Music and Muscles by Jerry Brainum 11/22

 

 

When I first began weight training 60 years ago, gyms were mostly silent. The only sounds typically emanating from a gym were the constant clanging of weights and the heavy grunting by those who lifted the weights. Two things never seen or heard in gyms in those days were music and women. No one apparently considered that having music playing in the background in a gym could positively affect training. But research over the years has shown that music can have profound effects on the degrees of training intensity and motivation. But it took years for this notion to be realized. Die-hard "old-school" gym owners, such as Vince Gironda and Joe Gold both refused to have music playing in their gyms. Vince's reasoning was that it's important to focus on the exercise you are doing to establish a mind-muscle connection. Playing loud music would interfere with that connection, Vince reasoned. As with so many of his ideas, Vince Gironda was ahead of his time as far as the mind-muscle connection is concerned. The more you focus on your training, the more you will involve muscle fibers that can lead to gains in muscular size and strength. Vince couldn't have envisioned a time when the majority of people in gyms walked around with cell phones in their hands and played with their phones more than they trained. Vince would never have allowed that and would have banned cell phone use in his gym.

As for Joe Gold, there was a source of music in the original Gold's Gym on Pacific Avenue in Venice, California. An old transistor radio sat on top of a bare desk in a corner of the gym. The radio was so old it looked like it might have been used by Marconi himself (the inventor of the radio). Despite its presence in the gym, I don't recall the radio ever being turned on. Denizens of the original Gold's, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and others, seemed to prefer training in silence, with the only sounds being communication between training partners and the usual gym sounds. Joe Gold was a classic old-school bodybuilder and like others of his era, didn't think that music and training were compatible. No one seemed to consider the possible ergogenic effect of listening to music in those days. Exactly when music became common in commercial gyms isn't clear, but by the late 80s, it was common. I suspect that the use of music in various aerobic training facilities may have influenced gyms that focused on resistance training to begin to incorporate music in the gym environment.

When the music came to Gold's gym, the original tunes played in the gym can best be described as an eclectic blend . . .