Could an Esports Athlete Train Like an Olympian?

An Olympic rower’s year is planned backwards from one race. Volume builds, intensity rises, load drops before competition so the body arrives fresh, and recovery is scheduled with the same seriousness as training. This is periodisation, and it is one of the foundations of modern sports science.

Most competitive gamers have nothing like it. Training is whatever time allows, intensity is constant, and the week before a tournament often looks like the week after. If esports performance has a biological ceiling, unplanned training is one of the clearest reasons players stay below it.

What periodisation would mean for a player

A periodised esports programme would separate kinds of practice the way athletes separate kinds of training:

• Mechanical work: aim drills and movement, high repetition, low cognitive load.
• Tactical and strategic work: VOD review, set plays, communication.
• Competitive play: scrims and matches, high arousal and high fatigue.
• Physical training and recovery: exercise, sleep and genuine rest days.

Each has a different cost. Competitive play is the most draining and the least efficient way to fix a specific weakness. A plan would put each kind where it does the most good, and reduce total load before an event so players arrive sharp rather than worn out. None of this is exotic in sport. In esports it is still rare.

Exercise as a learning tool

The strongest case for physical training is not general health, although that matters. It is that exercise may make practice stick.

Roig, Skriver, Lundbye-Jensen, Kiens & Nielsen, 2012

Moderate relevance to competitive play

A single bout of exercise improves motor memory

PLoS One 7(9):e44594 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044594

Sample

Three randomised groups, Healthy young adults

Design

Randomised: intense cycling before practice, after practice, or rest

Intervention

A visuomotor tracking skill practised with or without a bout of high-intensity cycling

Result

Both exercise groups retained the skill better at 7 days than the rest group. Exercising immediately after practice gave better long-term retention than exercising before it. Skill acquisition during practice did not differ.

Limitations

A laboratory tracking task. Later work suggests intensity matters: a 2016 study of moderate-intensity cycling found no retention benefit.

The detail that matters is timing. Exercise did not make people learn faster during practice. It helped the brain keep what had been learned, and it worked best straight after the session. Work by Thomas and colleagues (2016) also found the largest benefits at high intensity, while Snow and colleagues (2016) found no effect from 30 minutes of moderate cycling.

For a player, the hypothesis is concrete: a hard, short session of exercise after a focused aim block might consolidate it better than going straight into ranked games. It has not been tested in esports, which makes it one of the most interesting experiments the field could run.

What players already believe

In the Kari and Karhulahti survey of 115 competitive players, respondents reported about 1.08 hours of physical exercise a day within their training, and more than half of professional and high-level players believed exercise improved their esports performance. The belief is ahead of the evidence, but the direction is reasonable.

The limits of the comparison

The Olympic analogy is useful, but it should not be pushed too far:

• The demands differ. Physical sports are limited by the body’s capacity to produce force and endurance. Esports are limited mainly by perception, decision-making and fine motor control. Fitness supports these indirectly, through sleep, stress tolerance and stamina across long sessions, rather than directly.
• The evidence differs. Sports periodisation rests on decades of research. Esports has a handful of small studies. Much of an esports periodisation plan would currently be borrowed reasoning, not proven method.
• The calendar differs. Esports seasons, online qualifiers and ranked ladders do not produce the single peak that an Olympic year does.

The real lesson

What elite sport offers esports is not a specific programme. It is a mindset: training load is something to plan and measure, recovery is training, and how a player feels is an unreliable guide to how they are performing. Sports science learned those lessons through decades of trial, error and data. Esports can borrow the method now and gather its own data as it goes.

References

1. Roig M, Skriver K, Lundbye-Jensen J, Kiens B, Nielsen JB. A single bout of exercise improves motor memory. PLoS One. 2012;7(9):e44594. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044594
2. Thomas R, et al. Acute exercise and motor memory consolidation: the role of exercise intensity. PLoS One. 2016.
3. Snow NJ, et al. The effect of an acute bout of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise on motor learning of a continuous tracking task. PLoS One. 2016.
4. Kari T, Karhulahti VM. Do e-athletes move? A study on training and physical exercise in elite e-sports. International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations. 2016.

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