Cell Phone Use and Workout Intensity

Want to get the most out of your workout? Then turn off your damn phone when you’re training! I’ve been saying this for years to clients, so it was refreshing to hear these sentiments echoed in two recent published studies, conducted by researchers from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

When you talk or text during a training session, your attention is divided by the two tasks and that can lower the intensity of a workout as well as disrupt postural stability that is required to generate any kind of force production.

In one of the studies, the subjects that texted during a workout spent almost half of that time in lower intensity zone compared to the ones that were training without a phone. This reminds of the types that text and talk all their way through their whole cardio sessions…and then wonder why they’re not getting as shredded as they had hoped.

Really anything that can be seen as distracting should be removed from your workout – whether it’s texting, talking, scrolling social media or whatever – it can all take away from training intensity and performance.

There are many people that need to be able to check their phones during a training session and this post isn’t for you. This is for the hardcore athletes that are always looking for ways to improve and get the edge on their competition. If your competition is busy texting and you’re lost somewhere in beast mode, you’ve just gained some ground and possibly outworked your opponent.

It should be noted that listening to music does not reduce training intensity and in some other studies has been shown to increase it. So flip your phone to airplane mode, get in the zone and train like a T-Rex.

-Coach Sean