Yep, that’s right, all those boring chores around your home, or more specifically, those projects that seem to never end around the house, like painting a room, picking up the yard, landscaping, shampooing the rugs, or sanding floors or decks, are excellent for the heart and getting the heart rate up in ways that you don’t get from your everyday exercise on treadmills, ellipticals and the like.

For this reason, these types of dreaded home improvement projects tend to really rack up the calorie burning and the muscle building because they are different ways of movement that the body is not necessarily accustomed to. This creates muscle confusion, gets the heart rate up, and yes, sculpts lean muscle and burns more calories because you guessed it, your body’s not used to this type of activity so you haven’t built up a tolerance for it yet.

An unfortunate side effect of the extra calorie burning and muscle sculpting is the obvious though. The next day after strenuous yard work, painting or sanding a deck, you almost always experience muscle soreness. This is the time when I know to have my Aleve ready, because of all that naughty lactic acid that has invariably built up in my muscles from the unusual and often repetitive motion.

I just painted an accent wall the other day in my bathroom. I was just bored and decided to run out and buy paint and try it out just for the heck of it because I suddenly wanted a “change” and was bored with the way it looked. About 3 hours later and a lot of blue taping and preparation that required me carrying heavy ladders up the stairs, paint cans and other supplies, I was done.

Today I’m really feeling the exertion in my neck and back because I was leaning in ways that my body is not used to. I also really worked up a sweat being up close to the ceiling since heat rises, so I’m sure there was some bonus calorie burning happening too. So you see, you really can get a little health into your regimen of home improvement in the summer and the winter time!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Health and Fitness News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.