GARDENING not only beautifies your home, it’s good exercise too. Gardening is not only good for your soul, it helps you burn calories and strengthen your bones and muscles. Trying your hand at gardening may be a best-kept secret to getting and staying in shape. If you garden for pleasure, you may not be aware how beneficial this hobby is for your health. While you are preparing your garden plot to grow fresh vegetables or while you are busy turning the compost pile, you’re actually doing a decent amount of exercise as well! Studies have shown that gardening is an excellent form of physical exercise because it works most, if not all, of the body’s major muscle groups. While enjoying yourself in the garden, you are also working all the major muscle groups: legs, buttocks, arms, shoulders, neck, back and abdomen. Gardening tasks that use these muscles build strength and burn calories. It also increases flexibility and strengthens joints. When you are working in your garden you are constantly moving, bending over, picking up, stretching, twisting, squatting, lifting – in other words, exercising! A garden workout without being as stressful on your body as some other forms of physical exercise like weight lifting, aerobics, or running (jogging) working in your garden for 45 minutes can burn about the same number of calories as 30 minutes of more traditional exercise programmes like jogging or aerobics. And unlike other forms of exercise, gardening is engaging! You are actually accomplishing something wonderful. You are actually on your way to becoming healthy and fit. There is enjoyment in making things grow, prosper, and produce from a patch of dirt.
Losing weight by Gardening
Losing weight requires you burn more calories than you consume and so the amount of weight you’ll lose gardening depends on several factors like the specific garden activities you are performing and your size. A 180-pound person will use 202 calories during 30 minutes of digging, spading and tilling. Even 30 minutes of cutting grass on a riding mower burns 101 calories.
The National Institute for Health of America lists gardening for 30-45 minutes in its recommended activities for moderate levels of exercise to combat obesity, along with biking five miles in 30 minutes and walking two miles in the same time.
Iowa State University claims that women in general can burn around 300 calories with an hour of moderately strenuous gardening activities like cultivating or using a spade. Men typically burn around 400 calories per hour during same. Raking and carrying leaves is another good activity and burns a little less calories than using a cultivator or a spade. This provides exercise for your legs, back and arms as well. The reason is that the ground is providing resistance and thus your muscles work hard to move the earth. Using lawn mower is an excellent workout. However, not all mowers give you the same kind of exercise. The manual reel mowers are recommended to maximize the amount of calories you burn. If you use a reel mower, women can burn almost 400 calories an hour, while men almost 500. A power mower will reduce this to around 250 calories, for women and 350 for men. In addition to reel mowers, if you use other manual tools in the garden like a rake instead of a leaf blower, you’ll be better off.
Planting transplant including trees, shrubs etc work out to about 250 calories for women and 350 for men. This activity also provides your arms some exercise. If you plant trees you can expect to be digging holes, so that translates to a pretty decent upper body workout.
Weeding is a necessary chore in the garden. Some people hate to weed, but if you consider that you are exercising while you weed, you can think of it as replacing a trip to the gym. Weeding burns at least as many calories as mowing the lawn with a power mower.
Some of the best garden activities you can do to both work muscles and burn calories are to move compost, rake, dig holes for transplanting etc. You can burn over 100 calories when you turn the compost pile for 15 minutes.
It takes at least 30 minutes, three to five times a week, to really receive any health benefit from gardening. However, researchers are now saying that you can break that 30 minutes up into shorter active period throughout the day. As long as each activity lasts at least eight minutes and is at moderate intensity, when you total them up to 30 minutes per day, you will reap the same rewards as if you had been gardening for half an hour straight.
So you can do a little weeding in the cool of the morning and go back in out to the garden in the evening to prune and trim.
As with any exercise it is important to warm up and stretch before you begin gardening and afterwards. Vary your activities to avoid overusing specific muscles. To prevent back injuries, bend from the knees when you rake and hoe or when you lift heavy objects like bags of potting soil. You will want to protect yourself from excess sun exposure. Wear a hat. Drink adequate fluids to avoid being dehydrated, and retreat to some place cooler if you feel yourself getting overheated. As with any other form of exercise, check with your doctor first, if you are not used to strenuous exercise, and take things slowly in extreme heat. We do garden for the pleasure, after all. Getting in shape and losing weight are just the icing on the cake.
Therapy for the mind
Gardening is relaxing, energizing and rejuvenating. It is excellent for improving strength, endurance and flexibility. It soothes your mind and spirit. During your time in the garden, the demands and stresses of your everyday life seem to fade away. You can totally immerse yourself in your plant and your garden chores. Digging, raking, planting, harvesting, trimming, transplanting, mowing, and mulching are all therapeutic to the body and spirit. even weeding, to many gardeners, is an extremely rewarding garden task. One strongly feel the benefit of gardening extend beyond the physical weight loss. It also improves your intellectual, social and emotional health. Something that is not as widely publicised as it should be. It has masny rehabilitative properties that many people within society can attest to.
Aromatherapy? Who needs it when you are working and weeding in the midst of the soothing scents of grass and fragrant plants? I’d much rather be among plants out in the sunshine than a crowded room with music blaring doing aerobics. In the garden, there is breeze, things get dew on them, things flower, the sound, the smell, the rhythms of the natural environment and the repetitive, soothing nature of many gardening tasks are an excellent way to fight stress and fatigue, even symptoms of depression or low mood.
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