Motivating yourself to play VR fitness games can be tough sometimes, especially if you don’t change the rotation of games you play or you don’t promote the right habits throughout the rest of your lifestyle.
That said, I’ve fallen off of VR fitness gaming many times. No matter how hard I’ve fallen, I’ve always managed to come back for one reason or another, mainly because of how convenient and fun VR workouts can be! Nowadays, I tend to stick around indoors due to the pandemic, so VR fitness has basically kept me alive since March.
Of course, like any other fitness regimen, there are a billion reasons that you can fall off and stay off for good if you aren’t paying attention to what you’re doing. This is why we’ve come up with a list of top ways to motivate yourself to play VR fitness games more often and stay on track with your physical (and hopefully, mental!) health, all with the help of VR.
Track Your Workouts
Tracking your workouts is one of the simplest and most important things you can do to stay on top of your VR fitness workout routine. It’s important that you use a tracker that can at least read your heart’s BPM and record the calorie burn (kcal) of your workouts.
You can also check out YUR.fit. It tracks your fitness across any VR game you play.
By tracking your workouts in VR, you can do two things:
- You can see a more immediate result from the work you’ve put in while playing active VR fitness games. You may not feel or see the results of your workouts in VR right after you finish them, but with the digital data feedback from a fitness tracker, you can see on the screen how much work you’ve been putting in as soon as you finish working out.
- You can plan your workouts more efficiently, giving yourself more of a precedent to base your regimen and game rotations off of. For example, you might discover that you see the best results in The Thrill of the Fight after 30 minutes instead of 45 minutes, so then you decide to switch up the final 15 minutes of your workout with a session in BoxVR or Pistol Whip instead. Having a fitness tracker at least opens up the door to experimentation.
As an added bonus, if you’re a Pokemon GO player, you may find that tracking your VR fitness routine helps you progress in that game a bit faster.
Switch Up Your VR Fitness Games
Playing the same games over and over again is going to get dull, no matter who you are. It’s true that some of the most efficient and most popular VR fitness games are like Beat Saber, Superhot VR, The Thrill of the Fight, and BoxVR. However, there’s plenty more out there to find and choose from.
We definitely recommend scoping out our VR fitness game reviews section, which is constantly getting updated with some of the latest active VR games.
In addition to that, we always recommend taking a trip over to the VR Institute of Health and Exercise, which lists a ton of games and displays scientifically accurate fitness scores for each game. The game scores there are based on much wider samples of data than just one expert reviewer, and it’s an easy recommendation for anybody looking to optimize their VR fitness workout routine.
Clean Up Your VR Play Area
VR has the inherent problem of making people feel like it’s too much effort to jump into the headset and play anything. This is called ‘friction,’ and it’s an even bigger issue when you don’t clean up the room that you play VR games inside of.
Needing to clean a room is a bigger hassle that requires you to use more thought before jumping into a VR headset and working out inside of it. So, just clean the room and keep it clean. It might not always be the most feasible thing to do, depending on where you live and what kind of environment you play VR in, especially if you have kids or pets running around in a tightly enclosed space.
However, just like making your bed in the morning, we always recommend having a cleaned-up VR play area that you don’t need to think twice about doing your VR fitness gaming session inside of.
Create a Motivational Workout Playlist
Sometimes it’s just hard to get sufficiently pumped up to exert yourself in any way. Whether the juice isn’t there for you anymore, or external conditions are bringing you down, it might just not feel like the right time to get inside of a virtual reality headset and throw some punches or do some cardio.
Totally fair! I’ve personally run into the same issue. That’s why I made a workout playlist on Spotify that’s full of my personal favorite tunes that get me pumped up to play VR fitness games.
However, you don’t necessarily need to do that exact same thing. I personally love Spotify, but I’ve made playlists on YouTube and Soundcloud as well, and if whichever platform you choose has the best features and most of the music you want to listen to, by all means, go for that instead.
If you’re completely out of ideas, stick to rhythm games that have the music selection built-in, such as OhShape, Pistol Whip, BoxVR, Beat Saber, AudioShield, Synth Riders, and Audio Trip.
Set a VR Fitness Workout Time
The best way to make a habit stick is to do it every day at the same time for 30 or so days.
VR fitness isn’t something you do once then finish and move on; it’s part of having a healthy lifestyle. So you need to do it every day or at least do it every week unless you’re just supplementing another workout routine with VR (in which case, do it whenever you need to!)
We recommend choosing a time in the early morning or late afternoon that doesn’t interfere with your regular daily activities. Note that it can mess with your sleep schedule to do VR fitness within three hours of your bedtime— which hasn’t personally stopped me, but I never cared about my sleep anyway!
Now you’ve learned our top ways to motivate yourself to keep a VR fitness routine going over the long term. Do you have your own special tips and tricks? If so, leave them in the comments!