- Exercise during household chores.
- NEAT – Unintentional exercise.
- Tips for efficient workouts.
It can be challenging to incorporate exercise while completing household tasks. According to experts, by managing your home effectively, you can achieve both simultaneously.
This is known as NEAT, or non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which refers to unintentional exercise.
While a balanced diet and 10,000 daily steps are popular, all forms can support good health.
There are two methods to include housework in a fitness routine.
You can include gym exercises like lunges and squats or perform household tasks more deliberately and with greater physical effort.
Dr. Duston Morris, a professor of health promotion and health behavior at the Maryland University of Integrative Health, stresses consistency: “Aim for 20 to 30 minutes of daily house cleaning to increase physical activity and mobility.
Dr. Morris also recommends varying activities to enhance muscular balance: “Focus on dusting and laundry one day, bathrooms the next, and sweeping and vacuuming on other days.”
Experts advise starting with vacuuming, burning around 80 calories in 30 minutes for an average person weighing 175 pounds.
Stephanie Thomas, a certified personal trainer in Annapolis, suggests that dusting, especially in hard-to-reach areas, targets the shoulders and arms.
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For added challenge, Ms. Thomas recommends incorporating lunges or squats while moving around the room. Squatting burns about eight calories per minute, making a 10-minute session equal to 80 calories.
To engage your entire body, consider doing standing side leg lifts while dusting high shelves.
Dr. Morris also emphasizes switching arms room by room to avoid developing a dominant side.
Cleaning the bathroom, including toilet, floors, showers, bathtub, mirrors, and floors, can induce perspiration. Mopping bathroom tiles for half an hour results in significant caloric expenditure and involves hand, arm, and shoulder exercises.
Standing calf raises and squats can also be incorporated, with squat holds providing an extra challenge.
Surprisingly, kitchen chores are effective exercise. Washing dishes by hand burns about 150 calories in 30 minutes, while using a dishwasher can still burn approximately 105 calories in the same time by loading and unloading.
Like mopping and scrubbing, lifting heavy dishes engages upper-body strength. You can also attempt incline pushups using the countertop.
Laundry offers another opportunity for a workout. Perform pushups while folding clothes, using a bed or couch for an inclined position. Ms. Thomas recommends doing five pushups between every five folded garments.
Activities such as squatting while loading and unloading the washer and dryer, transporting loads throughout the house, and putting away clothes can burn up to 50 calories in half an hour.
Floor cleaning is a workout in itself. Vacuuming for 30 minutes burns 80 calories, engaging core muscles, arms, and shoulders. Varying hand positions while using a vacuum, mop, or broom targets different muscle groups.
Moving larger objects like sofas, mattresses, and coffee tables not only engages your biceps, triceps, chest, and back but also ensures no dust particles are overlooked.
