Tons of people use music in their training. There’s something about it. Music can be motivating, hypnotizing, stimulating, or soothing.
In yoga studies it’s the ambient/”Eastern” music that prevails. In hardcore powerlifting gyms, mostly super-intense metal of some sort. The “big box gyms” (Gold’s, etc.), play top-40 type stuff.
I see people wearing their iPods or other MP3/4 players all the time these days, whether they’re running, walking, taking the bus, or whatever. It’s ubiquitous. I do it too. I love to listen to music all the time.
What is it about music, about rhythm, that we love so much? As someone once said “music calms the savage beast.” Kant said that music was the highest form of art, because it’s the least embodied, it relies on pure concept/noumena.
There’s something fundamental to it though, beyond description. We’re composed of rhythms. We live within rhythms – large-scale rhythms/ultradian (6, 10, and 12-year), annual, seasonal (solstices), monthly (moon-rhythms), weekly (work, weekend, etc.), and daily circadian rhythms. Even below that are the rhythms of the cells in our bodies doing different tasks.
When we’re born, we learn language by hearing the rhythm. We know who our parents are by the sound, but also by the rhythm of their voice. We can recognize people by the rhythmical signatures of their movement – it’s possible to identify friends walking just from their silhouettes, when no other identifying characteristics are available to us.
When we exercise, there’s the rhythm of our breathing, our heartbeat, our energy-levels, and metabolic demands.
The danger is when we stop paying attention to these rhythms, when we lose touch with them. Then, we’re cut off from the flow of life around us. We’re floating, unable to get in synch, we lose our energy, our vitality. Plants and animals cut off from their natural rhythms wither and die.
Pay attention to the rhythms in your life. Don’t let any drown the others out. The undulating flow of exertion and rest, activity and recovery, it’s crucial to life, it is life.
