Can Beat Saber Help You Burn Calories and Lose Weight?

Using games consoles for exercise has been a big thing since Wii Fit came on the scene over 10 years ago.

Things have moved on a lot since then, and a popular game currently for exercise is Beat Saber (2018).

A recent study by the Virtual Reality Institute of Health and Exercise showed that Beat Saber may be more than just a fun VR game.

It turns out all that slicing and dodging can add up to many burnt calories. As much as playing tennis!

How Many Calories Does Beat Saber Burn?

The Virtual Reality Institute of Health and Exercise, which collaborates with professionals in many fields, such as Kinesiology, bases their data on a game’s observed metabolic equivalent (MET) score. This is a standard way of defining the energy spent during physical activities.

These MET scores are obtained by the institute by testing oxygen consumption and monitoring heart rate when playing VR games, and compares them to other activities such as baseball, tennis, or boxing.

Over the course of four Beat Saber sessions conducted by an experienced player, they determined a 60kg (132 lbs) Beat Saber player can burn on average 8.57 kcals to 9.86 kcals per minute during their final test.

This gives Beat Saber an average MET of 6.24, or the equivalent of the energy expenditure of playing tennis, which is rated between 6-8 METs.

It isn’t just a case however of standing there and swinging your arms.

To achieve this score, a player needs to keep movement at a constant. The correlation appears to be that the higher the skill level of the player, the greater chance you have of hitting and maintaining those upper heart rate targets.

The report suggests you should turn off the ability to fail songs, thus giving you more chance to finish a full song instead of getting stopped after missing too many notes.

This will then let you play the fastest songs without having to build up the required skill level to reach the end.

These results however are not just isolated to this study.

For example, Robert Long used Beat Saber as a tool for physical and mental recovery from a series of car accidents.

Robert went from 468 lbs to 330 lbs thanks to a combination of proper dieting and an intense 30-minutes of Beat Saber daily (full story here).

There are also many Reddit users who rate it as a good workout.

Other games that have rate at a similar 6-8 METs include Hot Squat (2016), a game that forces you to squat through barriers, and Fastest Fist (2016), a VR boxing game.

The highest rated MET score, which the institute rates at 15+ METs is the VR boxing game Thrill of the Fight (2016), which they rate as an equivalent to the MET observed during sprinting.

So next time you are looking to lose weight, perhaps pick up a VR headset rather than a tennis racket.

Confused about which headset to use for Beat Saber? Check out our article here.

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