Supernatural, a new virtual reality fitness app you can play in your home, makes me sweat so hard I have to guzzle five glasses of water for every 15-minute workout. The first time I tried it, I was so sore the next morning I had trouble walking downstairs. I sometimes get so immersed bopping and throwing my arms around like an exercise ninja assassin I forget to breathe. 

And I keep coming back for more, especially now that I’m trapped at home. 

Supernatural is a $19-a-month VR app for Oculus Quest with a 30-day free trial. This isn’t the kind of VR game where players can sit down and swivel around in a chair to play. It sets high-intensity, choreographed, game-like workouts to popular music, overlapped with encouragement and guidance from expert fitness trainers. It’s also like hopping around a breathtaking BBC nature documentary. Workouts are set in 360-degree captures of some of the most beautiful places on Earth. 

Supernatural’s creators said they wanted to replicate the fun exhaustion of activities like surfing or rock climbing. The app doesn’t mimic those movements, though — instead, it’s aiming to reproduce that feeling of physical activity that doesn’t bore you, because the best workout is one you actually do. 

“When you’re surfing or snowboarding, you’re never squatting in a wave like, ‘Oh man, I wish this squat was over,'” Aaron Koblin, co-founder of VR startup Within, the maker of Supernatural, said in an interview. Within started developing Supernatural as the fitness program that suited the teams’ own needs, after he and other members began to slip into “startup bod,” he said. They wanted to recreate the fun exertion of outdoor activities but remove the hangups that keep you from exercising all the time. 

“Dancing is primal, moving your body is fun, and — key for an antisocial person like me — it’s doing it at home in the dark with nobody watching,” he said. “That’s what allows me to be liberated.”

Anyone who’s ever played Beat Saber — VR’s first hit in the ballpark of a killer app — will feel familiar with the mechanics of Supernatural. Controllers in hand, you swing your arms to strike through flying targets in rhythm with music, and you move your body so you don’t collide with obstacles. 

But unlike Beat Saber, Supernatural isn’t challenging you with increasingly difficult dexterity or progressively complex controller patterns. Supernatural challenges you to swing wider and harder, or to lunge back and forth before popping back up again. 

For Supernatural, you pay a $19-a-month subscription after a 30-day free trial, and you need an Oculus Quest, the virtual-reality headset starting at $399 that won a CNET innovation award last year. It’s a little like Peloton’s equipment-plus-subscription idea for in-home fitness. The difference being it doesn’t require a $2,245 stationary bike or charge you $40 a month for classes. (Peloton also offers a $13-a-month digital subscription for equipment-free guided digital workouts.) 

And Supernatural is the first attempt to move this kind of subscription-based, full-body workout service into virtual reality. 

VR was one of technology’s buzziest trends a few years ago, attracting giant investments by heavyweights like Google and Facebook, which bought Oculus for about $3 billion in 2014. But hype has fizzled, as widespread adoption of VR has been elusive. Consumers en masse have been ambivalent about these headsets you strap to your face. 

At least, people seemed disinterested in VR before the coronavirus pandemic trapped us in our homes. Good luck trying to buy an Oculus Quest online right now. A 64-gigabyte model Quest is supposed to cost $399, but Oculus’ store is sold out. Even where you can find it online from third-party sellers on Amazon or Walmart, it’s priced at $560 or more. 

Supernatural feels a little like taking some sort of ninja shadowboxing dance class. You pick a workout, which can range from about 12 minutes to half an hour. You’re greeted by the fitness trainer, called a coach in the game, who gives you a brief mental preparation for what to focus on in that program. Then that coach’s voice sticks with you as you move through a selection of popular songs. The coaches give you pep talks, guidance about how to make it through tricky passages and reminders to breathe (which were very important for me). 

Within is developing Supernatural to have both a diversity of musical genres and a variety of personalities in the coaches. The idea is that no matter what your own personality or style is, you can find a trainer or workout playlist that gets you immersed and amped up. 

Workouts include songs like Good as Hell by Lizzo, New Rules by Dua Lipa and Can’t Hold Us by Macklemore. Supernatural has deals to use music from Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, two of the so-called Big Three record labels. 

It has two main game-play movements. The first is striking through targets that fly toward you with long bats you hold in your hands. The targets are black or white, and you strike them with the matching black or white bat. The second is squatting or lunging to keep your body framed by glowing triangles that fly toward you too. 

For Beat Saber fans, it’s a little like playing the game on 360-mode at a difficulty level between about hard and expert, except it challenges you not so much on coordination but rather stamina and strength. And instead of being in a shadowy dark vacuum full of weird neon, you’re standing on top of Machu Picchu’s ruins, the Andes towering against a perfect blue sky. Or floating above the glowing lava of Ethiopia’s Erta Ale volcano. Knee-deep in turquoise water of the Galapagos. Places that are rarified luxuries to see, even before all of us were trapped behind our front doors.

You get scores at the end of each workout for your accuracy of hitting targets and making it through triangles and for your strength of movement. Supernatural has a social tracking element to it, too. You can follow friends’ progress and compare it with your own on a weekly leaderboard. The VR app also has a companion phone app, which makes it easy to check your stats, see how friends are doing and connect a smartwatch to the program to track your heart rate while you’re working out. 

Now playing: Watch this: We took Oculus Quest on vacation

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I’ve been using Supernatural longer than any other member of the press, and I kill at accuracy. But dammit if I can’t get my strength score consistently above 85%. When I really want to hit through the targets with fury, I pretend these black-or-white orbs are actually floating coronavirus cells. I slice through them with F-bomb-dropping vengeance. It usually helps my strength score only a little, but it definitely makes me feel better…

Supernatural is designed so that every workout is choreographed to that song, for that particular type of workout, at a level of difficulty that adjusts to you. You exercise your arms, back and chest by striking with your arms, you exercise your core by twisting your torso with side-to-side strikes, and you work out your lower body with lunges and squats. Some workouts focus more on twisting, others on fast striking. 

The program also uses your data to calibrate difficulty for you. It’s supposed to be challenging enough to be engaging but not so hard that you lose focus on form and motion.

This isn’t a strength-training workout. There’s no replacement for a diverse fitness regime that mixes cardio activity with weights, resistance, stretching and other kinds of training. But Within’s goal was to help people clear the most essential bar for long-term health: the American Heart Association’s recommendation to have moderate to intense physical activity about 30 minutes per day, five times a week. 

“It’s a little bit less about a brand new type of workout to give you the best abs on the planet,” Koblin said. “It’s more about, how can we get people to get off the couch, get their heart rates up for the American Heart Association-recommended duration, and make a form of cardio that doesn’t suck?”

And I work out hard with Supernatural. My resting heart rate is usually around 65 beats a minute. My last Supernatural workout yesterday spiked it up to 174. The company is providing customers with free, sweat-proof silicon liners for their headsets, so they don’t become funky sweat sponges.

I’m sure I look ridiculous doing it. Or maybe not. In my mind I feel like Jet Li crossed with a Beyonce backup dancer. But after using Supernatural for almost a month I feel good about how I look in the mirror (once I shower off the gallons of sweat).

Supernatural will be available to download from the Oculus store Thursday at 10 a.m. PT.