My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

100% this. After spending the entire day in front of screens going out for a workout run is such a refresher.

However, to each their own.

Just wanted to add that Eleven (VR table tennis) is absolutely brilliant for exercise. After an hour of eTT and you will be sweating and have increased your step count a lot. Moreover, the better you get at it, the more energy you can put into it.

* If you're wanting to have some change of skill transference into real world table tennis, get an adapter for your dominant hand paddle so your bat has the right weight, position and feel. Also, never forget that the table isn't real.

Instead of being "follow-along" it's interactive. You have goals, can compete with others, explore, etc. just like in ordinary games.

Counterpoint: No.

VR is great. You don't have to spike your risk of skin cancer, you don't have to deal with allergies, you don't have to run along a road that constantly has drunken teenagers crashing into mailboxes, there are no mosquitos that will make your life miserable, and you can play with friends, regardless of the fact that they're traveling, or live elsewhere. You don't have to deal with motion sickness as you're driving to a more interesting location, and you don't have to comply to the schedule of your immediate environment.

But none of that is quite as important as what really matters: The real world is boring. If the parts accessible to everyone were half as interesting as a world defined in silicon, people wouldn't strap an LCD screen onto their face and spend all day in it.

$300 for a device that you can do your work in, watch movies with friends in, play pretty intensive, full-motion e-sports in, meet new people every single night without having to pay a cover fee in, and program your own world around your preferences in is a hell of a deal.

These things are popular because the real world sucks in comparison for 80% of the population. Not everyone's a dotcom bubble millionaire, not everyone attends any university, let alone a good one, not everyone lives in the suburbs or in an urban environment.

It's more fun to see someone stand up on a virtual stage and give a presentation to eighty people on something that wouldn't be significant in real life, like a mainline Linux kernel running in a written-for-this-talk RISC-V emulator inside of a pixel shader inside of the video game you're currently standing in's virtual world[1] than it ever could be to watch birds.

I have one of the best views imaginable in real life, with as much land as a person could want to mess around with vehicles, run, or make impromptu sleds to see how fast you can go down a steep hill without toppling, and it doesn't hold a candle to VR. Most of my hours spent outside now are based in running with my pet or walking through the woods, because there's no point in going outside every day for its own sake. If it weren't for my pet, I probably wouldn't spend more than an hour outside every day.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ&t=5054s

> I actually started bulking up in my upper arms for the first time in my life.

No you didn't, unless you were completely and utterly detrained (i.e., previously bedridden or something) and even then, the stimulus would've only resulted in adaptation for a short period.

VR exercise is far too submaximal (in regards to strength) to result in meaningful strength adaptations past a short initial adaptation period.