The Best Housework Workouts to Burn Calories
By: Ali Adcock
We all tend to get busy with life and let our health and fitness goals slip by the wayside sometimes. After all, keeping up with an exercise routine is hard work. But what if you could still burn calories at home without lifting any weights? You can by doing simple chores around the house. From sweeping, to raking leaves and scrubbing the bathtub, you can burn just as many calories as attending your weekly yoga class.
You probably don’t think about how your everyday housework burns calories, but that’s okay because we’re here to fill you in. You can burn a lot of calories from numerous indoor and outdoor household activities. We’ve compiled a list below of the best housework-outs for when you can’t make it to the gym.
Outdoor Activities
Raking leaves, building a porch swing or swing set, mowing the lawn and cleaning the gutters are just a few outdoor activities that will burn tons of calories. Since these activities are more labor intensive, you’ll likely burn about 1000 calories while doing weekend chores around the house. These activities can increase your strength and heartrate to burn calories. Think about how tiring raking a yard full of leaves can be, but it’s worth it when you realize how many calories you burned.
Indoor Activities
Sweeping, mopping, painting, and even repairing appliances are all great ways to get active and burn calories around the house. It’s likely you’ve spent an entire day or even weekend on cleaning and repairing things around the house. While it may not be very fun and kept you from making time to go to the gym, let’s think about all the calories you actually burned while tidying up. Simply painting one room in your home could burn close to 300 calories, which is basically equivalent to an hour of power yoga. There’s nothing more frustrating than a broken refrigerator, but when you think about all the stretching and bending you did just to get it fixed you’ve likely burned about 200 calories per hour you worked on it.
While housework isn’t the ideal way to get your workout in for the week, it is a good alternative when you can’t make it to the gym. Stay up to date on health and fitness tips by following us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. To learn more about our club management software and billing services text DATATRAK to 87365, for Canadian numbers text to 88988.