This Oculus Quest fitness app worked me so hard I forgot to breathe

Supernatural, a new virtual reality fitness game you can play at home, is not playing around. I sweat so much that I have to drink five glasses of water for every 15-minute workout. The next morning when I tried it, I was so sore that I had trouble walking down the stairs. Sometimes I dive so deep and throw my arms around like a practice ninja assassin I forgot to breathe.

And I keep coming back, especially now that I’m trapped at home.

Supernatural is a VR app for Oculus Quest for $ 19 a month with a 30-day free trial. This is not the type of VR that allows you to sit in a chair and turn. It uses high-intensity, choreographed, playful workouts on popular music that overlap with the encouragement and guidance of experienced fitness trainers. It’s also like jumping around in a breathtaking BBC nature documentary. The workouts take place in 360-degree shots of some of the most beautiful places on earth.

The makers of Supernatural said they wanted to mimic the fun exhaustion of activities like surfing or climbing. However, the app does not mimic these movements – instead, it is intended to reproduce the feeling of physical activity that will not bore you, since the best workout is what you actually do.

“When you surf or snowboard, you never squat in a wave like ‘Oh man, I wish that squat was over,’ said Aaron Koblin, co-founder of VR startup Within, the maker of Supernatural, an interview. Within, Supernatural began to develop as the fitness program that met the team’s own needs after he and other members started to slip into Startup Bod, he said. You wanted to re-enact the fun endeavors of outdoor activities, but to fix the problems that keep you from exercising all the time.

“Dancing is original, it’s fun to move your body, and – key for an anti-social person like me – it’s done in the dark at home without anyone watching,” he said. “It allows me to be released.”

Anyone who has ever played Beat Saber – VR’s first hit in the stadium of a killer app – will feel familiar with the mechanics of Supernatural. With the controllers in hand, swing your arms to beat flying targets to the rhythm of the music, and move your body so you don’t collide with obstacles.

Unlike Beat Saber, Supernatural doesn’t challenge you with increasingly difficult skill or increasingly complex controller patterns. Supernatural prompts you to swing wider and harder or jump back and forth before you reappear.

For Supernatural, after a 30-day free trial, you pay a subscription for $ 19 a month and need an Oculus Quest, the $ 399 virtual reality headset that won a CNET Innovation Award last year. It’s a bit like Peloton’s Equipment Plus subscription idea for in-home fitness. The difference is that you don’t need a stationary bike worth $ 2,245, or charge $ 40 a month for tuition. (Peloton also offers a $ 13 a month digital subscription for device-free guided digital workouts.)

And Supernatural is the first attempt to turn this type of subscription-based full-body workout service into virtual reality.

VR was one of the most vigorous technology trends a few years ago, attracting huge investments from heavyweights like Google and Facebook that Oculus had bought for about $ 3 billion in 2014. But the hype subsided as the widespread adoption of VR was elusive. Consumers were massively ambivalent about these headsets that you put on your face.

At least people didn’t seem interested in VR before that Corona virus The pandemic caught us in our homes. Good luck trying to buy an Oculus Quest online now. A 64-gigabyte Quest model is said to cost $ 399, but Oculus’s store is sold out. Even if you can find it online from third-party providers at Amazon or Walmart, the price is $ 560 or more.

The supernatural experience

Supernatural feels a bit like attending some kind of ninja shadow boxing dance class. You choose a workout that can last between 12 minutes and half an hour. You will be greeted by the fitness trainer, referred to as the trainer in the game, who will prepare you shortly for what you need to focus on in this program. Then the voice of this trainer stays with you as you move through a selection of popular songs. The trainers give you encouraging conversations, instructions on how to make it through difficult passages, and memories of breathing (which were very important to me).

Supernatural was launched on Tuesday at the Oculus Store with a handful of workouts and adds a new workout every day. This includes hits such as Good as Hell by Lizzo, New Rules by Dua Lipa and Can’t Hold Us by Macklemore and much more. Supernatural has offers to use music from Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, two of the so-called Big Three record labels.

Within Supernatural develops to have both a variety of music genres and a variety of personalities in the trainers. The idea is that regardless of your personality or style, you can find a trainer or workout playlist that will cast a spell over you.

It has two main movements. The first is hitting targets flying towards you with long bats in your hands. The targets are black or white and you hit them with the matching black or white bat. The second is squatting or lounging to keep your body framed by glowing triangles that are also flying towards you.

Supernatural is designed in such a way that each training session is choreographed for this song in a level of difficulty that is adapted to you. You train your arms, your back and your chest by beating your arms, you train your core by twisting your torso with side blows, and you train your lower body with lunges and squats. Some workouts focus more on spinning, others on hitting quickly, others on getting you to a low level just to start up again.

The program also calibrates the difficulty for each workout. It is challenging enough to be committed, but not so difficult that you lose focus on your shape and strength.

This dynamic difficulty is important to make your training as effective as possible. At the start, Supernatural has two workouts that do not change the level of difficulty. One is at the beginner level and another remains locked at the pro level. When I tried to train professionally, I found that it was actually below average training. When our bodies get tired, we instinctively find shortcuts. When the pro-level training kept pace, I accidentally started to defraud my shape. For example, I snapped my wrist more often to hit targets instead of consistently punching them with a strong range of motion.

For Beat Saber fans, it’s a bit like playing the game in 360 mode on a difficulty level between roughly hard and experienced – at least in my ability. The challenge of Supernatural is not so much coordination and speed, but endurance and strength. And instead of being in a dark shadow vacuum full of strange neons, you stand on Machu Picchu’s ruins, and the Andes tower against a perfect blue sky. Or hover over the glowing lava of the Ethiopian Erta Ale volcano. Knee-deep in the turquoise waters of the Galapagos Islands. Places that are rare luxuries before we were all caught behind our front doors.

You will receive points at the end of each training session. One is for accuracy, a combination of how well you hit targets and get through triangles, and another is for your movement strength. Supernatural also has a social tracking element. You can track your friends’ progress and compare them to your own in a weekly leaderboard. The VR app also has a companion phone app that makes it easy to check your stats, see how friends are doing, and connect a smartwatch to the program to keep track of your heart rate while you exercise.

Currently running:
Look at that:

We took Oculus Quest on vacation

5:18

I use Supernatural longer than any other member of the press and I kill with accuracy. But damn it if I can’t keep my strength constantly above 85%. If I really want to hit the targets with rage, I pretend that these black and white balls are actually floating coronavirus cells. I cut them with F-bomb revenge. Usually it helps my strength to score a little bit, but I definitely feel better …

This is not weight training. There is no substitute for a diverse fitness program that combines cardio activity with weights, resistance, stretching, and other types of workouts. However, Within’s goal was to help people clarify the most important point for long-term health: the American Heart Association’s recommendation to be moderately to intensely physically active five times a week for about 30 minutes a day.

“It’s a little less about a brand new type of training to give you the best abs in the world,” said Koblin. “It’s more about how we can get people off the couch, raise their heart rate for the duration recommended by the American Heart Association, and develop a form of cardio that doesn’t suck?”

And I’m training heavy with supernatural. My resting heart rate is usually 65 beats per minute. My last supernatural training increased it to 174. The company offers customers free, sweat-proof silicone liners for their headsets while supplies last so that your Oculus Quest does not become a funky welding sponge.

I’m sure I look ridiculous. Or maybe not. In my mind, I feel like Jet Li crossed with a Beyonce backup dancer. But after using Supernatural for almost a month, I feel good looking in the mirror (as soon as I wash off the gallons of sweat).

Supernatural can be downloaded from the Oculus Store on Thursday at 10 a.m.