📱 Is Your Phone Secretly Sabotaging Your Fitness?
- Frank Sinclair
- Oct 8
- 6 min read
Yeh yeh, I know NONE of us like being told to 'get off our phones' and your certainly don't need another lecture on how “bad" they are for you BUT please, before you scroll back over to check out the latest dance on TikTok - hear me out for just a moment:
Aim of todays blog:
Show you a few eye opening stats and research so you can see why this matters for your health and your fitness today.
Share the simple actions I've taken this year to help gain control of my own phone usage and rediscover the joys of exercise and being present in the 'real' world again.
Invite you to reflect: what role is your phone playing in your life right now?
Let's start with the numbers....
📱 How much are we on our phones?
In the UK, people spend on average 5 hours 6 minutes per day on their phone. opal.so
Of this time, it's estimated 2 hours and 23 minutes per day is dedicated to scrolling social media platforms. DataReportal – Global Digital Insights+2Soax+2
Also telling: UK adults spend about 76% of their waking hours online or on devices in some form. IT Brief UK
Don’t believe me? Check for yourself.
Open up your phone’s Screen Time (on iPhone) or Digital Wellbeing (on Android) and see what your daily average looks like.Go on, I’ll wait... 👀
📱 iPhone users: Check your Screen Time here
🤖 Android users: Check your Digital Wellbeing dashboard here
The number might surprise you, and it’s a great starting point for noticing how much time we really spend on our screens each day.
Apologies in advance if you shock yourself 🫣
🧠 What the research says re: Overuse of Smartphones
Science is changing all the time and with smartphones being a relatively new phenomenon in human existence it's likely to change constantly, but here's what the literature we have available now tells us...,
Issue | What the research says | Why it matters for your fitness & wellbeing |
Poor sleep quality & sleep disruption | Smartphone addiction and heavy use are robustly linked to worse sleep, more sleep disturbances, and poorer sleep quality, even after accounting for total screen time. Frontiers+2PMC+2 | Sleep is foundational for recovery, hormonal regulation, immune resilience, fat loss / muscle gain. Disrupted sleep = slower progress. |
Elevated stress, anxiety, depression | Several meta-analyses and longitudinal studies show higher smartphone use correlates with higher stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. PMC+3PMC+3Frontiers+3 | When your nervous system is “on edge,” you burn more cortisol, recover less well, and motivation / energy suffer. |
Cognitive & emotional regulation, impulsivity | Overuse is associated with difficulties in regulating attention, impulse control, emotional reactivity. PMC+2PMC+2 | If your attention is frayed, you can’t lean into consistency, you’ll jump between programmes or diets, and you’ll feel mentally “noisy.” |
Musculoskeletal strain, postural stress, eye strain | Excessive phone use is correlated with neck pain, back pain, thumb / wrist strain (trigger thumb), and general musculoskeletal tightness. mentalhealthjournal.org+2University of Rochester Medical Center+2 | Chronic tightness and pain can limit movement quality, reduce mobility for lifts or runs, and lead to niggles. |
Reduced physical activity & sedentary behaviour | Heavy phone / screen time competes with movement — more sitting, less incidental walking. Some studies propose “active couch potato” behaviour. PMC+2PMC+2 | Even if you manage a 30 minute workout - if you sit screen bound for 6 hours straight, you blunt many of the metabolic benefits. |
Another interesting (and quite alarming) bit of research worth flagging: a meta-analysis of 41 studies (n ≈ 41,871 youth) found that problematic smartphone use was associated with increased odds ratios for:
Depression: ~3.17x
Anxiety: ~3.05x
Poor sleep quality: ~2.60x
Stress: ~1.86x Frontiers
These numbers alone make it pretty clear that we should all take our phone use pretty seriously
🙋♂️ My Personal Experiment: Pulling Back, One Habit at a Time
I'll be straight with you...
I'm guilty as charged when it comes to phone addiction, and am certainly in no position to demand you quit your phone and go live on a remote island in the sun somewhere (although would be rather nice eh 🤔) so instead I'm going to share some real life strategies I've implemented right now to help me...
1️⃣ Deleted social media apps from my phone: What do you mean? I see you on there everyday Frank? Yes, yes you do... and I still post and engage on all the usual platforms, but only from my desktop or scheduling tools which means I can still keep active online and engage with you wonderful humans through comments and messages, but without the gravitational pull of algorithms, and endless feeds of comparison, distraction and kitchen dance routines my hips just can't keep up with anymore.
2️⃣ Running outdoors, phone and headphone free: At first I thought this would be impossible, even dull, as my default is to put my phone in my pocket and send some banging tunes to my ear drums in the hope it'll make me run faster (Disclaimer: it definitely didn't!) but now my puffy, no-tech running sessions have become quite magical. Without music or podcasts, I hear my body, my breath, stride, fatigue and all - reconnecting myself to movement in its purest form.
3️⃣ Front and centre Screen Time metrics: I moved the screen time widget to prime real estate on my phone dashboard. Now every time I open my phone, I see how much I’ve used it today, which gives me a little reminder to ask myself: “Is this really how I want to spend the next 10 / 30 / 60 minutes of my day?”
4️⃣ Small “tech boundary rituals”
No phone in the bedroom, evening wind down routine with a book instead of phone and batching tasks such as social media, emails, checking sky sports (all the important stuff) into specific time slots, rather than letting them leak into every spare moment of my day.
The Benefits I've Observed
A productivity boost: less mental clutter, fewer reactive distractions.
A clearer headspace: fewer half thoughts, and less internal noise.
More presence with my daughters: laughing & listening are all so much easier without distraction.
A deeper connection with movement: my workouts feel more intuitive, more alive, because I’m not buffering them with podcasts, scrolling instagram or checking notifications.
Slower creep of burnout: my nervous system feels less taxed, because there’s more downtime built in.
Now, before I jump off my high horse and get back to the most important reason for todays blog (you!) let me be clear that everything I share above is personal to me, and what I believe is important to me right now at this phase in my life.
What works for me, may not for you, and that's okay.
❓ Some questions to ask yourself today...
On average, how many hours per day do you think you spend on your phone / screens?
Which times of day are your biggest “leak points” (e.g. before bed, mid-afternoon slump, first thing in the morning)?
What’s one small boundary you could try this week (e.g. no phone 30 mins before bed, run without it once, remove social apps)?
How could less noise / distraction actually support your fitness goals better consistency, more recovery, more focus?
🎁 Wrapping It Together
Phones aren’t evil, they’re just tools,
However, the way we tend to use them, the patterns they embed, those are what can get in the way of achieving our health and fitness goals, and today is about more than being “good” or “disciplined.” It’s about choice. About pulling back the noise so you can hear your own body, connect with your mind, and head forward with more clarity and positivity in your stride.
I hope I've helped gently encourage some action.
If you’re curious to hear more on this conversation check out our Voice Of Fitness Reason podcast episode where we go deeper into dopamine, stress, social media, screen time, and fitness.
And if you want to explore the science behind dopamine, reward, stress, and tech, we also reference the book: The DOSE Effect. 📖 Buy On Amazon UK
Let me know how it goes when you try one of these shifts, I’d love to hear your progress, resistance, surprises.
FRANK
your Personal Trainer / Desert Island Runner
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