Is housework considered exercise?

tatilove1988

Asking for a friend

cmriverside

LOL, I didn't count it as exercise unless it was a big-twice-a-year thing where all the furniture gets moved and vacuum-steam cleaned or I cleaned out the entire garage.

You can use it as exercise though - why not? I live in a really tiny place so I wouldn't be getting many calories, but you might have a lot more to do when you clean. I think there's a house-cleaning or "chores" entry in the Exercise database.

Rockmama1111

I do this tidying thing where I zoom around and put stuff away a couple of times a day. In the morning I make my bed and start laundry and clean the litter box and take out the trash, etc. before bed, I load the dishwasher, fold laundry, wipe counters… whatever needs to be done. I do it kind of fast on purpose. It registers as a few extra Fitbit steps!

NC_Gardener

Yes

Yes, if it's new or special!

Otherwise, it's part of how you choose your activity level. So if you're on your feet for an hour, it could change from sedentary, for example, depending on how much else you move in a day.

Or if someone is completely sedentary except for cleaning, I'd probably be tempted to choose sedentary and log the cleaning. Not really to eat back, but just for tracking purposes in case things change later.

tomcustombuilder

No

No but it’s part of your NEAT which burns more calories than exercising.

AnnPT77

Your MFP activity level - even if set on not very active/sedentary - assumes some daily life activity, maybe around 3000-5000-ish steps or equivalent in other movement. If you got your calorie goal from MFP per its directions, counting your very routine regular housework as exercise could be double-counting, and lead to slower than expected weight loss.

I only log major, major unusual house or yard work as exercise, like if I spend all day cleaning out the garage, digging a new garden bed, shoveling several inches of snow off the whole driveway, or moving all the furniture to deep clean under everything (as if the latter's going to happen!). Dishes, broom over the floor, wipe down counters, make dinner, weed a patch of the garden . . . nope. That's just routine, part of my typical activity level.

On top of that, I'd go nuts trying to log every little daily or weekly thing. I vote for setting activity level to include that - as MFP expects - and only log intentional exercise or major other work beyond the daily/weekly routine.

HoneyBadger302

No

I do not count it as exercise. Steps, yes. So if you're doing a fair number of house chores, perhaps above average, and getting your steps up there, it may increase your general daily activity, but that's about it.

Exercise, IMO, is something that is strenuous (either getting your HR up or strengthening muscles) and not a "typical" activity most people do every day regardless.

penguinmama87

Yes

I don't log housework, but it's definitely activity and occasionally rather intense. Regular tidying has me going up and down stairs many, many times per day. I can break a sweat scrubbing floors and bathrooms.

Maybe this isn't how you intended the question, but housework is definitely exercise, in so far as it is activity that you do that burns calories. I see it like walks: I rarely walk without a reason - I'm typically going somewhere for some purpose, but it doesn't burn fewer calories if I'm on an errand instead of walking "just" to exercise.

As far as how MFP works, I think it makes the most sense to just include that (as well as any other activity that is just part of your daily life) in your setup for a calorie goal and just log whatever is really out of the norm if it's especially vigorous.

BarbaraHelen2013

HoneyBadger302 wrote: »

Exercise, IMO, is something that is strenuous (either getting your HR up or strengthening muscles) and not a "typical" activity most people do every day regardless.

I voted ‘No’ for the reasons others have mentioned, it’s in your general activity level setting, mostly.

But! Try being a 5ft woman and wrestling a king size duvet into a fresh duvet cover and tell me it’s not strenuous and doesn’t raise your heart rate and make you sweat! 😂 I’ve been known to say it should be an Olympic sport! (Not to mention turning the mattress!)

I also find cleaning bathrooms is strenuous when it involves balancing on the side of the bath and scrubbing, rinsing and drying the tiled walls at full stretch, again due to being short I cannot reach any other way!

cwolfman13

No

No, it's part of your NEAT. Even an activity level of sedentary is going to account for some day to day movement and activity equivalent to around 3-5K steps. I'd say in most cases, general day to day type of cleaning and household chores would fall squarely into that.

Hiawassee88

In my Life Kit, all movement counts, one minute at a time. Ambling, moseying along, climbing stairs and mountains, racewalking, sprinting, running. Dishes, laundry, mopping, waxing, cooking, cleaning bathrooms, mowing, irrigating, shoveling snow. Low, moderate and high intensity movement counts. Exercise is not all or nothing for me. If I can't spend an hour in the gym, why bother at all? I don't spend any time in the gym and all of my movement counts.

This ain't little house on the prairie. I can't sit around and wait for someone to blow smoke up my prairie skirt. I'm moving and I have functional muscles. My house is neat.

AnnPT77

I still agree with those saying that routine (average week) kind of housework is best accounted for in activity level (rather than logging separately as exercise). However, I'm prodded by recent posts to add something that's a bit of a tangent to OP's question, but maybe relevant in a different way.

People do often discount the importance of daily life movement. To those of us calorie counting and trying to increase daily life movement, it tends to become clear that daily life (non-exercise) activity has both TDEE-increasing value, and capability-maintenance (basic fitness) value.

Beyond that, though, there is one study that tantalizingly suggests that how we think of our daily life activity may have physical effects.

Here's the abstract:

In a study testing whether the relationship between exercise and health is moderated by one's mind-set, 84 female room attendants working in seven different hotels were measured on physiological health variables affected by exercise. Those in the informed condition were told that the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General's recommendations for an active lifestyle. Examples of how their work was exercise were provided. Subjects in the control group were not given this information. Although actual behavior did not change, 4 weeks after the intervention, the informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before. As a result, compared with the control group, they showed a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index. These results support the hypothesis that exercise affects health in part or in whole via the placebo effect.

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17425538/

I heard about this from an episode of the radio show/podcast Hidden Brain, which did a really interesting two-parter on the importance of mindset. (Another interesting study showed differential levels of appetite/satiation hormones after subjects were told that the very same milkshake was "healthy" or "indulgent". Brains are weird.) The podcast is close to an hour each time, not brief. If anyone cares, here's a link to part 2, where these studies among others were discussed.

https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/reframing-your-reality-part-2/

kshama2001

Only if you put on music and dance

AnnPT77 wrote: »

I still agree with those saying that routine (average week) kind of housework is best accounted for in activity level (rather than logging separately as exercise). However, I'm prodded by recent posts to add something that's a bit of a tangent to OP's question, but maybe relevant in a different way.

People do often discount the importance of daily life movement. To those of us calorie counting and trying to increase daily life movement, it tends to become clear that daily life (non-exercise) activity has both TDEE-increasing value, and capability-maintenance (basic fitness) value.

Beyond that, though, there is one study that tantalizingly suggests that how we think of our daily life activity may have physical effects.

Here's the abstract:

In a study testing whether the relationship between exercise and health is moderated by one's mind-set, 84 female room attendants working in seven different hotels were measured on physiological health variables affected by exercise. Those in the informed condition were told that the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General's recommendations for an active lifestyle. Examples of how their work was exercise were provided. Subjects in the control group were not given this information. Although actual behavior did not change, 4 weeks after the intervention, the informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before. As a result, compared with the control group, they showed a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index. These results support the hypothesis that exercise affects health in part or in whole via the placebo effect.

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17425538/

I heard about this from an episode of the radio show/podcast Hidden Brain, which did a really interesting two-parter on the importance of mindset. (Another interesting study showed differential levels of appetite/satiation hormones after subjects were told that the very same milkshake was "healthy" or "indulgent". Brains are weird.) The podcast is close to an hour each time, not brief. If anyone cares, here's a link to part 2, where these studies among others were discussed.

https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/reframing-your-reality-part-2/

Oh, that was interesting and I recommend it, and if your brain works like mine, start with part 1, which was interesting as well.

kshama2001

Only if you put on music and dance

I don't count the first hour of cooking or 30 minutes of cleaning I do each day, but after that do start counting it.

The middle of the summer when it is too hot to get cardio outside is when I get a lot of deep cleaning done

Sinisterbarbie1

Do you think if I charge a membership fee and make him scan a card when entering my husband will help clean the house?

MelodyandBarbells

Sinisterbarbie1 wrote: »

Do you think if I charge a membership fee and make him scan a card when entering my husband will help clean the house?

Depends what the alternatives are 🤔

PAV8888

That's the ticket to free cleaning! SMART! Make him pay for the privilege too!!!!

Let's compare antibiotic free, pasture raised, vegetarian fed, free roaming, bright yellow polka dotted eggs and good old plain industrial bleached white eggs we would rather not know much about other than the price!

