How To Stay Fit While Gaming
Do you ever feel guilty about spending every free minute gaming? You’re not alone! Being an avid gamer can make it seem impossible to stay in shape. However, with a few tweaks to your routine and lifestyle, staying fit while playing video games all day doesn’t have to be too challenging.
In this blog post, we’ll cover tips and tricks on how to keep fit while gaming without sacrificing the time you spend flaming strangers or grinding ranked.
Staying fit can mean a lot of different things to different people. So let’s define it. In my mind staying fit means maintaining a healthy body weight while simultaneously building strength or improving endurance.
By the end of this article, you’ll learn more about easy ways you can take care of yourself - both physically and mentally - so that when game time is over, you’re still feeling great!
How to maintain your body weight while gaming:
Maintaining your body weight is 90% about what you eat. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for gamers to snack on junk food while indulging in their favorite titles, but this can be detrimental to overall health and gameplay.
Eating a healthy diet is crucial for sustaining energy levels and improving cognitive function, which is essential for success in gaming. A diet rich in fruits, vegetables, healthy fat, lean protein, and whole grains can improve focus, memory, and reaction times, all of which are essential skills for gaming.
Conversely, consuming large amounts of sugary or processed foods can lead to spikes and crashes in blood sugar, making it difficult to concentrate and affecting overall physical and mental health. Therefore, it’s important to fuel your body with nutrient-dense foods to achieve optimal gaming abilities and maintain your long-term health.
If you want to maintain your weight indefinitely, using a calorie calculator and a food diary is the most accurate way. Simply type your data into the calorie calculator and track what you eat throughout the day. Do your best to stay below the maintenance level; theoretically, you will never gain weight. If you struggle to feel full throughout the day, take a look at the list of satiating foods that will help you maintain your calorie deficit.
If you aren’t the fastidious type, you can try a more holistic approach to diet. Try adding these foods to your diet, drinking plenty of water, getting adequate sleep, and taking a daily walk. As long as you improve your current lifestyle, you will see changes to your body from these little things.
Lastly, if you don’t want to think about food much, you could consider maintaining weight with intermittent fasting alone.
Any diet strategy that you are consistent with and creates a calorie deficit or replaces junk food with nutrient-dense foods can help improve performance across all aspects of your life and maintain a healthy body composition.
However, if you want to take people to the colloquial gun show, you must incorporate strength training into your day.
How to get strong while playing video games all day:
There are infinite ways to train your body. How you train your body is based on the results you want to see. If, for instance, you want to run marathons, you’ll have to run… quite often. If you want to look like you exercise with the absolute minimal effort, read on.
For men, the appearance of fitness is just about the ratio from your shoulders to your waist. The wider the shoulders and thinner the waist, the more physically fit you appear. Assuming you want to workout without leaving the area you play games or going to the gym, you can do that with a few exercises.
1) Push-ups
If you are starting from completely sedentary, push-ups are a great place to begin. They are easily scaled for any strength level, and you can quickly see results from push-ups alone.
2) Pull-ups or assisted pull-ups
If you need to, you could stop here. Push-ups and pull-ups alone are enough to get you into great shape. In fact, regularly training pull-ups can greatly increase bicep size and improve grip strength. In a previous article, I had ten men do 30 pull-ups a day for a month, and it significantly changed their bodies.
However, if you want to increase that shoulder size and the aforementioned shoulder-to-waist ratio, I’d also recommend incorporating the third exercise.
3) Lat raises
This one is for the self-esteem boost. Most people think of bicep curls when they think of a workout to look strong; however, bicep curls are inefficient. Instead, change to an underhand grip on the pull-ups, which will sufficiently build your biceps. On the other hand, lat raises make you look buff. They will help round out your shoulders, making them look broader and giving you the overall appearance of strength.
4) Cardio exercise of choice
Strength training is great, but cardio offers some substantial practical and mental health benefits. Try for 30 minutes of cardio a day, even if it is just walking. However, if you want to get more gaming time in, you could do faster workouts like jumping rope or sprinting.
These three exercises and a bit of cardio are not a complete workout plan. Resistance training your lower body is so crucial for strength and longevity, as well as being the most effective exercise for weight loss. This is because your legs and abs are the largest muscles in your body, and the larger the muscles targeted by an exercise; the more calories are burned when training them. That is why large compound movements are so popular for High-intensity interval training and why HIIT workouts are considered a great way to lose weight.
Before you do these exercises:
Just like the firing range or an aim trainer, you should take a few minutes to warm up before you do your exercises. And if you intend to workout throughout your gaming session, I would do a few banded shoulder warm-ups before you hop online.
For your warm-ups, focus on the external rotators of your shoulders. Spending a lot of time gaming can cause poor posture, specifically rounded shoulders or a forward head posture.
Neither of these is generally considered sexy and can cause a host of long-term issues. Luckily they can be almost entirely offset by a few basic shoulder external rotation exercises.
Now you can either dedicate time before or after your gaming sessions to accomplish these exercises, but if you are trying to optimize your gaming time, you could incorporate the workout into your session in a few ways:
Use your Queue time to workout
Most battle royal or MOBA games have at least a thirty-second queue time, if not much longer. This is more than enough time to do a set of push-ups. And if you are in a competitive lobby, you could probably sneak in a full circuit of push-ups, pull-ups, and lat raises.
Use your inevitable death as an opportunity.
Instead of raging or flaming your teammates, the next time you die, take a little workout break. Most FPS games are designed for you to fail at least a few times. Resetting your mind and doing a few strength exercises will likely help improve your performance for your next life.
Harvest some muscles
Now I’m not familiar with the genre of harvesting games like animal crossing and star dew valley, but I am aware that they have zero queue times and no chance of death. So for these types of gamers, I’d recommend picking something in game that comes at a similar interval as death to use as your impetus for a little workout break. For instance, in Don’t Starve Together, you could do a set at the end of each day, which comes roughly every eight minutes.
All the above tips on staying fit while gaming have one major flaw. You have to stop playing to do them. These, however, can be done while playing.
Passive ways to workout while playing video games
Game at a standing desk
Standing desks are a great tool to incorporate into a healthy lifestyle. They can decrease your risk of lower back and neck pain from sitting all day and give you more freedom to change positions. Alone, they only burn a handful of extra calories, but when used in conjunction with our following tip, they can be a game changer.
Walk while playing
A walking pad is a great way to get your steps in while you play. However, this may not work for everyone; most games require extreme precision and focus. Treadmills make your whole body move as well as make some noise. Your teammates may not like hearing the sound of a conveyor belt while they are trying to grind.
Under desk bike
Nowadays, there is a product for everyone. An under-desk bicycle or elliptical to keep your legs moving while sitting is a great way to burn extra calories while gaming. These have the added benefit of being quiet, so your squad won’t complain about the mic.
Sitting on an exercise ball
You may think it is a bit much to have a standing desk, a walking pad, an under-desk bike, and so on. You’d be right. A cheaper option is an exercise or Swiss ball. Sitting on an exercise ball for even just part of your gaming session can engage your core and help improve your posture. If you are having trouble choosing between a standing desk and an exercise ball, check out this article.
Honorable mention: Kegel Exercises
You aren’t going to lose weight or look any stronger doing kegels, but they can be done while gaming, and no one will be the wiser. Kegel exercises can help strengthen your pelvic floor but, more importantly, have been shown to improve sexual function.
For any other exercises, you will have to stop playing for at least a few minutes to perform. Try combining one of the passive ways to workout while gaming with the gaming breaks for the best results. In addition, if you want to be successful in any aspect of life, you’ll have to stop gaming and go to bed.
Get adequate sleep
Getting a good night’s sleep is crucial for overall health and well-being, but did you know it can also improve your video game performance? Lack of sleep can negatively affect cognitive function, including reaction time and decision-making skills, which are essential for rolling your enemies. Lack of sleep can also increase the hormones in your body that make you hungry, making it harder to maintain a healthy weight.
Additionally, sleep deprivation can lead to higher levels of stress, which can impact your performance and lead to a less enjoyable experience. Aim for at least seven hours of quality sleep per night to maximize your gaming abilities and enhance your overall well-being. So, next time you’re tempted to pull an all-nighter for a gaming session, remember that a good night’s sleep can actually improve your performance and make your next gaming session even more delicious.
As lame as it sounds, I’d recommend setting a timer to stop gaming so you don’t get too lost in the sauce and end up spending all night trying to beat some meaningless boss or hit a new competitive rank.
Lastly, I cannot write an article about staying fit without mentioning hydration.
Why you need to stay hydrated while gaming
Staying hydrated while gaming is crucial for maintaining peak performance and overall health.
Did you know? Even mild dehydration can negatively impact reaction time, decision-making skills, and cognitive function, essential components for success in gaming. Additionally, prolonged gaming without proper hydration can lead to symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, and nausea.
The most popular product sold to avid gamers is energy drinks, which are totally unnecessary. Water can help maintain a stable energy level and aid in weight loss. In contrast, energy drinks can cause jitters and crashes that are far more likely to hinder performance than help it. Adequate sleep and water will outperform whatever powders your favorite streamer is selling.
Video games are a sport now. They are even called e-sports. It is common knowledge that drinking water and maintaining a healthy diet improve sports performance overall. In addition, caffeine and other supplements can be beneficial when used sparingly but not on a daily basis. If your goal is to improve at your gaming, treat your body like an athlete's.
Or if you just want to stay fit while dedicating more time to a hobby you enjoy. Regardless of your motivation, adding some of the tips in this article into your lifestyle is bound to improve your health and gaming.
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