Gardening As Exercise

Minna Lessig Shares Her Workout

(CBS)  During the summer months many people do outside activities like washing their cars and working in their gardens. If done correctly, these activities can keep you fit and trim, too.

On "Monday's Workout," fitness expert Minna Lessig take us through a few gardening activities like planting, raking, mowing, and cutting to show the proper techniques.

Regular garden chores can burn anywhere from 120 to 200 calories per half hour, depending on the intensity of the activity. However, gardening chores are seasonal and can lead to injury if your body is not properly prepared for outdoor activities.

It is important to start stretching for several weeks prior to beginning outdoor spring chores. Regular stretching of legs, arms, back, and even hands and feet are essential to preventing aches and pains later. Crunches, leg and arm lifts, squats, and even push ups can help prepare those dormant muscles for spring and summer chores.

Dynamic Gardening

To maximize benefits from gardening, focus on the major muscle groups, advises Jeff Restuccio, author of "Fitness the Dynamic Gardening Way." Restuccio recommends simple techniques, such as bending your knees while raking, or placing a crate that requires you to step up and down as you move from one flower bed to the next. "If you have ever raked, hoed, or weeded a garden bed, you already know that gardening is a good workout," Restuccio says.

The Tennessee-based author and martial arts expert recommends exaggerating movements to achieve maximum range of motion and changing gardening stances to use different muscles. For example, when raking, put your left foot forward, and use your left hand on the lower handle. Then switch the right foot forward, and switch your hand positions as well.

Remember, sore muscles aren't proof that you've exercised. More often, stiffness and pain indicate inadequate or improper stretching and warm-up, or overuse of muscles. After gardening you should feel tired, not achy. Take time to stretch, and avoid marathon sessions turning compost, raking leaves, or shoveling snow. Above all, don't forget why you garden. Simply be aware of the duration and intensity of your gardening so that you accrue the maximum health benefits.

Maximizing The Health Benefits Of Gardening

• Use a push mower instead of a rider. This is a great way to get exercise once or twice a week. If your lawn is too big to cut without a rider, set aside a portion of your lawn for a push mower.
  
  
• Plan a daily gardening activity. Of course, people living in colder climates need to be creative. If you use a snow thrower, shovel a portion of your driveway. When buying seeds or other easily carried items at a garden center, park your car a mile away and walk.
  
  
• Vary your activities. Don't let one activity consume you, or you'll pay for it later. Break up strenuous gardening chores with more moderate and enjoyable activities. For example, break up a session of post-hole digging with some quiet weeding or transplanting.
  
  
• Count the minutes. Make sure the total daily time of garden activities adds up to 30 minutes. Each activity should last at least 8 minutes. If you've been inactive, build up to the 30-minute total gradually.
  
  
• Dig holes. Digging and shoveling are big calorie burners (250 to 350 calories per half-hour). Each depends on the muscles of the legs and stomach, arms and shoulders, and neck and back.
  
  
• Make a compost pile. If you've been thinking about starting a compost pile, now there's another good reason to do it. Turning compost burns 250 to 300 calories per half-hour.
  
  
• Listen to your muscles. Pay attention to the muscles that are working for you, as well as to your exertion levels. If you can increase your range of motion or safely add weight or resistance to a garden activity, give it a try. But whatever you do, don't use your back.

Calories Burned During Common Gardening Activities

The following chart gives the calories burned during 30 minutes of the activity for a 180-pound person. Generally, a person who weighs more will burn more calories than the amount shown here. Likewise, a person weighing less burns fewer calories. Typical calories burned in 30 minutes of:

Sleeping 36

Sitting quietly 40

Watering lawn or garden 61

Mowing lawn (riding) 101

Trimming shrubs (power) 142

Raking 162

Bagging leaves 162

Planting seedlings 162

Mowing (push with motor) 182

Planting trees 182

Snow thrower (walking) 182

Trimming shrubs (manual) 182

Weeding 182

Clearing land 202

Digging, spading, tilling 202

Laying sod 202

General gardening 202

Chopping wood 243

Gardening with heavy powertools 243

Mowing lawn (push mower) 243

Double digging 344

Gardening and your health:

For your comfort, safety, and the good of your back and knees, keep these tips in mind:

• If you spend time on your knees, use a cushion.
  
  
• Keep your back straight and don't sit on your heels. Stand up and stretch your legs every 10 minutes or so.
  
  
• Use a lightweight, long-handled shovel or spade, and don't overload it.
  
  
• Bend at the knee and step forward as you raise and dump each shovel full of soil.
  
  
• Bend at the knees and hips when picking up tools.

Gardening uses all the major muscle groups--the muscles that do most of the calorie burning--in the human body. Legs, buttocks, shoulders, stomach, arms, neck, and back all get a workout. It also increases flexibility and strengthens joints.

How much is enough? Researchers now say you can break up the exercise sessions into short bursts (at least 8 minutes) of moderate activity throughout the day. Although each short activity has minimal health benefits, as long as those exercise sessions total 30 minutes, you'll profit. For example, if you weed for 10 minutes in the morning, push a mower for 10 minutes in the afternoon, and chop wood for 10 minutes in the evening you get similar health benefit as you would doing 30 consecutive minutes of comparable activities. "These activities need to be of at least moderate intensity," says Dr. William Haskell, professor of medicine at the Stanford University Center for Research in Disease Prevention. "A person has to do more than putter around a flower bed." Haskell defines a moderate activity as the equivalent of a brisk walk (3-4 mph).

Although gardening is great for improving your overall health, Haskell advises combining moderate activity such as gardening with a program of regular aerobic exercise such as climbing stairs, cycling, jogging, or swimming. That's because aerobic exercise utilizes large muscle groups (usually the legs) over an extended period of time, and as its name implies, makes you breathe harder. Aerobic exercise offers additional health benefits - improved lung functioning and increased heart strength and efficiency - that you won't get from moderate exercise like gardening.