Working Out in the House and Garden

In the final analysis, exercise is nothing more than making your body work, burning energy using your muscles in order to achieve certain objectives that you set yourself.

In times gone by, when physical labor was much more common and important, man did not really need to worry about what is essentially an artificial requirement as a way of burning off energy.

Nowadays, the general Western lifestyle involves very little work-based physical labor, hence the need to think of ways to exercise.

Running a house and home does require work and effort, however, and so, whether you realize it or not, you are exercising every time you attempt any kind of task around the house.

For example, many women would find using the vacuum cleaner and dusting the house to be a tedious and tiresome chore. Cleaning the windows, ironing and doing the washing up would probably not come high on the list of enjoyable pastimes either!

Yet all these activities represent exercise that you do not even know you are doing, as evidenced by the fact that 15 minutes of vacuuming and dusting will burn an extra 40 kilocalories for a 40 year old woman who weighs 78 kilos and is 165 centimeters tall.

That is not a massive amount, but it does indicate that work is being done, and therefore exercise of a sort is being taken, even without realizing it.

Mowing the lawn, digging in the garden and pulling up the weeds will have a similarly beneficial effect, with fifteen minutes of doing this kind of activity burning off over fifty calories for the same lady.

Given that ‘gardening’ is an activity that many people enjoy and spend many hours involved in, there is the potential here for a serious work-out. I would suspect that most people would never consider this to be exercise, so that makes it far easier to do.

Is the car dirty? If so, forget the idea of taking it to the car wash, as hand washing it yourself has many benefits. Not only will you save the money that you would otherwise have spent on the car wash and do your bit to help the environment, you also get to stretch - you have to reach over the car roof - bend and work your muscles. These are muscles that you generally don’t use if you work in a sedentary office environment.

In the case of washing the car, even going at a nice, gentle pace - it is not a race, after all - you will still be burning 150 kilocalories per hour.

Do you have kids, or does a family member who lives relatively nearby have a family? Do them a favor by walking the kids to the park for a gentle game of whatever takes your fancy - soccer, baseball, cricket, tennis - it really does not matter a great deal what sport it is.

The point is that it is good for all of you on both a physical and a spiritual level, it costs nothing and it will give you a great appetite into the bargain.