I had just survived my first semester at B-school, so I came home to Kanpur with one plan: eat, sleep and rot on my phone, guilt-free. My parents had beaten me to it. Every conversation began with, “One minute, I saved something to show you.” Then came the smirk. “You lot go to all these places,” they said, “only to sit on your phones.” Rich, coming from them, but it stuck. Of all the places, it was the gym, where I was meant to be training my body, that my phone had become the hardest-working organ: something to stare at between sets, a way to look busy, a polite “don’t talk to me” signal. So, I made a deal with myself. For 10 days, I would try phone-free workouts, leaving my phone in the gym locker from start to finish.
Thirty minutes into day one, I caught myself walking to the locker. My feet just knew that the rest between sets was phone time. By evening, I had also picked up a stranger’s phone from an equipment by reflex. Three different times. Jitesh Pathak, a 23-year-old junior analyst, knows the feeling. He reaches for his phone even when he knows he should be working out. Once, he called a friend on the walk to the gym and skipped the workout altogether. His accidental solution came when he switched to an underground gym with barely any network. “Blessing in disguise,” he says.
For the first few days, I felt painfully self-conscious. I kept making accidental eye contact with strangers I would usually look right through and between sets, I didn’t know what to do with my hands. Keerthana Swaminathan, a sports and performance psychologist and co-director of The Performance Doctor, explains it’s often just a habit. “It’s the natural need of a human being to feel like they belong somewhere and looking busy makes that easier”, she says.
Over the next few days, though, my rest breaks got shorter. Instead of waiting for my screen to light up, I would breathe and get ready for the next set. Without my earphones, I even found myself vibing to whatever the gym was playing. For once, I was actually focused on my workout. Simran S, 26, a Bangalore-based Hyrox racer, knows how easily that feeling slips away. A session can be going well until a notification, often a stressful work message, throws her off. There is one caveat: the gym is where she does hard things, so it’s also where she sends the texts she’s been dreading.
So, the phone isn’t always the villain and before anyone blames the playlist, Swaminathan has a word in its defence. “Music can really help us with our focus and with performing better because there is a certain rhythm to it,” she says. What matters more is interoception: the ability to notice what’s happening inside your body, from your breathing to your form. The problem is when a device distracts you from it.
The upside of phone-free workouts? With no YouTube to hide behind, I finally asked my trainer about my form. But being easy to approach is a double-edged sword. Without earphones, I got stared at more and people struck up conversations while we took turns on machines. My trainer, too, had a lot to say. He asked about my work and education and shared details of his own life, including the fact that he was engaged. I was a bit uncomfortable. I was there to learn form, not swap life stories. So, I told him I would do my sets alone and he could just watch for mistakes. It worked, but I had to say it out loud; earphones would have done the job without a word.
