Thanks to cellphones, smartwatches, fitness trackers, and various other devices, it’s easier than ever to keep technology at your fingertips while working out. But what would happen if you left your tech behind, even just occasionally?
Nate Kosberg set out to discover exactly that when he joined the experimental, invite-only workout club Training Group MN, a weekly gathering that was sure to be “the hardest workout of your week.”
Tuesday evenings during the summers of 2024 and 2025, the group met at an agreed-upon location — often the bottom of a ski hill in suburban Minneapolis. Together, they ran, jogged, hiked, and even crawled up and down the hill as many times as they could in one hour. Among the rules were to wear all black, leave kids and pets at home, and don’t stop.
And since 2025, Training Group has been explicitly tech-free: Any and all electronic devices had to be either left in one’s car or stowed away in a communal lockbox. “It was a way to bond by [the] nature of hard work versus proof of work,” recalls Kosberg, CSCS, a yoga teacher and personal trainer at Life Time and a former Muay Thai fighter.
Instead of leaning on technology to capture workout stats or photos, Kosberg relied on his body, his mind, and his breath. “Tech-free workouts give us this chance to turn down the noise on everything else and connect with ourselves,” he says. “They’re an opportunity to not shy away from what’s in front of you but to find your breathing as you find your strength. They’re a chance to take back your power.” (Go deeper at “How to Build Body Awareness Using Fitness.”)
Still, if the idea of setting aside your tech during a workout gives you pause, you’re not alone.
You might think that you can’t complete a workout without the distraction of a podcast or playlist. Or that you wouldn’t know what to do without an app prompting your next move or monitoring your heart rate.
Perhaps the prospect of unplugging from email, text, and DMs — and thereby from work, family, and other life responsibilities — makes the idea of working out too stressful. Or you might feel a creeping fear that your workout won’t count if it’s not tracked and reshared in some way.
There’s no doubt that technology can support the building and maintenance of a fitness routine. It can connect you to sustainable programming, coaching, and community. It can provide dynamic insight into long-term improvements or day-to-day progress toward a goal. It can offer motivation, inspiration, and accountability.
But an overreliance on technology can also become a barrier between you and your body.
Whether you join a running group that collects all devices at the start of a session or make the choice to slip off your tracker before stepping into the yoga studio, there are plenty of good reasons to disconnect from time to time. Consider these three.
1) Increased Body Awareness
The brain and body have a robust connection that allows most people to sense and interact with the world. This body awareness exists in various forms.
Proprioception relies on receptors in your muscles and joints to tell you where you are in space. Interoception is similar except that the receptors are in your organs and blood vessels and tell you what’s happening inside your body. Sensations like pleasure, rhythm, relief, and comfort are other examples of body awareness.
Technology can tamp down your ability to tune in to these cues. A break from the literal and figurative noise, meanwhile, can help you rekindle the connection that biomechanist Katy Bowman, MS, describes as speaking the language of the body.
“Trust that your next breath is going to happen whether you think about it or not. The more powerful you can make it, the more you find an embodied sense of control that carries far beyond exercise.”
“I’ve spent a big part of my life — movement or otherwise — trying to dial in to make sure I’m fluent in myself,” says Bowman, founder of Nutritious Movement and author of Movement Matters: Essays on Movement Science, Movement Ecology, and the Nature of Movement. “I want to be able to speak the language my body is speaking.”
Letting the body take the lead can take some getting used to, acknowledges Kosberg. Relearning to pay attention and notice the body’s language — its cues and sensations — is a skill in and of itself. You might not hear anything at first. Or the body’s voice might be so loud as to be overwhelming.
“Come back to the breath,” Kosberg advises. “Trust that your next breath is going to happen whether you think about it or not. The more powerful you can make it, the more you find an embodied sense of control that carries far beyond exercise.”
2) Better Mind-Body Connection
A break from technology is also an opportunity to practice mindfulness — that is, paying attention to the present moment with curiosity rather than judgment.
Tech-based feedback during and after a workout is often black and white, with a focus on optimization. When your focus is constantly trained on what needs improvement, it can be hard to meet yourself where you are and to approach your workouts with grace for your body and psyche.
Unplugging allows you to check in with yourself without pressure from a heart-rate reading or high-BPM playlist pushing you to do more — or less — than you can.
It can also help you stay connected to your Why.
“It’s important that we recognize that we’re looking for the reason to move our bodies,” Bowman says. “Much of fitness motivated by modern technology boils down to the message ‘This will help you not die someday in the future,’ and that’s not motivating for most people.
“The big thing that’s missing is joy and meaningfulness,” she continues. “Once you can connect how exercise heightens your ability to stay on track with your values” — rather than with data points or metrics provided via an app — “movement becomes intrinsically motivating.”
This isn’t to say that technology can’t inform your fitness routine. Going tech-free can actually complement the data.
“Even the most elite athlete can benefit,” says ultrarunner Barbara Powell, MA, NBC-HWC, a holistic performance coach for Life Time Mind and author of Finding Leadville: My Story to a Hallowed 100 Mile Finish Line. “When we give ourselves the opportunity to feel what it’s like to be in our body and we trust the data of what our body is giving to us, it really can help us shape this relationship in terms of healthy progress, of being able to know when we can push ourselves a little further or pull back.”
3) Less Sensory Overload
Working out involves managing multiple sensations, both inside and outside of your body. In addition to the sights, sounds, and smells of your environment, you likely experience changes in body temperature, muscle tension, body position, and breathing and heart rates.
Cultivating your perception of these sensations, a practice known as sensory experiencing, can help build body awareness and mindfulness.
But sometimes inputs from one or more of your senses can become overwhelming, triggering a physiological response known as sensory overload, explains Powell. (It this sound familier, see “5 Strategies for Coping With Sensory Overload.”)
Symptoms may include feeling stressed, anxious, irritable, confused, or unable to focus. Other signs may include dizziness, flushing, shaking or trembling, sweating, and tightness in the chest that aren’t caused by exertion alone.
Light, sound, color, and other stimuli are common triggers of sensory overload. While some inputs are outside your control, consider the following tips the next time you go to the gym:
- Drape a towel over the screen of your favorite cardio machine.
- Wear earplugs to soften ambient noise.
- Put your phone in airplane mode — or leave it in the locker room.
Small changes to your immediate environment can make a big difference in helping you reclaim your sensory peace and refocus on what matters to you in the moment.
This article includes additional reporting by Maggie Fazeli Fard, Experience Life’s editorial director of fitness.
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