Riding rides might not seem like exercise, but it can actually provide some health benefits. Roller coasters, in particular, can give you a bit of a workout by engaging your core muscles as you twist and turn through the track.
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Roller coasters are good for stress relief, fighting phobias, and clearing your sinuses.
The truth is that most visits to the amusement park are full of thrills, fun and are statistically quite safe. However, some amusement park rides, and especially roller coasters, are a significant cause of neck and spine injuries. While these injuries don't make the nightly news, they can slow you down.
By riding various rides at an amusement park, one can experience further calorie burn due to increased heart and respiration rates that come with the 'excitement response' from thrill rides. This means spending four hours at an amusement park could melt away at least 800 calories.
As people age, they may feel the bumps and drops of a roller coaster more strongly or take longer to recover from dizziness after having been spun at high speeds. They may just not enjoy the thrill as much as they did as a kid.
Unfortunately, visitors who ride roller coasters can walk away from these rides dizzy, nauseous, and possibly even severely injured. Some riders experience headaches and brain injuries from banging their head backwards or side to side on over the shoulder restraints.
According to clinical psychologist Judy Kurianski, high tempo rides expose us to “good fear.” Our brains perceive the drops and heart-stopping twists to be “safe” and “predictable,” so riding these thrill rides becomes therapeutic, especially as we scream out our anxieties.
Or go for the back seat because it offers more air time: your butt will hang in the air off your seat for much longer on those hills and drops. And those sitting in the last car in the line always experience the fastest ride and who doesn't want fast on a roller coaster?
Riders may experience weightlessness at the tops of hills (negative g-forces) and feel heavy at the bottoms of hills (positive g-forces). This feeling is caused by the change in direction of the roller coaster. At the top of a roller coaster, the car goes from moving upward to flat to moving downward.
According to the medical team at Florida Hospital, the motions that your body goes through while on the topsy-turvy journey on the roller coaster is also experienced internally. This means that with every slide and turn, your brain, intestines, and other internal organs are also moving according to the motion.
Fear of roller coasters, also known as veloxrotaphobia, is the extreme fear of roller coasters. It can also be informally referred to as coasterphobia. Such a fear is thought to originate from one or more of three factors: childhood trauma, fear of heights, and parental fears that “rub off” on their children.
“As far as an age limit, though, if you are physically healthy and up for the thrill, there is likely no greater risk for someone who is 60 than there is for someone who is 20.” The largest concern for those who indulge in roller coasters is the after effects.
This high G-force can push heads down and have blood rush from your brain down to your feet, which in turn lowers the oxygen level in your brain, which may lead to gray outs, loss of peripheral vision (known as tunnel vision), or temporary blindness.
“As we get older, the vestibular system gets less efficient, meaning it doesn't respond as easily to motion of the head or to movement around us. Normally the inner ear responds to movement automatically, so we aren't aware that it is working until the movement is too much for our vestibular system to handle.
While you are on a roller coaster you will be flexing against the g-forces from the turns, and your heart rate will probably be increased, so you will burn more calories than if you were just sitting around, but I would guess that it would be a negligible amount, not enough to notice significant weight loss.