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Pokémon Trainers don’t need comfortable shoes as long as they have one of the relaxing gadgets.

Pokémon GO isn’t just one of the most phenomenally successful mobile game of all time. It’s also one of history’s most motivating exercise programs, as it encourages fans to get out of the house and walk the real-world distances required to hatch the Pokémon Eggs in their in-game incubators.

Being the crafty gamers/dedicated couch potatoes we are, though, we’ve been on the lookout for ways to build our Pokémon roster without taxing our leg muscles. Since we don’t have a model train set, that particular walk-eliminating workaround isn’t an option for us, but digging through out closet we discovered another gadget that will do the trick: a handheld electric massager.

Specifically, we used manufacturer Daito’s Thrive Handy Massager. All you have to do is let the device massage your smartphone’s screen, as we do starting at the 0:14 mark in the video below.

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Before giving our phone a relaxing massage, we had two Pokémon eggs on our incubator. Both had a hatching threshold of five kilometers (3.1 miles), with one at 4.4 kilometers and the other at 3.9 kilometers of progress.

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As the massager did its thing, our on-screen Pokémon Trainer meandered his way around the game map, despite the fact that we hadn’t moved an inch in the real world. After 10 minutes, we once again checked our incubator, and found out that we were now 400 meters closer to hatching our eggs!

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And then, after five more minutes of massaging…

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…we were the proud owners of a newborn Poliwag!

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As proud as we are of ourselves for this gaming innovation, we should point out two things. First, this potentially game-breaking secret technique could have similar effects on your phone’s screen, as we have no idea what this sort of automated high-speed tapping does to the longevity of its touch sensors. Second, the average human walking speed is said to be roughly 4.8 kilometers an hour. That works out to 800 meters per ten minutes, meaning that, in terms of how much time you’re spending on the project, you could hatch your Pokémon eggs twice as quickly by actually walking, as opposed to using our trick.

Still, if you absolutely can’t be bothered to walk, you can indeed grab a massager and skip your Pokémon GO legwork. And if you get impatient and decide to just go out and do the walking yourself, you can always use the gadget on your tired leg muscles after you get back.

Images © RocketNews24
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Researchers are still trying to determine the effects of massaging your screen while following Casey on Twitter.