Exercise for the sake of exercise is EXTREMELY unnatural. It completely goes against our biology and psychology.
If you study biology for one minute, you learn that most of nature is about energy intake and expenditure. If a plant, animal, bacteria, or insect runs out of energy, it dies. That’s it. So the prime directive for a living organism is to find food (calories) and conserve energy (calories) to be as efficient as possible. Millions of years of evolution has turned all organisms into highly efficient energy management machines. It’s literally the most important mechanism for a living thing.
No animal exercises just for the sake of exercise. They may engage in play, which looks like exercise, but that’s a way for the young to learn in a safe way.
Organisms only exert themselves physically to avoid predators, find and digest food, find mates, and raise offspring.
No bear just runs around in circles for 30 minutes for no reason. No squirrel climbs up and down a tree over and over for an hour just for fun, trying to beat its previous best time. No fish swims back and forth between corral reefs just to improve its resting heart rate.
Somehow the fitness industry thinks we can just easily get over this most basic element of biology by using “discipline” and “#goals” and “willpower”. If you don’t run on that treadmill, lift those weights, or ride that bike for hours per week, you just need to tell yourself to “just do it”.
And look where it has gotten us? Almost nobody exercises consistently every week, every month, and every year. Worse yet, we’re made to feel bad about it, like it’s a moral failure.
Gaming is a brain hack that makes us think we are doing something useful. We are collecting necessary supplies, gathering food and resources, competing for mates, fighting predators, fighting for survival, climbing social hierarchies, improving our skills for later use, protecting kin, impressing potential mates, and working together with our tribal community members to accomplish survival and mating goals.
We can use those hacks in a virtual reality environment to trick the brain into thinking that the physical activity that we are requiring is useful and necessary. You’ll want to do it and feel like you need to do it. You won’t focus on “exercising”, you will focus on accomplishing goals that your primitive brain thinks it must. The side effect will be improved health, fitness, appearance, and mental health.
That’s what Black Box VR is doing and that’s why we are different than anything that has been seen before in fitness. We’re not using a light coating of “gamification”. We’re not trying to fake making exercise “fun” with music and dancing. We’re using the full psychological toolkit of high-end esport video games. That’s why we will be the most effective health improvement company of the coming decades.
About Black Box VR
Black Box VR is the world’s first virtual reality esport that combines resistance training, HIIT cardio, and intense gaming to deliver a science-backed workout experience. With gym locations open in San Francisco, Phoenix, Oceanside, and Boise, members are able to build muscle, lose fat, and get fit while playing an addictive game.
