If you are a professional gamer or a real gaming enthusiast spending hours after hours playing your favourite games, you can easily imagine the harmful effect of a sedentary lifestyle on your health. This is even more potent if gaming is your major hobby while your main job is also sedentary. In such a case, you should necessarily include exercises into your daily routine.
What is happening when a person is sitting too long?
Generally speaking, modern scientists are sure a sedentary lifestyle is extremely dangerous for people and it can be one of the main culprits for various health conditions affecting people in the western world. Actually, many doctors claim a sedentary lifestyle has an overall negative effect on health equal to obesity and smoking.
Sitting for hours affects not only the posture as you can imagine it but also the blood circulation in the body which is detrimental for internal organs and metabolism. In fact, scientists are sure sitting on a chair is a rather unnatural position for humans and it should be avoided as much as possible.
When it comes to gaming, players are particularly prone to spending too much time in a sitting position. Even if your work requires sitting, it is definitely not absorbing to the extent when you do not feel physical discomfort of sitting for a couple of hours in a row. Sooner or later, you will feel an urge to stand up and have a walk. Even if it is not allowed at your workplace, you can still find a pretext to stand up.
While playing your favourite game, you are getting so engaged into the process that you simply do not feel a need to get distracted from playing by absolutely anything. Certainly, some games can make you forget about hunger and sleep, let alone physical activity.
For these reasons, gamers should be particularly careful about their physical activity.
What should you do to improve the situation?
Even if you invest money into a special gaming chair which is usually rather expensive, you will still be spending time in a sitting position. Your posture might be improved but it is not enough.
As you can imagine it is recommended to exercise on a regular basis in order to keep your body healthy. The exercises do not have to be particularly intense or prolonged, however, they should be performed on a daily basis. In addition to it, it is highly recommended for gamers to make at least 10-minute breaks every hour in order to perform short exercises or just to walk around.
What else can you do?
If you are looking for some possibilities of combining your hobby with physical activity, you can look at the choice of the games allowing players to stay physically active during the gaming process.
For example, you assist your jogging or running workouts with popular mobile game Pokemon Go. You can pick pokemons right during your workout outside which will make it especially pleasurable for you.
Another great thing you can do is purchasing a special platform for games requiring real physical activity such as Just Dance, Beat Saber, Gorn or Kinect Sports Rivals. For Xbox One, such a platform is Kinect. For PlayStation 4, you can get PSVR while HTC Vive is available for a desktop computer.
By the way, such a platform can be a great solution for parents who want their children to have more physical activity.