Other than a couple of small improbability issues having to do with calcium carbonate, bleach, and bright yellow polka dots.... eggs from chickens are still just about 78 Cal per 50g.

Calories are very good at not caring about human value judgments.

IS your activity already included in the base level of activity you've selected? The sedentary level already includes activities that could be compared to walking approximately 3500 steps in a day. By the time you hit 5000 steps, most people have exceeded the level known as sedentary.

The way MFP is designed to work, you WOULD eat (i.e. mark as exercise) calories that are in excess of your selected activity level.

Regardless of what generated them.

That said: MFP is not a calculator. It is an ESTIMATOR. Your own n=1 experiment with logging and weight change is what determines how close you're tracking to your estimates and when and how you should adjust.

springlering62

All my adult life my house has been spit shined.

Most my adult life I was obese or overweight.

Just sayin’.

MelodyandBarbells

springlering62 wrote: »

All my adult life my house has been spit shined.

Most my adult life I was obese or overweight.

Just sayin’.

That regular exercise doesn’t automatically mean you’re thin?

penguinmama87

Yes

MelodyandBarbells wrote: »

springlering62 wrote: »

All my adult life my house has been spit shined.

Most my adult life I was obese or overweight.

Just sayin’.

That regular exercise doesn’t automatically mean you’re thin?

This is partly how I had the epiphany about needing to pay much closer attention to the "calories in." I spent a lot of time worrying about "calories out," and suspecting that deep down I really was just a lazy slob because after all, if I was *really* active, I'd be thin, wouldn't I?

I didn't do a lot of formal exercise then but I was very active in my day-to-day. I became even more so as I lost weight (moving a lighter body is so much easier!) but I hadn't figured out that I couldn't outrun my fork, as the saying goes.

I get a little queasy thinking about just how little I'd have to eat if I *didn't* move so much throughout the day.

Kiwi2mfp

Yes

I can go all day cleaning the house, cooking, canning, gardening...etc. I do set my calorie goals at the lowest though and I'll log maybe an hour or two of gardening or such. But if I had set my calories to very active then I wouldn't log that activity. There are days I'm not as active so this works for me. I try to keep a balance. If it was a very active day, I log the activity and eat more. If it's not so active of a day...I don't.

AnnPT77

penguinmama87 wrote: »

MelodyandBarbells wrote: »

springlering62 wrote: »

All my adult life my house has been spit shined.

Most my adult life I was obese or overweight.

Just sayin’.

That regular exercise doesn’t automatically mean you’re thin?

This is partly how I had the epiphany about needing to pay much closer attention to the "calories in." I spent a lot of time worrying about "calories out," and suspecting that deep down I really was just a lazy slob because after all, if I was *really* active, I'd be thin, wouldn't I?

I didn't do a lot of formal exercise then but I was very active in my day-to-day. I became even more so as I lost weight (moving a lighter body is so much easier!) but I hadn't figured out that I couldn't outrun my fork, as the saying goes.

I get a little queasy thinking about just how little I'd have to eat if I *didn't* move so much throughout the day.

Oh, man, yes: I was training pretty hard 6 days most weeks, and even competing as an athlete (not always unsuccessfully in age group terms), eating pretty healthfully . . . and staying class 1 obese, for like a dozen years. I thought I had a "slow metabolism", because I should've been losing weight, right?

Nah. Even heavy exercise is only a minority fraction of most peoples' daily calorie needs, easily wiped out by portion creep. A single sad serving of peanut butter on healthy whole-grain bread will calorically negate a pretty decent workout, as will 2-3 extra tablespoons through the day of oil/butter/rich dressings/sauces . . . and I don't mean both of those, I mean either one alone. 300-400ish calories is a decent workout. It's a pretty small snack, with calorie-dense choices.

It turned out that not only was my metabolism not slow, I actually require literally hundreds more calories daily than MFP or my good brand/model of fitness tracker estimates, despite being severely hypothyroid (medicated), menopausal, old, non-tall (5'5"), sedentary when not exercising, and various other supposed weight loss doom factors.

That's rare, but looks like it can happen, eh? (Why do I need more calories? Not sure. Probably part of the reason for higher needs is more muscle mass than average for my demographic (F, 67), plus the greater ease/joy of daily life movement that reasonable fitness enabled. Just guessing, though.)