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IIf you come across someone who is exercising with a virtual reality headset, it will look ridiculous. You might be able to judge them silently for what might seem like random and clumsy movements. If that describes you, a study published in Psychology of sport and exercise can make you regret this instantaneous judgment: the researchers' conclusions suggest that virtual reality can really play an important role in physical performance, thus helping people overcome physical discomfort.
In the larger world of virtual reality-related drills, companies such as Virzoom have developed elaborate scenarios, ranging from lasso games to bandits to Mondays, to scenarios in which your apartment bike becomes a pegasus in flight. But the virtual reality game used in this study, done by a team of researchers from the University of Kent in England, was not even fun, it was an exact reconstruction of the laboratory, to the gray walls and bland.
Despite this extremely disappointing backdrop, the study found that participants who wore a Samsung Galaxy Gear VR helmet took an average of about a minute longer than the control group during a "continuous pain task". – Essentially a test in which the team asked participants to hold a stationary dumbbell until they could no longer. VR subjects lasted an average of 5.34 minutes, while the control group averaged 4.14 minutes. But strangely, the RV group also reported lower pain intensity scores of 10% over the course of the task.
The co-author of the study, Alexis Mauger, Ph.D., lecturer at the Faculty of Sports Science and Exercise at the University of Kent, did not not surprised by this result, as his previous research suggested that it was not necessary to make elaborate evasive games. deceive your brain:
"I conducted a study a few years ago in which we used the mirror box technique to persuade subjects to think that they were lifting a mass lighter or heavier than the one that they had. they really were, "says Mauger. reverse. "When we did that, they felt respectively less or more pain and their performance was better or worse."
VR, he explains, was a natural step in his research: to create an immersive world that could still mislead the senses. But Mauger actually had another hypothesis that he thought he could mitigate the power of virtual reality, based on the idea of "private body consciousness" (PBC). In the article, the team defines private body awareness as "an awareness of the body's internal sensations". Mauger suspected that, for people who are very conscious of how their bodies feel during exercise, virtual reality may not provide a useful distraction.
His tests proved this hypothesis totally wrong.
"Given that CBP is a measure of your own awareness of internal sensations, we would expect that someone less aware would show a limited response to the RV intervention," he said. he declares. "That was not the case and virtual reality was just as effective regardless of the PBC. But this is good news because it means that virtual reality could be used more widely than we thought.
But if this discovery suggests that virtual reality plays an even more powerful role in physical performance than he thought, Mauger adds that it's hard to understand How Virtual reality games improve performance more difficult. The authors attempt to answer this question in the paper, suggesting that visual cues may play a role. In the virtual reality game, the subjects did not see their forearms tremble with exhaustion nor their hands blush with color as the blood rushed over their painful biceps. They just saw a stable virtual arm holding a weight:
"Another possible explanation for the effectiveness of virtual reality in our study to reduce pain and perceived exertion was that participants embodied the simulation and felt the virtual hand as their real hand," they write. "If that was the case, virtual reality masked visual stimuli that could be perceived as signals of pain and stress."
Mauger says his team could follow this idea, but in the meantime, this study provides a rare example of shortcut for improving sports performance. If you want to get bigger, these first results indicate that it is time to adopt the simulation.
Email of the author: [email protected].
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