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Is playing chess a weight loss hack?
Did you know that a pro chess player can burn 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament? That's 3X what an average person burns.
Chess is a game requiring a significant amount of mental activity when it comes to strategy, but there is a theory that playing can also help you lose weight.
During a recent episode of TMZ’s Strange and Suspicious, several guests weighed in on this idea.
While it’s hard to understand that a game requiring sitting for extended periods of time can actually burn calories, there is some evidence to support this claim.
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Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University claimed that while playing in tournaments, chess players can burn up to 6,000 calories per day, three times the daily average.
The neuroscientist and primatologist told ESPN in 2020 that based on breathing rates and blood pressure, which both elevate during a chess match, and muscle contractions during games, a player’s stress responses to chess are similar to those of an elite athlete.
Can playing chess result in weight loss?
The 1984 World Chess Championship in Moscow required five months to finish. The tournament featured a match between chess legend Garry Kasparov and then champion Anatoly Karpov.
Karpov reportedly lost more than 22 pounds and the championship was eventually called off because of their physical conditions, per Men’s Health.
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Twenty years later, a six-game championship in 2004 resulted in Rustam Kasimdzhanov shedding 17 pounds, and in 2018, a company tracking the heartrate of chess grandmaster Mikhail Antipov reported that he burned 560 calories in two hours while sitting and playing chess.
According to LiveScience, chess players experience pressure that may result in stress, and can lead to an elevated heart rate, faster breathing and sweating. These physical traits can burn calories.
Separately, chess players can sit for almost eight hours at a time and LiveScience notes that this can interrupt a player's eating schedule.
This story was reported from Washington, D.C.