From Virtual Opponents to Real Effort: Wearable Bands Make Mixed-Reality Boxing Tougher

Mixed-reality boxing already asks players to punch, defend, rotate and react quickly; now researchers wanted to know whether wearable elastic bands could raise its physical demands without damaging the experience that makes immersive exercise appealing. The study, titled 'The portable WearBands resistance system increases exercise intensity during mixed-reality boxing without reducing enjoyment or flow,' was published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living.

Researchers Jacek Polechoński, Aleksandra Daniel, Małgorzata D Polechoński, Aleksandra Daniel, Małgorzata Dębska-Janus, Anna Witkowska and Jarosław Cholewa found that body-worn resistance produced clear increases in heart rate and perceived effort, with enjoyment, concentration and engagement remaining stable.

Why Researchers Added Resistance to Boxing Match

Virtual and mixed-reality exercise has moved beyond passive gaming, giving people opportunities to practise sports, improve fitness and take part in physically active entertainment inside small spaces. Exercise intensity varies widely because some applications depend mainly on hand movements, while others require users to rotate their trunks, change position, dodge attacks or move their entire bodies. Boxing is among the more active choices because a player must repeatedly throw punches, maintain a fighting stance, defend against attacks and respond to an opponent rather than simply follow visual targets.

The researchers selected mixed reality instead of a fully virtual setting so participants could see the real laboratory through the headset's passthrough cameras while a digital boxer appeared in front of them. Seeing the floor, surrounding space, their own limbs, and the resistance equipment could support spatial awareness during fast movements, though camera-based views can still involve latency or visual distortion and cannot remove every collision risk.

Elastic tubes offered a practical way to add physical load without attaching equipment to a wall or filling the room with large exercise machines. The WearBands system used in the experiment included a hip belt, gloves and two short tubes connecting the belt to the hands. Each tube stretched as a punch travelled away from the body, creating greater resistance during extension and decreasing tension as the hand returned. Since the equipment moved with the user, participants could rotate, evade attacks and change direction more freely than they could with bands fixed to an external anchor.

Three Ten-Minute Bouts Revealed a Clear Rise in Exercise Intensity

The experiment included 36 students from the Jerzy Kukuczka Academy of Physical Education in Katowice, Poland, consisting of 20 women and 16 men with an average age of about 22. All had occasional experience with immersive digital entertainment; none had used the applications selected for the experiment, and no participant reported amateur or professional boxing experience. People with conditions such as motion sickness, epilepsy, flickering-light sensitivity or balance disorders were excluded for safety.

Each participant completed three continuous 10-minute bouts using Golden Gloves VR on a Meta Quest 3 headset. They fought the application's least demanding artificial intelligence-controlled opponent under three conditions: no resistance, lower resistance from orange elastic tubes and higher resistance from blue tubes. Trial order was counterbalanced to limit learning and fatigue effects, while a 15-minute recovery period separated each bout. The game's opponent reacted dynamically to participant behaviour, creating an interactive fight involving punches, defensive actions, trunk movements and changes in body position.

Heart rate was continuously recorded using a Polar monitor and chest transmitter, with exercise intensity expressed as a percentage of each participant's estimated maximum heart rate. Researchers measured perceived effort with the Borg 6-20 scale, enjoyment with the short Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale and flow with the short Flow State Scale, which captures feelings such as concentration, control, involvement and absorption in an activity.

Heart Rate and Perceived Effort Increased at Every Resistance Level

Mixed-reality boxing produced tough exercise even before elastic resistance was introduced. Average heart rate reached 156.61 beats per minute without resistance, increased to 164.97 with the lower setting and climbed to 169.75 with higher resistance. The corresponding percentages of estimated maximum heart rate rose from 81.34% to 85.68% and 88.17%. Differences between every condition were statistically remarkable, with large effect sizes showing that the pattern reflected a meaningful physical response rather than a small numerical change.

Participants' perceptions matched the heart-rate findings: Average Borg scores moved from 10.86 without resistance to 13.50 under lower resistance and 15.83 under higher resistance. The digital setting did not hide how much harder their bodies were working, yet greater effort did not automatically create a worse experience. Players could recognise that a bout had become more strenuous while continuing to find it satisfying and absorbing.

The recorded heart rates were comparable with the lower range reported during real-world boxing activities such as pad work or heavy-bag training, though they remained below the levels often reached in sparring or competition. The use of the easiest digital opponent, the absence of physical contact and the lack of psychological pressure from facing a live boxer may explain part of that difference. Golden Gloves VR still created a dense movement pattern because participants had to react to an opponent instead of striking predictable targets, leaving fewer passive moments during the session.

Enjoyment Stayed Strong, Though Important Questions Remain

Enjoyment scores changed very little, moving from 5.67 without resistance to 5.72 with lower resistance and 5.77 with higher resistance. Flow scores were similarly stable at 4.22, 4.17 and 4.22. Neither measure showed a statistically significant difference, suggesting that additional load changed the physical cost of boxing without disrupting its central goal, feedback, competitive interaction or sense of involvement. The body-mounted design may have contributed because it allowed the tubes to follow the player's movement, though the study did not directly compare wearable bands with externally anchored resistance.

These findings come from one short session involving healthy, young and physically active students, which means the results cannot be extended confidently to older adults, less active users, trained boxers or people living with health conditions. The experiment did not measure oxygen consumption, energy expenditure, muscle activity or punching biomechanics, while actual tube resistance may have varied according to each participant's height, reach and technique. Researchers also tested only one application, one opponent level and one resistance system.

Wearable elastic resistance could give coaches and researchers a simple way to adjust the physical demands of mixed-reality exercise without changing opponent speed or game difficulty. Higher resistance brought some participants close to very intense exercise, making individual adjustment and gradual progression essential. Longer studies involving diverse populations are needed to examine safety, repeated-use adherence, metabolic demand, movement technique and whether these short-term increases eventually produce meaningful fitness benefits.