Are Esports Professionals Real Athletes?
Photo Credit: Microsoft Copilot
This is one of the questions that come up the most when the comparison between traditional sports and esports sparks a discussion. Mainly a quest to probe this aspect because of the physical activity (rigorousness, contact, hours of training, etc) involved. The amount of training however makes a strong case for esports professionals being considered as real athletes. According to a research by Professor Ingo Frobose, who has been studying esports athletes decades ago, he realized that the number of movements made on a keyboard and a mouse amounted to 400 per minute; movement that goes to show the asymmetricality of an individual who coordinates the use of both hands and various parts of the brain.
These strain levels could not be matched by even tennis, a sport that requires a very high level of hand-eye coordination. Cortisol levels were also tested to measure the stress levels in esports players, and the amounts recorded compared it to the level of a race-car driver. These among other tests were conducted by scientists at the German Sports University in Cologne.
