First published November 2026

VR Training for Athletes: What Happens Inside a VR Headset

VR training puts an athlete back inside a real recorded moment: a play, a run, a delivery. They repeat the decision at game speed without the physical toll of another session - the approach NFL quarterbacks took up in 2014-15. It has since reached skiers, footballers, cricketers and the Springboks; the research rates it a strong complement to real practice, not a replacement.

What does a quarterback see inside the headset?

A quarterback sees the defence he faced last week from the same spot behind the centre. The picture moves at the speed it did on the day. The 2015 system shot every position and every play, offence and defence, as video rather than animation. Playback ran in first person on a VR headset (Fortune, 10 August 2015).

Carson Palmer used it that November to rehearse what he would see. He worked a play "from every angle" and watched his own arm and elbow as he threw (Business Insider, 18 November 2015).

Repetition is the whole point. NFL and college quarterbacks used VR to run through and memorise hundreds of plays (CNET, 10 February 2018). Jayden Daniels carried his simulator work from LSU into his rookie season with the Washington Commanders in 2024 (The Athletic, 18 October 2024).

The capture side of that work has moved on from flat video. Volumetric video records a person in three dimensions so a viewer can walk around the moment instead of watching it from the camera's spot.

What does a skier rehearse?

A skier rehearses a course she has not yet skied, at the speed she will ski it. The US Ski Team was the first Olympic squad to train in VR. More than 20 members took part, among them Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin (CNET, 10 February 2018).

Laurenne Ross used it up to three times a week and ran hundreds of sessions. It kept her sharp on race details in a sport where on-snow practice time is limited (CNET, 10 February 2018).

Coach Brian Meek said the squad could rehearse "deviously designed Olympic courses at 80 miles per hour". They arrived "much more prepared" and less distracted by the surroundings (CNET, 10 February 2018).

What does the coach control?

The coach sees the same picture as the athlete, can speak into the headset mid-rep and can send the moment back to the start. Fortune described that setup in 2015: coaches watched what the player saw, talked him through the rep and rewound it.

Newer systems hand more of the decision to the athlete. England's cricket pathway trialled batting headsets in 2017. Virtual bowlers "shape up in 3D exactly as they do in matches". Motion sensors measured how and when a batsman chose to play (The Guardian, 13 December 2017).

South African studio Many Worlds built Flyhalf Vision. It is a Meta Quest 3 simulator that drops a flyhalf into a virtual stadium against a rushing defensive line. The player chooses a kick, pass, dummy or tackle at game speed. The developer reports a first live trial on 25 February 2026 at Harlequins Rugby Club with 30 players, using grip-based motion controls and slow-motion decision points (Many Worlds).

Who else trains this way?

Football clubs, cricketers, rugby teams and Formula 1 teams all train this way now. The common thread is a skill where the picture decides the outcome and real reps are limited.

The Premier League signed a four-year partnership with VR developer Rezzil on 28 March 2024 and took an equity stake. The software recreates match scenarios from league data. Manchester City and Wolves were already partners (Premier League, 28 March 2024; SportsPro, 28 March 2024).

The German Football Association agreed a VR training deal with Beyond Sports in February 2018. The deal covered on-field decision-making, positioning and time-pressured tasks (SportsBusiness Journal, 15 February 2018).

Formula 1 teams including Mercedes and Red Bull feed race telemetry into custom systems. Drivers learn a circuit before they drive it (Motorsport Week, 25 December 2024).

The Springboks brought VR into their training environment in June 2026. Rassie Erasmus and Luan Giliomee were filmed testing a VR headset in the team hotel in Johannesburg before the Barbarians match (Rugby365, 16 June 2026).

Where did VR athlete training begin?

The first version came out of a Stanford kicker's master's thesis. Derek Belch tested the system with the Stanford football team through the 2014 season and turned it into STRIVR Labs in January 2015 (Stanford Graduate School of Business).

Four NFL teams used it in the 2015 season: the San Francisco 49ers, Arizona Cardinals, Minnesota Vikings and Dallas Cowboys. Dallas signed a two-year deal and built a soundproof VR room (Fortune, 10 August 2015). The Cardinals had started in 2014.

Palmer became the public face of it that year. "I don't buy in to all the new technology ... But I am all in on this" (Business Insider, 18 November 2015).

Does the research say VR training works?

Yes, as an addition to real practice. The strongest single test found adaptive VR beat real batting practice on five of eight measures. A 2026 review of 18 studies called VR a complementary adjunct to conventional training rather than a superior replacement.

Gray (2017) took 80 US high-school seniors and randomised them into four groups: adaptive VR batting, extra VR batting, extra real batting or a control. Each did two 45-minute sessions a week for six weeks. The adaptive group improved on all eight measures and beat real practice on five. Eight of its players reached higher-level competition, against one to three in the other groups (Frontiers in Psychology, 13 December 2017).

A 2019 systematic review found five studies with 189 participants that measured real-world transfer, four of them showing improvement. All of the trained skills were closed skills - rehearsed sequences rather than open play (Frontiers in Psychology, 20 September 2019). Club football and Test rugby have since taken VR into open play.

The 2026 meta-analysis pooled 18 studies with 678 participants. It found moderate effects for stability and mobility (SMD 0.68) and object control (0.72), rising to 1.15 for complex sport-specific skills (Scientific Reports, 26 March 2026).

The question changes shape when the goal is a shared day rather than a skill and the evidence review behind a VR team day takes over from the training literature.

Where practice time is capped, or an opponent look cannot be recreated on the field, the headset supplies repetitions the schedule would not otherwise allow. Every programme above runs it alongside real practice rather than in place of it. The real session still does the physical work. The headset gives the athlete more looks at the decision before it arrives.

The version we run is a sports day rather than a training programme. The VR Sports lineup puts three arenas and the race rig in front of guests who came to play. The lap times still get compared.

Sources

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