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Music is a performance-enhancing drug. 
Some exercise scientists could convincingly 
argue that when Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie 
broke the world record on the 2000 meter race 
during a US running competition in 1998, he was 
actually on a performance-enhancing drug. 
Earlier that day, Gebrselassie had managed to 
convince event organizers to play the pop song 
“Scatman” during the race – one of his favorite 
songs, and the song he had trained to. When he 
heard the familiar upbeat melody play over the 
giant stadium speakers, Gebrselassie was able 
to run faster than he ever had before.
The power of music to push us beyond our 
physical limits can hardly be overstated. 
Musicologists have long described music as 
ergogenic, or work-enhancing, and science is 
finding more and more evidence to back up this 
claim. One recent study found that people who 
listen to music during their workouts consume 
less oxygen than those who don’t. And even 
patients with high blood pressure last 51 
seconds longer during a cardiovascular stress 
test when they are allowed to run on the 
treadmill to their favorite tunes. 

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Costas Karageorghis has made a career out of 
the performance-enhancing powers of music: his 
job is to curate workout playlists for some of the 
world’s best athletes. A trained sports 
psychologist, he explains that the best workout 
songs usually have a strong, energetic beat, a 
tempo of 120 to 140 beats per minute and 
motivational lyrics that include words such as 
“work,” “go,” or “run.” Eminem’s “Till I Collapse,” 
for instance, estimated to be the most popular 
workout song of all time, ticks almost all of these 
boxes.
Such positive, familiar songs have the power to 
deliver us an extra burst of feel-good chemicals 
like adrenaline, dopamine, and endorphins 
during our workout. Upbeat melodies and 
inspirational lyrics can also help us frame 
physical discomfort in a more positive way.
Humans’ deep-seated urge to move to music 
has even led to medical miracles. Famous 
neurologist Oliver Sacks liked to tell the story of 
a woman whose leg was paralyzed after a 
complex bone fracture. Doctors believed that the 
communication between her leg muscles and 
her spinal cord had been cut completely, yet 
when she heard her favorite Irish jig, her foot 
spontaneously started tapping. Accessing 
muscle memory with music therapy, the woman 
learned to walk again.