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My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

nathanlippi.com

111–120 of 275 posts

Re: My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

#111

One thing that’s good to point out to anybody looking to get into VR for fitness is that Beat Saber becomes radically more challenging when playing custom community-made maps instead of the stock/DLC maps. The higher difficulty community maps require a lot of speed, precision, and stamina, and I’m only beginning to be able to play them decently after a few months of practice. It’s almost an entirely different game. U…

I'm several months into using Beat Saber as an exercise routine. Yes, add-on maps are a necessity, not just for the challenge, but also to keep things interesting. I don't find high difficulty levels to be great exercise. I can keep up fine, but I get lulled into using little wrist flicks instead of sweeping arcs. The best tracks for me are ones which aren't technically challenging. Instead, I get my whole body into…

> The best tracks for me are ones which aren't technically challenging. Instead, I get my whole body into it - dancing the whole time, stepping to the side so I can take a wide swing, shakin' my butt to the groove...

Exactly. Once I could beat everything on expert I ended up losing interesting because expert+ felt like a different game: seemed much more wrist-oriented, which I have zero interest in. I'd like to find more maps that optimize around the criteria you've mentioned, but haven't put effort into it.

Re: My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

#112
post #82
post #13

Shameless plug: if you are into VR fitness but you think the existing solutions are missing multiplayer options, my brother and I are building Space Punch [1] which is a multiplayer fitness app. It is currently released in early access on Sidequest, and it’s functional. We are working out Monday to Friday 4:30pm UTC. If you have a Quest and want to work out together as group, then drop into our Discord sever. I’ll pe…

Perhaps because I'm an introvert, but never quite understood the motivation for social exercise in VR. Half the advantage of it is that I can work out on my own time, in private without being coupled to fixed schedules or other people's expectations.

Same motivation as social exercise generally. It can make a mundane task more fun.

Re: My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

#113

Geez, go outside for a run. Get some fresh air, smell the rain, say hi to the neighbors, watch houses being built, get chased by a dog, check the Little Library for something interesting, swallow a bug, see if anyone has a cool car in their garage.

This sentiment is so predictable and boring. Also the article literally says the motivation was knee pain meant he couldn’t run more than a few minutes. Maybe people aren’t the cartoons you have in your head.

Re: My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

#114
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not the Vive? They've made huge progress in the last few years.

That's true, I just forgot about them. From what I've seen, the Vive occupies a midpoint in price and quality between the Oculus products and the Index. EDIT: I hadn't actually seen much of the Vive Pro 2, it looks... comparable to the Index? Both price and feature-wise?

That's still their flagship I think, check out their other lines like the cosmos which has AR/VR type camera integration etc, room scale without the base stations and so on.

Re: My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

#115
post #82
post #13

Shameless plug: if you are into VR fitness but you think the existing solutions are missing multiplayer options, my brother and I are building Space Punch [1] which is a multiplayer fitness app. It is currently released in early access on Sidequest, and it’s functional. We are working out Monday to Friday 4:30pm UTC. If you have a Quest and want to work out together as group, then drop into our Discord sever. I’ll pe…

Perhaps because I'm an introvert, but never quite understood the motivation for social exercise in VR. Half the advantage of it is that I can work out on my own time, in private without being coupled to fixed schedules or other people's expectations.

Peer pressure (hopefully in a positive way), fun, distraction from the boredom of the exercise. The better memories you form of the event, the less likely you are to seek excuses to skip the next session.

Re: My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

#116

Has anyone solved the ventilation problem for headsets yet? I seem to be convinced that the right light-absorbent baffles that still allow air through are possible, but no one seems to have attempted this in a product

I turn on an overhead and a box fan, and use upgraded facial interface, and disposable covers if I'm going especially hard.

