In my history and philosophy of science course, I used to start by asking students whether cheerleading was a sport. This aroused lively discussion because they usually had surprisingly strong feelings for and against this issue. But my real goal was to introduce them to the idea of demarcation criteria, setting up necessary and sufficient conditions that would establish whether some thing X belonged definitely to class A or definitely did not belong to class A. An important and unresolved question in the philosophy of science is the effort to identify necessary and sufficient conditions that would determine whether some theory was scientific or not, and this early exercise on cheerleading was meant to be an introduction to that more abstract question later in the semester.
In the course of the discussion, students would begin to identify various criteria as being necessary for something to be classified to be a sport, and physical exertion was almost always raised as one requirement. Others would challenge this, saying that chess was a sport that did not require exertion. Whether chess could be considered a sport or not was debated but the assumption that it did not require physical stamina was taken as a given.
But it turns out that chess is extremely demanding physically.
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.
Nowadays top chess players realize this and the article points out that they train just like athletes in those sports that we think of as physically demanding. Look at the training regimen of Fabiano Caruana , the number two ranked player in the world who lost his title match with world chess champion Magnus Carlsen in November of last year.
At 7:30 the next morning, he pulls on gray Mizzou sweats and matching running shorts, rubs the sleep from his eyes and heads out for his hour long run with his training partner, Cristian Chirila. They jog up and down the hills around the farmland, whispering during water breaks about openings and effective chess permutations.
At 5-foot-6, Caruana has a lean frame, his legs angular and toned. He also has a packed schedule for the day: a 5-mile run, an hour of tennis, half an hour of basketball and at least an hour of swimming.
The brain uses up to 20% of the body’s total energy consumption.
It is well established that the brain uses more energy than any other human organ, accounting for up to 20 percent of the body’s total haul. Until now, most scientists believed that it used the bulk of that energy to fuel electrical impulses that neurons employ to communicate with one another. Turns out, though, that is only part of the story.
A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA indicates that two thirds of the brain’s energy budget is used to help neurons or nerve cells “fire” or send signals. The remaining third, however, is used for what study co-author Wei Chen, a radiologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, refers to as “housekeeping,” or cell-health maintenance.
…“Housekeeping power is important for keeping the brain tissue alive,” Chen says, “and for the many biological processes in the brain,” in addition to neuronal chats.
I know that after working hard on intellectual activities during the day with almost no physical exercise, I feel drained, and not just mentally. But the massive amount of energy used by chess players is not due to their brains working even more but that playing chess makes them more prone to behaviors during the tournament (such as not eating and sleeping properly, poor posture, minute motions, etc.) that cause them to burn calories at a higher rate than normal.
So while we can debate whether chess is a sport or not based on other criteria, there is no doubt that it is puts great physical demands on players, especially when played at the highest levels.
So why don’t chess players have cheerleaders?
What, if anything, is a { rabbit | dog | sandwich | species | race | gender | organism | god } ?
Very OT, but I wanted to thank Owlmirror at #2 to cause me to remember my favorite list. Perfect for a long, and probably not very productive, discussion about demarcation criteria. The list itself is:
From Borges, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins;
The list divides all animals into 14 categories:
1. Those that belong to the emperor
2. Embalmed ones
3. Those that are trained
4. Suckling pigs
5. Mermaids (or Sirens)
6. Fabulous ones
7. Stray dogs
8. Those that are included in this classification
9. Those that tremble as if they were mad
10. Innumerable ones
11. Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
12. Et cetera
13. Those that have just broken the flower vase
14. Those that, at a distance, resemble flies
I don’t know how you got the conclusion that their brains aren’t “working even more.” Not sure exactly what that’s supposed to mean, but I would say they are. (To be clear, this isn’t a claim about what constitutes a “sport,” which is a more complicated question, only that more “work” is being done in some sense.)
The same goes for performing music. It’s no big deal to perform for five or ten minutes, for a song or two let’s say, but you need lots of endurance to last for several hours, when doing a longer concert. Some instruments (and vocals) seem to me to be a little more demanding than others, but no matter what, it’s not easy. That is not what an “ordinary day” is like for me — I’ve had those too, and I wouldn’t compare what happens in them to running a marathon or doing manual labor all day. They might make it look easy, but it’s really not. Or at any rate, you won’t have a very good idea of what’s actually involved, only based on the experience of watching/listening (which describes most people, who are non-musicians, non-chess-players, non-cheerleaders, non-athletes, or what have you). So, appearances can be deceiving, and the issue is that some people may form a judgment about such things by using that sort of mistaken impression, not from direct experience doing the activity nor from the kind of empirical evidence you’d see in a study about human physiology or whatever.
