Burn calories: Gardening burns around 300 calories per hour, making it an excellent moderate-intensity exercise. If you want to be healthier and lose a few inches around your waist, gardening and other types of gardening can help you lose weight. At this point, it is well understood that spending time in nature directly increases physical and mental well-being. Gardening, therefore, is a super healthy habit.
But how healthy is it? Is spending an hour in your tulip bed equivalent to spending it in the gym? Here's the latest research on how you can make sure your next gardening session serves as an exercise for your body and mind. Beyond its caloric benefits, gardening can also help improve dexterity and strength, muscle mass, aerobic endurance and functional movement. Digging in the dirt can even help improve bone density, as a study by the University of Arkansas revealed. Of the 3,310 women aged 50 and older, those who worked in the garden or worked in the garden at least once a week had higher bone density measurements than those who were sedentary or jogging, walking, swimming, or doing aerobics.
Melina Jampolis, MD. In the end, gardening seemed to have a significantly positive effect on lowering BMI. “I think the mental health and stress-related benefits of gardening, along with the fact that it keeps you out of the kitchen or TV room, where you often eat out of boredom, can also help you lose weight,” Jampolis adds. Another study, conducted by the University of Utah, found that people who participated in community gardening not only had a substantially lower body mass index, but also had a lower chance of being overweight or obese than non-gardeners.
Community planters weighed an average of 11 pounds less than non-planters, and men weighed 16 pounds less. This is an important technique borrowed from martial arts as well as weight training. Essentially, you'll want to increase your range of motion as wide as possible when raking or clearing by hand by increasing the sweep or arc from your starting position to your final position. At first, this will require some continuous effort and practice, but it will increase stretching, caloric expenditure and muscles used, Restuccio notes.
Always strive to engage larger muscles (think quadriceps, glutes, and torso) when working in the garden. Transferring the effort from the small muscles of the arms and lower back to the large muscles of the legs and buttocks will help you burn more calories and feel less sore the next day. While gardening, pull one arm inward while the other moves outward, as you would if you were curling dumbbells. This technique can help balance the muscles used, increase power and raise the heart rate to the aerobic training zone.
While raking and digging a hole is not the same as doing a leg press, the concepts are quite similar. Restuccio suggests grouping the raking and cultivating movements first in repetitions and then in series. For example, raking 10 to 15 sweeps vigorously can be a set. Rest or keep doing something else for a minute, then keep raking.
This type of thinking is most effective for difficult activities, such as picking up bags of dirt, digging, raking, or turning over a compost pile. Beyond physical benefits, there are also a number of mental benefits associated with gardening and working with plants. For starters, since gardening generally requires some time in the sun, Altman reminds us that it can increase vitamin D intake. Vitamin D not only serves as a mood stimulant, but it is also an important nutrient for every organ system, including bones, brain, heart, kidneys, and immune system.
Community gardens, in particular, can help reduce feelings of isolation and increase self-esteem by allowing people to meet socially and be part of a project. If you are interested in knowing where your nearest community garden is, check out the locator tool on the American Community Gardening Association website. George Papanicolaou, D, O. He notes that researchers found that daily gardening represents the greatest reduction in dementia risk, reducing incidence by 36%.
Papanicolaou adds that young minds can also reap enormous benefits. School gardens are popping up everywhere, and there's a good reason studies have found that gardening resulted in improved learning and a significant increase in achievement test scores, he says. The next time you feel lethargic, overwhelmed, or just need a quick dose of sweat, try to get a little dirt under your nails and see what happens. Our FREE Physician-Approved Gut Health Guide.
According to experts, a few hours of gardening can do wonders for your health and well-being, as well as burn calories quickly. She hosts the DVD series “How to Grow Anything” by The Great Courses and Melinda's nationally distributed radio program Garden Moment TV &. When you work in the garden, you're not just standing in one place repeating the same activity over and over again. However, not everyone has the same metabolism, so don't rely solely on garden exercise to lose weight.
Taking care of a garden allows your creative side to shine, leaving you with a sense of accomplishment and pride. The act of gardening, whether on a small or larger scale, requires a multi-step thought process. In fact, there are many garden tasks that can burn fat, and if you're able to burn more calories than you consume, weight loss should come with ease. Jeffrey Restuccio, author of two books on how to transform gardening into a comprehensive fitness program, points out that there are things to keep in mind when it comes to approaching gardening as a physical activity.
Horticultural therapists have found that, for elderly patients in particular, gardening can stimulate all the senses, providing interesting images, sounds, textures, flavors and aromas, and stimulating memories and connection with the past. And the best part is that all the work you do in your garden will produce healthy and delicious fruits and vegetables to support your diet and nutrition goals. Your brain even has the opportunity to exercise while planning garden designs and absorbing information from resource materials. Feel free to do bodyweight workouts at home or full body HIIT workouts if you want to get fit (opens in a new tab) sooner, but gardening can also burn a surprisingly large amount of calories by mowing lawns and raking garden waste, as it turns out that.
Exercise in the garden provides all major muscle groups with a good workout, including legs, arms, buttocks, stomach, neck and back. Shoveling holes for new plantations or burying posts for a fence can be a lot of hard work, but at least you have the pleasure of having a nicer garden and knowing that you've done good gardening training that day. . .
