Why does playing chess consume that many calories but playing videogames, which, in theory, uses a lot of brain capacity, doesn’t?
In: Biology
Frame challenge: playing chess does not use very many excess calories. Those that it does use, are due to high stress. Playing a high stress, fast-paced competitive videogame, e.g. StarCraft 2, DoTA, would burn the same amount of calories, plus more due to the constant physical activity.
[People have used chess as a model for studying stress responses and therefore have done a detailed metabolic analysis.](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18987876) The key data is in table 1 (p. 347); here it is, converted to Calories/hr:
>Energy expended (Cal/hr): Before / Beginning / Middle / End
>
>———————— ———– ———– ———– ———–
>
>Mean : 91.8 / 100.2 / 91.8 / 93.0
>
>Minimum : 68.4 / 70.8 / 70.2 68.4
>
>Maximum : 120.0 / 132.0 / 120.6 / 122.4
>
These are comparable to light physical activity (desk work, etc.), and not even close to jogging (400-500 Calories/hr for someone weighing ~70 kg).
So, no, chess grandmasters do not rate that highly when it comes to caloric expenditure.
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