I am standing on a grassy mountaintop, listening to birds chirping, getting lost in the stunning landscape. Suddenly, pop music swells and round black and white objects the size of soccer balls begin to fly toward me at an accelerated clip, exploding into confetti each time I punch one away.
No, I’m not dreaming—just working out in my living room while wearing a VR headset, playing the Supernatural fitness game, immersed in a 360-degree wonderland. When it’s over, I’m panting, elated, and totally sweaty, just like when I finish taking a class at the gym—and the next day my lats are on fire.
So I’m not surprised to read the findings of a small new study which found that VR exercise—specifically the Supernatural app on a Meta Quest headset—was just as effective as comparable real-life, “high-quality cardiovascular activity” like running, boxing, and swimming.
The study, out of the Behavioral Medicine Lab at the University of Victoria, Canada, and published on June 6 in the journal JMIR Serious Games, looked at the effect of two medium-intensity modes of the games “Flow” and “Boxing” on 24 participants with little or no VR experience. It measured results with what’s called a Metabolic Equivalent of Task, or MET, score, which is a multiple of a person’s base resting rate, used to calculate an estimated calorie burn based on the individual’s weight.
Further, it looked at mood changes post-exercise and found they were consistent for what you’d expect after vigorous exercise, with participants reporting they felt “full of pep” and “lively” after the workouts.
“I think there’s a lot of skepticism because [VR fitness] is very new,” Leanne Pedante, Supernatural head of fitness and one of six coaches who guide Supernatural users through its more than 3,000 workouts (at a subscription price of $10 a month or $100 a year), tells Fortune. There is often a misunderstanding that “you’re not really moving” with VR workouts, and that it’s like a video game, with a perception that “it’s kind of passive, and not an activity where you would actually move enough to sweat.”
The study, Pedante adds, “helps us ground it with cycling, jogging, boxing—things that people are familiar with.”
The study was commissioned and paid for by Meta but carried out independently, led by the University’s School of Exercise Science professor Ryan Rhodes, whose focus of research has been “the psychology of enjoyment and being engaged in what you’re doing,” noted a press release on the study. “A lot of exercise is an act of willpower for people,” he says. “Let’s face it, running on a treadmill is not exactly a fun, engaging activity. We do it because it’s good for us but, ultimately, it can be difficult to stick with it.” That’s where VR technology can step in.
“When you’re doing something like this VR app, it really feels like you’re standing in the middle of Antarctica or you could be on a beautiful beach,” he says. “That can add to the experience.”
The study’s results track with other similar findings, including a 2020 systematic review which suggested that “VR exercise has the potential to exert a positive impact on an individual’s physiological, psychological, and rehabilitative outcomes compared with traditional exercise,” as well as a Supernatural assessment by the Virtual Reality Institute of Health and Exercise.
That organization, formed in 2017 by kinesiologists to study the effects of VR fitness on the body, assigns ratings to VR workouts—others include FitXR and Litesport—based on METs, as with the new study. In rating the Supernatural Boxing game, it found that its combination of straight jabs, hooks, uppercuts, and blocks made for good, vigorous exercise, with an exertion level most equivalent to real-life cycling.
“Looking at the [new Meta] study, I think that their results seem very reasonable,” Aaron Stanton, director of the Institute. “They registered an average MET score of 7.89 METs, and our testing actually rated it higher than that, at 11.44 METs. Their testing was lower than ours, and so I don’t think they’re likely exaggerating.” (Note from this writer: They weren’t.)
But what about community?
Another reason some people may be skeptical of VR workouts, Pedante says, is that, especially post-COVID, they “focus on the isolation part. I hear a lot of that, the idea that you’re kind of leaving the real world.” But, she adds, “The goal has never been that we want people to stop doing things in the real world. The goal is to make sure people find places within VR that can serve their needs in a way that isn’t getting served.”
It’s something she sees frequently with Supernatural fans, including, “People who haven’t been able to make home workouts stick who are now three years in with this because it’s fun.”
The “gamification,” she notes, is helpful, providing the same sort of competitive vibe you’d get in a group fitness class. “It helps to give you some sort of metric to align yourself with, to chase after.”
Further, while the workouts are indeed solo activities, that hasn’t stopped superfans from creating communities—including a Facebook community page with 108,000 members and real-life meetups happening around the country, including one group making a pilgrimage to hike the actual Tom Dick and Harry Mountain in Oregon that serves as the virtual backdrop for one of the Supernatural workouts.
“I often go to the Facebook page for inspiration, and to see what workouts are coming out, what people are achieving,” Jessa Curcillo, 45, tells Fortune. “The collective excitement keeps my motivation going.” The Columbus, Ohio mom of four kids between 10 and 16 says that Supernatural helped bring fitness back into her life full-throttle, as it has previously been something she “endured for the results.”
Doing these workouts for about 30 minutes a day, she says, “really changed my mindset about fitness. I really felt like I was cheating the system, like it was a vacation just for me.” As a contract worker, her schedule is flexible, and while she does other real-life exercising here and there, Supernatural is her main workout.
“I’m kind of in a phase of my life that is pure chaos, so if not for this, I couldn’t fit fitness into my life,” she says.
Pedante points to people like Curcillo as the reason why Supernatural’s stickiness is so important—especially considering that no more than 28% of Americans met the combined aerobic and muscle-strengthening guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, per the CDC.
“We see it all the time—people who hadn’t been able to make home workouts stick who are now three years in because it’s so fun,” she says. “There is a massive benefit all of us [coaches] have seen, and we want more people to know the solution is there for them.”
More on fitness and exercise:
