housework as exercise

Photo by Cathy1983km

I spent part of my Sunday cleaning every inch of my kitchen, from floors to cabinets. I was exhausted afterward. I could barely stand up from all the squatting and reaching, and my shoulders ached.

It never occurred to me that as I was making my home's worst disaster area spanking clean and orderly that I was also nudging closer to my bikini body goal.

Paying a visit to the Fit Moms: Exercise and Health Enthusiasts group, I read a post by mischevious who expanded on a web article explaining how housecleaning is great exercise:

"Personal trainer Lynn Bode says washing windows is a great upper body workout.

"I’ve also found that I can stretch my legs fabulously by wiping with strokes from up to down on glass doors and full length mirrors. I often stretch as high as possible to the top of the glass and then squat downward to clean the bottom in one fluid motion, so that I am doing a repeated squatting exercise while cleaning.

"Add window cleaning to your list of weekly or monthly household chores, and the effects of these efficient and superlative exercises will soon be obvious on more than just your windows."

I checked this Activity Calculator to find out how many calories I burning cleaning the kitchen yesterday, and came up with around 150-200. Not bad! The calculator lets you estimate calories burned for almost any everyday activity, including washing windows, chasing after a toddler, and dancing behind a vacuum cleaner.

Is housework and childcare your main form of exercise? Do you think that everyday activities give as good a workout and calorie burn as sports or going to the gym?