How to Ruin a Workout
I’ve looked around but can’t find any reliable studies that determined whether occupying yourself with distractions while exercising makes your time moving less effective from an overall health standpoint. I can only provide anecdotal evidence from my own experience and share some hunches based on what I see around me. Clearly, getting out of the house and into the gym, yoga or Pilates studio, or other exercise locale is a great start. But I often wonder if certain distractions such as talking on the phone, texting, or reading diminish your results.
I admit that being in earshot of someone near me on the treadmill or stationary bike who is having a full-throated business conversation does disturb my concentration. (I often ask them to stop or move.) Yet, this is a much deeper subject for me than just being polite and thoughtful to others in the gym. Let’s ponder this key question: Does multitasking diminish your results?
The Harmony of Body and Mind
Perhaps it’s my yoga experience or perhaps it’s what I’ve learned about the coordinated workings of the mind and body but, to me, the experience of moving is far more than just the physical effect it has on my body. A big part of my practice is feeling alive and healthy while I’m moving. That visceral experience, which includes everything from sensations in my body, breathing, the effect on my mood, and giving my mind a chance to turn off and go wherever it feels like going, including experiencing the joy of moving, offers as much benefit as the movement itself. Among those benefits, which I’ve written about many times before in these pages, are better circulation, higher immune function, more strength, and much lower risk of all-cause mortality (ACM). I also suspect that I feel better about life and health than people who don’t exercise or move very much. This is so much more than just numbers on a medical report.
When I see people engaged with their screens while exercising, I know they may not realize that they are distracting themselves from what their bodies are feeling. (They are also keeping their minds from going wherever their minds want to go.) Trust me, I used to do the same thing when keeping weight off was my only health concern. “Just put in the time to burn the calories” was my mantra. I would listen to music, watch TV, or even read a book or newspaper to keep from being bored, as long as I got the calorie-burning results.
Not paying attention to what’s going on in your body while exercising can cause poor form, which keeps you from fully benefitting from the movement. It may also lead to repetitive motion injuries and imbalances. I am just recovering from one such injury, my iliotibial band and outer right knee, caused by years of walking on the outside of my foot due to high arches in my feet (more to come on this nagging health challenge).
Effort
Perhaps some people focus on their screen while exercising to avoid thinking about the effort involved in their workout. Years ago, when I was exercising solely to keep the weight off, the multitasking activities kept me from being bored—and from fully focusing on the effort, which certainly was not comfortable! Exercise and movement are not always supposed to be comfortable. And while they can sometimes feel pleasant, especially at lower Zone 2 levels, they are not meant to fit into a lifestyle of always taking the easy path of least resistance and comfort to achieve results. That is the whole point of effort in general.
Effort is part of the challenge of life. It is what leads to more strength and better health. Effort while moving is hormetic, i.e. it promotes healing and strengthening. It is why intense effort, like High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) routines, build so much stamina, power, and increased VO2 Max results. This is not to say that you always want to be exercising at that intense level, but mixing different levels as well as various kinds of movement—strength, flexibility, aerobic—leads you to better understand how your body feels and works under different conditions. Ultimately, it is this feeling of overall health and freedom of movement that will be your biggest friend on your later-life health journey, making getting out of bed every morning and starting to move a joy and not a task.
Inspiration
But moving is much more than that to me. The very best part of moving is that I get to turn my mind off from anything else that is preoccupying me that day. This, in turn, allows me to wander mentally, wherever that leads. Sometimes it is meditative, concentrating on breathing and body sensation with no or little mental activity, even with eyes closed. Sometimes it is in free-association mode, with my mind making new connections and often solving problems on its own or giving me new, fresh ideas. The possibilities are endless, but in my movement mode no thoughts are precious; they come and go. If something seems particularly important, I might write it down in a notebook or on my phone, which is always set on airplane mode during workouts. I would miss all of this if I was on a screen.
Going for a walk or a bike ride outdoors is particularly good at promoting this very productive and pleasant state of mind. It is the same state of mind that Robert Pirsig, in his great book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, calls quality. I also call it the miracle of wonder—that solution to a problem or new idea that seemingly comes from “nowhere.”
So, keep your phone on while exercising and keep your mind engaged with multitasking if you must. You are getting some exercise, which is great. But if you want to deepen your movement experience and life journey, turn off the distractions and engage with yourself, the wonder of who you are and how you got here, and the miracle of life that keeps you going every second. Believe me, starting your workout with the anticipation that you might be visited by some of that wonderful inspiration makes it easier to leave the house and move every day.
