Gains and Games: The Link Between Fitness and Esports Performance

Physical exercise is generally known to have many benefits and improve performance across many activities. But does working out improve gaming performance, or would any gamer be better off sweating with their mouse in their hand instead of dumbbells? The answer: it depends—let's look at the details.

"In many studies, physical exercise has shown positive impacts on executive functions, reaction time, communication skills, and stress-coping strategies." [1]

For instance, cognitive functions improve through exercising due to enhanced blood flow, the activation of the central nervous system, and engagement of neurotransmitters. Since high level video game performance is cognitively and physically demanding, it is suggested that working out (physical exercise) could boost in-game performance—doesn't matter if you're s1mple, Faker, or n00bLord69.

Although, some studies were able to show some benefits of physical exercise on esports performance, e.g. warming up (here's the episode that covers it), the long-term effect (if there is any) is still unknown. Therefore, "the objective of this study is to explore the relationship between esports performance and traditional sports participation." [1]

617 players completed a survey, reporting their rank, amount of physical exercise, gaming genre etc. 368 of them were male, 249 female. 404 (65.5%) reported participating in traditional sports.

🎯 Fitness, Focus, and Frags

"Physically active participants had higher rankings in PUBG." [1]

Analyzing games (genres) separately, the researchers found that only FPS (PUBG) players benefited from physical exercise. Their interpretation is that reaction time is crucial to success in FPS games, but to a lesser degree in other games such as LoL or Dota.

Interestingly, how long, how often, or what type of sports players engaged in didn't make a difference, meaning the sole fact of being physically active was enough to boost players' FPS in-game rank.

"Esports players significantly outpace non-esports players in terms of sports participation. Besides, among players of different genres of esports games, those who play sports games and fighting games participate in sports activities significantly more than players of other game types." [1]

This is something we've seen before in the gaming and esports literature. Those who have high ranks (especially progamer) are more physically active than lower-ranked players. Also, the researchers found that men work out significantly more than women. The table below shows that very clearly.

Lastly, the amount of experience players had (how long they've been playing) didn't have any impact on their performance. This is something I've pointed out before: games are designed to have a "fair" competition, meaning you'll face players that are at a similar level. This, in theory, will have you end up at a rank where your chance of winning is 50:50.

However, this wasn't the case for Honor of Kings (HOK) players—the duration players spend in-game was correlated with their rank. This may be, the researchers point out, a result of the unique ranking system in the game. At a certain rank, players will not get demoted after losing games, but get promoted faster for consecutive wins.

🎒 Your Take-Away Implications

Let's start by emphasizing that working out on a regular basis is good for you across many areas in life, so don't skip it—especially when you're getting older. Second, although the results didn't really show a general improvement of gaming performance from exercising, this doesn't mean it doesn't at all. Why? The positive impact may be indirect, or just not big enough to be significant in the analysis. Also, a larger sample may yield varying results.

As the researchers mentioned: "Nevertheless, it is anticipated that physical exercise would positively impact esports performance." [1]

In this spirit, let's work out today—I surely will. 'Till next week,

Christian 🙂

References

[1] Tang et al., 2024