Lose Weight Playing Video Games

Let Your Video Games Help You Burn Off Fat and Calories.

Hey there!

Let’s start burning calories with video games!

A console such as your Nintendo Switch is great to use while on the treadmill. The Joycon functionality of being able to remove them from the main console can be extremely helpful in allowing to have more freedom to move around.

You don’t have to run of course, simply put the treadmill at an incline and walk at a slow to moderate pace. 

You may not burn hundreds of calories, but it’s better than just sitting on the couch and not burning any at all.

But if this is the only thing you do for 3 or 4 hours you could burn around 100 or more calories each hour.

There’s a few other ways to become more active with your gaming.

Add consequences to your gaming experience

Let’s say you’re playing a fighting game with online matches. Play your matches standing up. And yes, simply just standing makes that much more of a difference when focusing on burning calories. A medically reviewed article on Healthline says the following about sitting in comparison to standing:

Sitting, by comparison, only burns 60 to 130 calories an hour. Think about how fast that adds up! You could burn anywhere from 120 to 210 more calories just by swapping 3 hours of sitting for standing.

Every time you lose, have it to where you do an amount of reps for an exercise such as 10 pushups, or 15 squats. Add an amount of reps as well for every time you win.

As a suggestion, while waiting for matches do some sort of exercise. It doesn’t matter what kind as long as your body is active. This can be sit-ups, jumping jacks, you can even play some music and dance while waiting in the lobby! 

Since you don’t have to be working out your muscles to any crazy extremes (at least if you don’t want to), this can easily be a part of your rest days. Doing some sort of exercise is important to do DAILY. But working out harder than last time SHOULD NOT happen DAILY. Therefore, these can be great additional exercises to implement before the gym, or your workout for your rest day!

Playing Active Games

There are games that require you to have movement for the gameplay. With that being said, make sure that you exaggerate the amount of effort put in for those calories to really burn off. 

When I’m saying this I'm talking about games like the Just Dance series. Other games like Wii Fit don’t require you to add as much extra effort. If anything, playing Wii Fit for an hour or so could burn a good amount of calories. Especially if you spread out multiple sessions throughout the day.

I’m not really sure why it never clicked in my head to really use video games to my advantage. I know they’re not really good for me, but I also know how to prioritize things and when I play video games I often use it as my resting period. Does that make sense? I hope so 😂

What I’m trying to say is that I still love video games, but I understand that I can’t play them as much anymore because it takes away time from my work, and makes me procrastinate. Up until recently when I saw a Brandon Carter short where he talked about using his switch and the adaptability of the console to play games while simply burning off calories on the treadmill. I was shook when I found out about this discovery.

Have a great day! Use video games to your advantage!!