If you want to lose weight, play competitive chess

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Talk Tennis Guru
ESPN: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. "He looked like death," grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley recalls.

In 2004, winner Rustam Kasimdzhanov walked away from the six-game world championship having lost 17 pounds. In October 2018, Polar, a U.S.-based company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found that 21-year-old Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov had burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting and playing chess -- or roughly what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis.

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters' stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

"Grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners," Sapolsky says.



BTW, I've measured this myself using my Garmin Fenix 5+. My stress levels are quite elevated when I play chess.

Caruana playing tennis - what do you think is NTRP is?

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I think its high intensity competitive environments. When I play a competitive video game, and its an important match, I can often end up with a stress headache afterwards, a dull pain at the base of my skull. Just playing the game is not enough to induce it. Its playing against a highly skilled player with high stakes, officially sanctioned matches, that makes it happen.
 
ESPN: The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving
haha, I read this yesterday and some of the discussion on hackernews (ycombinator.com/news).

otoh, i seem to remember Vishwanathan Anand (who is mentioned in the article) as being overweight.

It is possible that there is a certain personality type that takes to chess. The introverted type, and one that is ectomorphic.

I did note the part about how orange juice was making one of them tired as he was growing older. The sugar crash. I was wondering if Federer is having the same thing in the latter half of long matches (although this is physical). Should we tell him to shift to half chocolate milk and half plain :D ?
 
Interesting read.
I for one actually find a solving a tough/intense problem relaxing and energizing.

As an introvert, otoh, any kind of interaction (social or professional) with people can be extremely mentally and physically draining.
 
If thinking really hard makes you lose weight, can someone explain the Sureshs paradox?
Obviously he doesn't think much before poasting.

Have you even read his posts/threads ?

"my eco-friendly balls", "coach grabbed my balls". Seriously, do you think they require intense thinking ?

Or are you implying that he would have to put in intense intellectual effort to come out with those threads :D
 
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