the calves test
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Arnold Schwarzenegger <[email protected]>
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Arnold's Pump Club promotes a healthier and happier lifestyle, sharing daily tips and research-based advice. They discuss the impact of music on focus and productivity, citing a review of 154 experiments that found background music can hurt performance on difficult tasks. The club also features "Adam's Corner" with "The calves test" and other health upgrades.
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How To Select The Right Music To Unlock Better Performance
A review of 154 experiments found background music hurts hard tasks more than easy ones. Here’s when lyrics cost you focus and what to play instead.
Welcome to the positive corner of the internet. We’re here to make your life healthier, happier, and less stressful. At the bottom of each email, we explain our editorial process, stance on AI, and partnership standards.
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Today’s Health Upgrade
Right playlist, right situation
Is the next-gen creatine worth it?
Potatoes: good or bad?
Adam’s Corner: The calves test
Mindset
Is Your Playlist Making It Harder to Focus?
Music can make a tedious task more enjoyable. But the songs you choose could make it harder to write a thoughtful email.
Whether music helps you work depends on what you’re doing and what’s playing.
For simple, repetitive tasks, music may help by improving your mood and making the work feel less boring. Research supports a mood boost from background music, though evidence that it improves performance is less consistent.
But when the type of work changes — such as work that requires understanding or remembering words — the music matters more. A review of 154 experiments found background music was more likely to hurt performance on difficult tasks than easy ones.
Across dozens of studies, songs with lyrics made reading a little harder. Other experiments found similar costs for memory.
One likely explanation is that processing a song’s lyrics competes with the mental work needed to understand the words on your screen. That makes your favorite singalong a poor match for reading or writing.
If you prefer background sound, instrumental music generally doesn’t cause the same interference. It doesn’t reliably improve focus, either, but it gives you an option without the added distraction of lyrics.
But it’s not just the type of music you enjoy; tempo matters, too. In one small experiment, instrumental music hurt reading comprehension most when it was both fast and loud. Keeping the volume low is a safe default.
For general guidelines, use silence or quiet instrumental music for reading and writing, and save songs with lyrics for simpler tasks, such as organizing files. Judge the choice by how the work goes. If songs with lyrics work for you, that could be all the evidence you need.
Together With Momentous
Is Creatine HCl Worth the Extra Money?
One creatine company says its 750-milligram scoop of creatine hydrochloride (HCl) can do the work of 5 grams of creatine monohydrate.
If a scoop that small can give you the same results, maybe it’s worth paying more. So we went digging.
To the dismay of many creatine brands, the research suggests your best bet is to save your money and skip the creatine HCl.
Creatine monohydrate has decades of research showing it helps people get stronger. HCl dissolves more easily in water, but researchers haven’t shown that a smaller scoop delivers the same benefit, or that anything with HCl leads to better results or absorption.
Your body already absorbs nearly all the creatine in a serving of monohydrate. And we know what happens when people take it and lift weights.
A review of 63 studies involving nearly 1,500 people found that those who took creatine gained more upper- and lower-body strength, on average, than those who trained without it. Every one of those studies used monohydrate.
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