However, I don't have a specific playlist for running, so I just put my music on shuffle, meaning that quite often something most unrunnyish comes on, like A Thousand Years (Christina Perry) or The A Team (Ed Sheeran). And I always wonder when these types of songs come on whether they will affect the way I run in any way at all.

You see, I think that they do. I have recently invested in a running album (Now That's What I Call Running 2015 - cause I'm that up to date) which is just basically an album filled with pumpy high beat songs and tunes. I think that when I am given a beat and a rhythm to run to, I will work harder to ensure that I stay in time to that, and don't slow or stop. This is something that you don't get with a slow relaxing type of song.

I did a little bit of research on the world wide web, and according to that it is very hard to monitor the effects of music, because everybody is different.

However, it does seem that music often acts of more of a distraction than an incentive. But it seems to me that when you have no distraction (and you don't particularly enjoy running, like me) all you can do is run and think about how you are not enjoying yourself - which seems like something that will just hold you back. When you are listening to music, and you have something else to focus and concentrate on, then surely the time will pass a lot quicker?

This website did also say that the louder and faster your music is, the faster most people appear to run (although this can be quite unsafe when running across roads and around vehicles). An actual quote of findings from the website says that:

"One study found that listening to high-tempo music for a 10-minute warm-up enables better performance in high-intensity exercise, even when there’s no music playing during the actual trial period."

So... music does help!

I don't really know if you got anything out of this, I feel like I just rambled about my terrible music taste most of the time. I'm not going to stop listening to music when I run because I would just get too bored (plus, I just spent £9.99 on my running album, so I need to get the most out of it!).

Maybe you learnt something, maybe you didn't but never mind. Be sure to leave something in the comments - what do you think about music?

See you soon!