Much cheaper purchase and fun enough that I can enjoy playing it for hours a day. I have an (admittedly shitty) exercise bike, and will probably be using that a lot less now.

If anyone's looking for a home fitness gadget, give that a look. I'm told BoxVR is a better workout than Beat Saber but I haven't bought that yet.

I've only gone running once this spring so I don't have a huge dataset (lots of walking and exercise bike instead), but the one run I did was a 10:30 mile. So I'm not especially fast, but 11:30 is a slow pace for me and feels reasonable as a beat saber equivalent workout.

Downside, the Quest's foam face-interface gets absolutely drenched in sweat. I need to get a sweatband and a wipeable pad replacement as soon as VRCover catches up on their backorders.

Even as an exercise bike owner who can hop on that for a workout whenever I want to, I've never gotten home from work and said "You know what I want to do? Exercise bike for more than two hours."

Compared to half an hour of exercise bike and two hours of Overwatch, I think this will be a huge deal for fitness.

That's an absurd claim by your apple watch. An hour of expert level beat saber is closer to 360 calories.

EDIT - did a comparison against Runner's World's calorie burn calculator, and the calories/hour burn rate lines up with a leisurely 11:30 minutes/mile pace based on my weight.

It honestly seems about right.

This source puts 6 Kcal/min on the low end of the range for an idealized 60 Kg individual, but your estimate is close.

tl:dr; 6-8 Kcal/min (360-480 Kcal/hour) for a 60 Kg individual

Inputs are: 1 mile, 11:30 minutes/mile, 210 lbs weight

Gives back 159 calories for a 1 mile run, 829 calories per hour.

My Beat Saber workouts yesterday tally up at 830 calories per hour and the amount of sweating felt in the ballpark of running an 11 minute mile. I don't think the watch's estimates are that outlandish.

https://www.runnersworld.com/training/a20801301/calories-bur...

Again factoring in that I weigh 210 lbs, their calculator also says a marathon would be upwards of 4100 calories for me. 1900 calories clocks in at less than half of a marathon.

But I’d pretty surprised if you did it without training to build up to it. You could have developed the aerobic capacity through other activities, but I’d have thought various muscles would be unprepared and would be giving you rather strong pain signals. If you nevertheless pushed through that, I’d think you’d be SORE AF today and barely able to move.

Or maybe your activity confused the calorie model your Apple Watch uses.

Not that it isn’t great exercise.

>According to the Cleveland Clinic Center for Consumer Health, a runner who weighs 130 lb. will burn 2,224 calories during a marathon, a 165 lb. runner will burn 2,822 calories and a 210 lb. runner will burn 3,593 calories.

https://www.livestrong.com/article/302836-how-many-calories-...

Regardless, my main takeaway is that I’m going to burn more calories with this than I was without it.

Average calorie burn was 830 calories/hour, which they say is equivalent to me running at an 11:30 minutes/mile pace.

In terms of effort expended, important to note that this was three sessions over the course of the evening, adding up to 1900 calories and 2 hours 17 minutes.

So it was something like running 4 miles 3 times with an hour and change break in between, which is probably an easier feat than doing it in one shot.

My arms are still sore and I don't plan on doing that every day, but it was definitely a workout.

It was a good chunk of my evening and my arms are pretty sore today, so I don't plan on doing that all the time. But I'll absolutely do it more often than I run/bike 1900 calories.

I don't trust that at all. Apple Watch will give you several "active" calories a minute sitting still if you start an "Other" workout.

Or weather wise, anywhere in the northern US where it's cold and snowy for from November to February.

I live in the mountains of Colorado, but will always prefer exercising outdoors, even in winter. I tend to modify my exercise for the time of year and weather. In winter it tends towards running and skiing. Summer is for biking (and more running). I like to have variety of activities (helps to build up a diverse set of strength) and the simplicity of walking out my front door. (Without a monthly fee)

Exercise bike was a game changer last winter in terms of getting me to stick with regular workouts.

And while I don't really don't enjoy riding stationary bikes, there is some appeal to getting in a fake ride on a stationary bike in my living room when it's 35 degrees and raining outside. Or 90 degrees and high humidity.