Re: My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

#117
post #82
post #13

Shameless plug: if you are into VR fitness but you think the existing solutions are missing multiplayer options, my brother and I are building Space Punch [1] which is a multiplayer fitness app. It is currently released in early access on Sidequest, and it’s functional. We are working out Monday to Friday 4:30pm UTC. If you have a Quest and want to work out together as group, then drop into our Discord sever. I’ll pe…

Perhaps because I'm an introvert, but never quite understood the motivation for social exercise in VR. Half the advantage of it is that I can work out on my own time, in private without being coupled to fixed schedules or other people's expectations.

Fixed schedule is one possible system that will push you to keep going even while you go through demotivated period. Same with "other people's expectations". Seeing other people exercise is motivating for a lot of people. And being seen is one more nudge to actually do it today. Moreover, many people are motivated by competition. That does not need to be official competition or large scale one. Pretty often it is just "I want to keep doing it as long as him" or "I think I could get bigger score then mx123Throwaway". For many people, the social aspect is what turns activity from "boring chore I do because I think I have to" to "I actually like doing it".

Underappreciated aspect of long term exercising is "how to keep doing it long term" and "how to prevent it from becoming yet another annoying dot on my todo list".

Re: My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

#118

Geez, go outside for a run. Get some fresh air, smell the rain, say hi to the neighbors, watch houses being built, get chased by a dog, check the Little Library for something interesting, swallow a bug, see if anyone has a cool car in their garage.

While I do run regularly, you gotta admit it is probably the most boring sport from them all.

Re: My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

#119
post #4

I do pretty much the same thing. I own a Quest 2 and I play Pistol whip, Thrill of the fight and Moon rider (a free VR game which is played in the browser where you need to hit blocks with your hands synced to music). The only issue I have with Thrill of the fight is that when I get into it, I hit hard, but find no resistance as I would hitting a punching bad or sparring with someone, so my elbow tends to overextend…

I had the same issue at first, but I was able to overcome it by being careful to not fully extend my elbows and using the jab less often.

Re: My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

#120
VR exercise is a remarkably poor allocation of time (if your interest is physical fitness, efficiently). It also leaves out the most important adaptation of all: strength.

Effective training (not exercising) requires a progression model. That is, on some time frame you must exceed your performance at the end of that time frame when compared to the beginning of the time frame. This must be done in some measurable way--trying "harder" is ineffective. For example, if you squatted 120 kg x 5 two days ago, today you need to squat 122.5 kg x 5. VR cannot support such a progression model because it is incapable of producing a sufficiently intense stimulus (obviously for strength, but also for cardiovascular fitness) to result in continued adaptations; i.e., you cannot effectively scale the stress to produce meaningful adaptations after an initial period of adaptations. I'm sure if the author of the post continues for another 80 days, you'll see progress mostly stall.

At any rate, the bigger issue is that the most important component of fitness--strength--is left out entirely. Strength is extremely correlated with decreased morbidity/mortality but, perhaps more tangibly, becoming strong results in vast, systemic changes to your body and (especially if you're older or extremely unfit already) similarly vast improvements to your quality of life. You are a physical entity and the way you interact with your environment is expressed through forces; the degree to which you can produce such forces is strength. We all depend on strength.

As anyone who is strong will tell you, being strong is a far superior state to being weak. If you only "exercise" or just go for runs or only do VR exercise, you are weak.

(Effective) strength training trains your entire body. Your bones, your nervous system, your balance, and yes, even cardiovascular fitness. You can become very strong lifting just 3x a week for one hour each time. Throw in some HIIT (which takes 15 minutes and results in better cardiovascular fitness than VR exercise because it has a progression model and is sufficiently intense to result in sufficient stress to evoke an adaptation) on a rest day and you have a far, far more effective recipe for general fitness with significantly less time spent. All other factors being equal, the man who can squat 400 lbs will always be fitter than the man who plays VR for 45 minutes every day--and the former can do it with a smaller time investment.

For any naysayers arguing that strength training isn't fun (like VR is): it is fun. You're playing Pokemon, just leveling up IRL instead of your Clefairy. The progression model I explained above makes it fun.

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