How your phone is quietly wrecking your workouts, and how to use it to save them.

I was at my local gym, morning like always. I train early because it’s how I wake up. It sets the tone. It’s my one hour of being alone before the day starts asking for pieces of me.

And I was spending it on Slack.

Between sets I’d tell myself I was being smart by sending a quick message now so people could respond later. Except they didn’t respond later. They responded immediately. Now I’m mid-workout, jaw tight, swearing under my breath, irritated at coworkers who aren’t doing anything wrong. I’m the one who invited them into my head.

I was trying to get ahead.

Instead, I was dragging my workday into the only place I go to get away from it.

The moment that snapped it into focus wasn’t some grand epiphany. It was a stat on my training app:

Total workout time: 55 minutes
Active workout time: 22 minutes

I stared at it like it was a typo.

Because if I’m only lifting for 22 minutes… what am I doing with the other 33?

The answer was obvious and embarrassing: I was spending most of my gym time annoying myself.

The real problem isn’t the lifting. It’s the waiting.

If you lift seriously, you rest seriously. Most programs bake in around 60–120 seconds between sets for a reason: you need it to hit the next set hard. That means a big chunk of your workout is open space.

Some guys use that space well. They stay locked in. Music on. Eyes forward. Quiet and focused.

Other guys (i.e. me) treat those gaps like a staging area for the circus of distractions spinning inside your head. Slack. Emails. News. Scrolling. “Just one quick thing.”

Multitasking is the polite word for it. The honest word is worse: fragmenting.

I told myself the same lie a lot of driven men tell themselves:
“I can’t just stand here doing nothing for over half my workout time. I have too much to get done. I can do my workout and knock out work at the same time.”

It wasn’t productivity. It was actually counter-productive.

And it didn’t make my day better. It made my morning worse.

My workouts started to drag. They felt long. Not fun. I’d leave the gym stressed instead of energized, and that mood followed me into the day. That’s a terrible trade. The whole reason I train is to regulate myself. To get quieter. To think clearer. To come out stronger and steadier.

Instead I was walking out agitated.

And after fifty, when motivation starts to get more fragile, you don’t get away with that for long. If the gym starts feeling endless or pointless, consistency doesn’t “falter.” It dies.

No one is coming to fix this.

That’s the thought that hit next.

No app was going to save me. No program. No YouTube channel. Not unless I built something that solved the actual problem: what happens between sets.

So I started patching together the things I already knew mattered but never did consistently.

Innovative mobility work I saw online. Yoga. Breathwork. Self-development ideas I’d heard on podcasts but forgot five minutes later.

At first I tried replacing my warmups and cool downs with random YouTube routines like animal movement, yoga flows, mobility drills… anything that looked interesting. It helped, but it was chaotic.

Then I built a Google Doc: my favorite stretches, band work, mobility moves. I started using those between sets. I’d listen to self-development podcasts and jot down the lines that hit hard so I could turn them into isolated thought prompts later.

It was a lot to juggle. It was time-consuming. But it was the first time in years my workouts felt like they were for me again.

The formula that stuck

Eventually, the chaos turned into a sequence. A practical loop that gave my brain something better to do than open Slack.

Here’s the sequence I run between sets:

1) Get my breath under control.
Simple and repeatable breathing patterns. My default is the physiological sigh because it works fast. It drops the noise. It helps my heart rate come down. It resets my head. The best part is by building this habit 20 times in a workout I have started using simple breathwork outside the gym. It helps me wake up in the morning, or lower stress when it spikes during the day, or wind down for bed.

2) Stretch between every lift.
Stretching for a few minutes before and after a workout might have worked when I was 20 (actually it didn’t really work then either but I didn’t care) but over 50 that just isn’t enough. Baking in mobility between every set balances my workout. This more rounded approach addresses my stiff lower back and joints, and muscle tension so I leave the gym feeling stronger and more mobile.

3) Feed my mind one clean thought.
Not scrolling. Not headlines. Not a three hour podcast filled with great insights so many of which I forget. One concept, one example, one question. Something worth chewing on for a minute and figuring out how I can apply it to my day.

That’s it.

Not complicated. Just disciplined.

And once I built the loop, something unexpected happened: my workouts started flying by. I left energized. Clear. More open in my body. And I started getting ideas again, about work, relationships, life, because I was taking advantage of the natural meditative state I get into when I lift.

The phone didn’t leave my hand.

It just stopped being an instrument of distraction and instead it became the tool that kept me on track.

EVRMV: a workout without “dead time”

That loop became EVRMV.

A continuous practice built around the reality that most of your lifting session is rest. EVRMV doesn’t pretend that time doesn’t exist. It uses it.

Lift. Breathe. Stretch. Reflect. Every set.

No waiting. No distractions. No “I’ll do mobility later.”

It’s one 4-phase flow that makes every minute of your workout count.

If you’ve got ten minutes, you can try this.

If you’re a man over forty and you’ve been training for years doing a workout you put together years ago that hasn’t evolved to meet where you are at in your life today, and consistency has become a struggle, try this:

Press play and stay with me until the end.

Try the 10-minute full body EVRMV workout. If it clicks, it won’t feel like another program. It’ll feel like a missing piece. The kind of workout where you feel the payoff immediately (strength, mobility, mental clarity) so making this a part of your daily rhythm feels obvious.

And that’s the whole point.

A daily practice that builds the healthspan habits that will carry you forward.