When most of us think of gardening, we think of a nice, leisuredly stroll around our gardening areas, assessing what looks like it needs some TLC, watering our plants, and maybe pulling a few weeds, but whenever I “garden”, it’s always a couple of hours since I have several decorative beds to tend to, and I’m planning on also starting a small vegetable garden, so it’s actually quite straining to garden for me.

If you have a larger yard and you also have several flower beds or even a vegetable garden, then you probably know what I’m talking about. Today was one of the nicest days we’ve had so far in April, so I ended up being outside for about two and a half hours, cleaning up the yard and the garden beds, and it really was some hard, physical labor that also involved some fairly strenuous pushing and pulling. I had to transplant a few things, which involved hoing the soil and then raking it and tilling a large bed, which is very good muscle work for the arms, and also a little bit of cardio in there too.

I also had to clean the front porch off, which is a wrap around porch, and involves moving furniture, wiping off several items and also carrying large cushions fairly far out of their winter storage place. Since it was sunny and over seventy degrees, this also included a great deal of my body having to cool itself off, which involves the burning of calories as well as cardio output.

It’s kind of like when I get out of our infrared sauna, my heart is working and it feels like I just worked out because I’m slightly out of breath. It feels good! With the gardening today, I started to sweat and had to drink quite a bit of water to stay hydrated. Tilling soil is definitely one of the most taxing of all gardening duties, and weeding can also be somewhat hard, especially with that large, hardy weeds that require a lot of pulling. There’s a lot of bending and many times forceful digging just to get the weeds, root and all, out of the ground.

So, you see, it’s good to garden! Especially if you’re one of those people who cant’ stand gardening, getting a little cardio in and getting the good, fresh air that you get by gardening could be very therapeutic as well as cardio conditioning, which can help with burning calories and also muscle toning since there is some lifting and force going on which requires you to use your leg and arm muscles, which are great for initiating accelerated calorie burning.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Workout Regimens. 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.