Breaking Stereotypes: Physical Activity And Sedentary Behavior Of Esports Athletes Compared With Frequent Video Gamers

Abstract

Esport is professional and amateur video game competition. It is growing in popularity with high schools and universities supporting teams, trainings, and competitions. Esports players think of themselves as athletes and research suggests that physical activity is a beneficial component of esports training, indeed vigorous cardiovascular exercise can improve video game performance. Yet esports players are stereotyped similarly to video gamers more generally, in other words as sedentary, not physically active, and male. PURPOSE: to compare physical activity and sedentary behavior between competitive esports players and a sample of similarly experienced video gamers who were not on an epsorts team. METHODS: data were collected from within the USA via an online survey from a crowd-sourcing web service (N = 532 total; n = 172 females). The recruitment script and two filtering questions assured that only experienced video game players ≥18 years old (35.4 ± 10.1 years old on average) completed the survey. The survey assessed physical activity, sedentary behavior (i.e., IPAQ), time spent playing video games, and esports team membership. Independent samples t-tests compared esports team members versus non team members for all dependent variables. The analysis was run separately for males and females as sex was a covariate for physical activity. RESULTS: For the entire sample, participants averaged 211 ± 120 min of playing video games per day with no significant difference between esports players and nonplayers (t = 1.416, p = 0.157), and no difference between males and females (t = 0.086, p = 0.932). Splitting the sample by sex, 50.6% of males (n = 182) and 70.9% of females (n = 122) belonged to an esports team. For both males and females, esports team members reported significantly more (≥ 91% greater for all) vigorous physical activity (t ≥ 8.1, p ≤ 0.001), moderate physical activity (t ≥ 6.0, p ≤ .001) and walking (t ≥ 5.3, p ≤ .001) per week than non esports team members. Additionally, both male and female esports team members reported significantly less (≥ 40% less for all) sitting per week (t ≥ 4.6, p ≤ .001) than non esports team members. CONCLUSION: In this sample of video game players, members of esports teams were more physically active and less sedentary than equally experienced video game players who were not members of esports teams.