Housework Makes You Healthy!
Posted by Tel on 22 Jul 2009 at 10:24 am | Tagged as: 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?
I always wondered what anyone would see in housework other than it being a real pain in the butt! I guess you could view it as a means to burning off some excess calories, which is no bad thing. And I guess there’s plenty of folks that spend too much time indoors and don’t get any other form of exercise, so it would be good for them to treat housework in that way.
But I’d rather be out of the house doing some running, cycling, swimming or just about any other activity instead of housework…!
Michelle
Well, you’re right about that really, but it just shows that even detestable chores can be turned into positive health benefits with a little imagination and gumption!