Amateur/casual games are another story, but professional chess usually lasts for extended periods of time. As you know, individual “classical” games (with long time controls) frequently last six hours or more, although sometimes the game is decided more quickly. (When adjournments were still common, a game would be even longer and spread out over multiple days.) Some may then go back to their hotel rooms or wherever, to prepare for the next day, in addition to doing some kind of exercise regimen. In rapid/blitz tournaments, they’ll typically schedule multiple games each day, so it’s still a full day of work for the players, since each game is shorter (but also more fast-paced).
consciousness razor,
What I meant was that the massive burning of calories was not due only to more brain activity. It was due to physiological factors that were triggered by the stress of playing chess.
“An important and unresolved question in the philosophy of science is the effort to identify necessary and sufficient conditions that would determine whether some theory was scientific or not.”
A question that never will be answered, because there is no sharp line between science, quackery and pseudo-science.
“saying that chess was a sport that did not require exertion”
This argument is based on the false body-mind dichotomy.
Learn chess and play two difficult games of four hours each on one day (it happened to me once) and tell me why you feel so tired if it doesn’t require exertion.
“Nowadays top chess players realize this”
They’ve been realizing this en masse for more than 30 years. Possibly the first one was WCh Max Euwe, who prepared physically for his matches against Alekhine in 1935 and 1937, ao by boxing.
[Chess] “puts great physical demands on players”
Old news, really -- very old news.
Well, I still disagree that “stress” is the right term for filling out the rest of the picture. When I play the piano for example (or chess for another), then among other things, I have to move my hands around with various muscles. That obviously requires energy, and it’s one of the many things the activity requires, beyond whatever is (also) happening in my brain. Just a simple example, but that’s not what I’d call a “stress” response. Yet it is burning calories, more than what is required in other circumstances. If the idea here is to give a fairly accurate account of energy, then presumably all sorts of stuff may be included that isn’t what people would normally consider “stress,” no matter which bodily parts/systems are involved.
(Also, brains are body parts and part of our physiology, of course, so things are a bit murky when phrased that way, as if they weren’t “physiological.”)
However, you have improved things by adding the important word “only”: it isn’t only due to more brain activity. I definitely have no problem with that.
Professionalism has changed sports greatly. Chess grandmasters from before the 1980s could never compete with players today because of the training and resources available.
Prior to the 1980s, players in pro team sports (NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB) went to pre-season training camp to get in shape. Now they have to stay in shape year round if they want to keep their jobs. Physical fitness was once never a consideration in motorsports; many smoked and drank. Today, most race drivers do year round fitness training (yes, even nascar) and require a fitness level equal to competitive cyclists.
My definition of a sport doesn’t include physical exertion, though it should:
A sport is a competition decided by:
(a) measurement (weight, time, length or height)
(b) achieving specific goals (knockout, pin, or other victory)
(c) scoring within specific rules
It doesn’t go down too well with fans of events like gymnastics, figure skating, and dancing. But I have zero patience for “judged” events. Officials should facilitate a sport (e.g. a referee), not decide it.
Intransitive,
I am totally with you in the dislike of including ‘judged’ events in things like the Olympics. But I think they bring in a lot of viewers and so we are stuck with them.
Intransitive: “A sport is a competition […]”
Stop right there. You really that sure that, unless it’s competitive, it’s not sport?
So, if you play (say) a round of golf with friends, it’s a sport or not depending on whether you do it competitively? And, certainly, doing the very same round by yourself is not a sport.
(Or, you hold it’s the intent that’s the determinant, not the actual activity)
John Morales@10; if you play (say) a round of golf with friends, it’s a sport or not depending on whether you do it competitively?
It’s still a competition against yourself when you play it alone -- if you don’t care about the score then you’re exercising or playing, not competing.
That’s handled perfectly well by Intransitives definition, which disdain for judgement I share.
I once heard sport defined as any regulated competitive activity that ones ability to perform is improved by improving ones cardiovascular fitness.
fentex:
Even though it’s the very same activity.
So, using the same example, golf is sometimes not a sport, but sometimes it is.
(Am I indulging in sport right now? 😉 )
All games of golf are a competition, whether or not you are alone and regardless of whether you care about the score. ALL rounds of golf are a competition between the club-wielder and the designer of the course. Some people choose to share and compare their outcome with others who were playing around the same time, but that changes nothing.
sonofrojblake:
What is this variant of golf where scoring is not a thing?
[PS next, kayaking. Not a sport, unless competitive. Right?]
PS sonofrojblake, BTW, I do like how you intimate that whether or not a score matters to a participant, it’s competitive merely if the result of the activity is somehow measured comparatively, and therefore is perforce a sport.
Intransitive @8:
My instinct is to agree, but referees in sports like soccer make judgment calls all the time. What one referee calls a foul at one particular time might not be called a foul by another ref, or perhaps even by the same ref at a different time. Same goes for yellow cards (official caution) versus red cards (sending off). While this is not directly scoring the game, it can certainly affect, and even decide, the outcome. Blurry lines…
My husband and I play ping-pong without keeping score. In fact, if we can, we continue playing even if someone just did what otherwise might count as ‘scoring’ and would require a new serve. I guess that’s not a sport activity?