eSports are booming, but also frowned upon by health researchers. After all, excessive screen time, inactivity and sedentary behaviour are a global public health problem and have been associated with negative short- and long-term health-related problems, such as cardiovascular diseases, mental problems and cancer. While eSports are sedentary ‘activities’, we set out to characterize and describe the physical activity levels and physical training habits of people engaged in virtual football, a popular esports genre related to a traditional sport (i.e., soccer).
Methods
This was a cross-sectional investigation based on a structured online survey using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) and a set of questions regarding habits of physical training.
Results
The participants (n = 433) reported spending a median of 5,625 MET-min week(-1) being physically active. Still, the participants spent 320 min/day sitting, and 150 min/day practising virtual football. According to the IPAQ scores, high physical activity levels were reported by 84.5% of the participants, and 87.1% were considered physically active considering the WHO guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour. Overall, 60.0% of the participants reported planning their own physical training. Maintaining or improving overall physical health was one of the main reasons for doing physical training (66.7%), with only 6.1% responding being active to improve virtual football performance.
Time eSport athletes spent per week (min·week-1) with physical activities, presented by type of physical activity, based on IPAQ-SF. Values are median and interquartile range.
Conclusions
Overall, the results showed that most virtual football players reach the standard recommendations for physical activity, with high levels of physical activity, and encompassing regular physical training focused mostly on health promotion, rather than improved virtual football performance.
The full paper can be accessed here (open access)
Pereira AM, Verhagen E, Figueiredo P, Seabra A, Martins A and Brito J (2021) Physical Activity Levels of Adult Virtual Football Players. Front. Psychol. 12:596434. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.596434