It is already a known fact that each time you spend working in the presence of nature and appreciating wildlife helps in enhancing mental strength as well as causing the body to relax.
Furthermore, spending time working in your garden, lawns, and also landscapes doesn’t just offer mental health benefits but it also helps to boost the physical activity an adult engages in so as to ensure they stay healthy and active. This is why you need to know how to exercise and stay healthy while gardening.
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How To Exercise And Stay Healthy While Gardening
The big question here is “Does Gardening Count As A Form Of Exercise”?
Statistics have already shown recently that every adult needs to at least engage in aerobic activities ranging from moderate to intense for a time frame of about one hundred and fifty to three hundred minutes every week (150 -300 minutes weekly).
Engaging in muscle-strengthening activities is also a great idea because it is another form of recommended resistant training that the body needs to stay healthy and active. Carrying compost bags or mulch, trimming, raking, planting, digging, weeding, mowing are gardening chores that counts as weekly activities.
The physical activity guideline also reveals that you can engage in any of these activities for about ten minutes duration throughout the entire week.
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How To Exercise In The Garden
The next question you would probably have racing through your mind right now is how you can make use of gardening tasks to improve your health and stay active. Below are some of the best and recommended ways which you can engage in to add some level of momentum when exercising in the garden;
- Make use of large muscles in your legs and not your bags when lifting heavy bags
- Stretches should be done before heading out to work in your garden so as to warm up and prevent the risk of getting injured
- Ensure that your lawn is kept tidy so raking should be done weekly and do not hold the rake the same way each time you make use of it but learn to alternate the way you hold the rake. The same method should be applied when sweeping
- Engage in intense leg workout exercises in your garden and this involves squatting when you bend down to pull out weeds
- If you want to water your plants, make sure you do not stand still but walk around the place, back and forth
- When it comes to aerating the soil, digging it up tends to have an impact on major muscle groups so ensure that you exaggerate the motion when digging up the soil so as to boost the benefits
- You no longer have to pay someone to mow your lawn for you but instead, it should be done yourself. You should also make use of the push mower instead of the riding mower and do not forget that mulching mowers would be very beneficial to your lawns
- Continue to exaggerate some garden motions, for example, try to stretch some more when reaching for a branch and also try to skip when you want to step across areas in your lawn
- Learn to stay hydrated and take breaks too. Ten minutes activity period also counts
Gardening Exercise Health Benefits
From the Havard Health Publications, a person who weighs about fifty-five pounds for a period of thirty minutes is likely to burn about 167 calories which are higher than burning 149 water calories.
You can also get rid of 205 calories each time you push a lawnmower and this is the same amount of calories that get expended when you go out dancing disco. 186 calories can be used up when digging up dirt in your garden and that is the same figure that gets expended when riding on a skateboard.
Working out in your garden for the recommended 150 minutes weekly has a lot of health benefits such as cutting down the risk of premature death, depression, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, stroke as well coronary heart disease. If you’re suffering from depression, it’ll be best to seek help from a counselor specialised in depression counselling such as the team from A Kind Place.
Apart from the health benefits, working out the ideal way in your garden would also result in having a lovely and well cared for garden or yard. We hope that at the end of this review, you have gotten familiar with how to exercise and stay healthy while gardening so good luck as you put them into practice.
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