July 2009
Monthly Archive
Housework Makes You Healthy!
Tel 22 Jul 2009 | : healthy exercise
Welcome back to Health Image, where I’m going to take a subject that instills a sense of foreboding and distaste in most housewives and also those blokes that are lumbered with doing the housework. There’s good news to be had in the form that housework is actually good for your health, at least when you do it in a certain way.
Now, at first blush, that is going to sound a little crazy and you may be wondering if I haven’t actually flipped my lid! But when you think long and hard about it and reason it out, it makes perfect sense. You can actually lose weight doing the housework because it really is good for you, whether you believe it or not. In fact housework is just another form of exercise and you can choose to treat it as such, or you can carry on just doing it as a chore that must be done while you switch off and think of your next vacation…
The trick to this, and I know because I do the housework around here, is to treat it like a workout and use whatever you need to make it feel like exactly that. So first you’ll need some rousing music. You choose what works best for you but it has to be upbeat and lively, like you’d do some aerobic exercises to.
Then you take each job and get into it with gusto! Where I live, we don’t have carpets as its a hot country, so we have marble flooring which doesn’t need vacuuming. But it does need sweeping and mopping and these two make great exercises when you make each brush stroke count and move into it with determination and va-va-voom!
If you have stairs, then use them as leg muscle work outs by running up and down them as fast as you safely can. This gets your heat rate up, gets you sweating and breathing hard. Same goes for cleaning those windows and mirrors – it can be hard work, so make it into a tough workout that leaves you out of breath. All this pushing your body to work hard with every housework job you do forces your body to burn calories.
Ah, I see the light bulb glowing now!
Yes, the whole exercise is designed to burn calories and when you do your daily housework jobs that take maybe an hour or so, that’s a really useful workout and a good amount of calories burned, while you tone up muscles and feel fitter!
Now who said doing housework was a chore?
