Scrolling drains not just battery but also focus
impact of cell phone use before practice / game
Recent research (2024–2026) highlights a “double-edged sword” effect: while devices are essential for tracking and community, their use—particularly social media scrolling—acts as a “mental drain” that significantly impairs physical performance.
As of late there appears to be an increase in academic studies related to technology and its impact on athletic performance. This is not technological training aids but rather a focus on cell phone use.
Multiple studies from 2024 and 2025 confirm that as little as 30 minutes of social media or video game use before competition induces measurable mental fatigue.
Athletes using social media (like Instagram or TikTok) for 30 minutes before training showed significantly lower “attack efficiency” and passing accuracy.
Research in Canadian Cycling Magazine (2025) noted that pre-activity screen time decreased explosive power (countermovement jump height) across several sports.
Even if physical markers (like heart rate) remain the same, mental fatigue increases the Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE). Athletes feel they are working harder for the same output, leading to earlier exhaustion.
The negative impact of smartphones is most pronounced in “open-skill” sports that require rapid decision-making (e.g., soccer, basketball, boxing).
Slower Reactions: Pre-game scrolling impairs the Stroop effect (selective attention) and response times. More about stroop at the end of this article
Technical Errors: A 2025 longitudinal study found that habitual smartphone use exceeding 4 hours per day was linked to increased mind-wandering and concentration lapses during training sessions.
Closed-Skill Resilience: Interestingly, some research suggests that pure “closed-skill” tasks, like a 100m sprint, may be less affected by pre-game phone use compared to complex team sports.
The timing of use is critical. 2025 research on Blue Light Exposure (BLE) has refined our understanding:
The 9:00 PM Threshold: Exposure to blue light after 9:00 PM significantly shortens total sleep duration and reduces accuracy and motor learning the next day.
Glycogen & Recovery: Inadequate sleep (often caused by “revenge bedtime procrastination” on phones) is now directly linked to impaired muscle glycogen storage, which is the primary fuel for high-intensity exercise
While stroop task (identifying the color of a word rather than the word itself) is a laboratory tool, researchers use it both to measure an athlete's baseline cognitive control and to induce "Mental Fatigue" (MF) to see how a tired brain affects court performance.
Current studies (Hemmat et al., 2025) use a prolonged 30-minute Stroop task to intentionally exhaust the prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain responsible for “executive functions” like decision-making and inhibition.
Impact on Power: Mentally fatigued players showed a significant decrease in Vertical Jump Height. This suggests that cognitive exhaustion reduces the “neural drive” required for explosive movements, even if the muscles aren’t physically tired.
Impact on Skill: The V-CUT dribbling performance (a high-agility task) declined significantly. However, stationary two-point shooting remained largely unaffected, suggesting that simple, well-practiced motor tasks are more resilient to mental fatigue than complex, multi-directional ones.
A 2025 study in Frontiers in Neuroscience compared the Stroop effect to “head fakes” in basketball.
Conflict Processing: Just as the Stroop task creates a conflict between a word’s color and its meaning, a head-fake creates a conflict between an opponent’s body movement and the actual ball trajectory.
Expert Advantage: Elite players exhibit shorter reaction times in these “conflict” scenarios. However, the research found no significant difference between elite and amateur players on the standard Stroop task itself, indicating that basketball expertise is domain-specific—it makes you better at reading the game, but not necessarily better at general lab tests.
Meta-analyses from 2024 and 2025 (Li et al.) have pinpointed exactly where mental fatigue—as measured or induced by Stroop tasks—hits the scoreboard:
Free-Throw Accuracy: Mental fatigue significantly reduces free-throw percentages. Because free throws are “self-paced” and require intense focus, the lack of cognitive resources leads to lapses in concentration.
Three-Point Accuracy: Recent data shows that 3-point shooting is more sensitive to mental fatigue than 2-point shooting, likely because the higher precision requirement of long-distance shots is more susceptible to “noisy” neural signals from a tired brain.