gardening and yard work as exercise

jtpinter10

I have yet to find a way to enter gardening and yard work into the exercise log. Is there a way or should I just give this up ?

yirara

Do you do yardwork every day or is it a one-off? How intense is it and how long? Note, that sweating is not really correlated to intensity. If it's just an hour and fairly light I would not log it. If it's every day a bit then I'd take this into account under your everyday activity level. If once per week or so then there's probably an exercise.

cmriverside

You have a couple choices:

Find something in the already-existing database. I would suggest probably "Aerobics" - and there are varying levels of intensity in that category. I picked "high impact" and got what I believe to be a reasonable number if I was working fairly hard at it. Use something like that.

Or
If you have a Fitbit, use their numbers

Or
You can just pick a random number and use that. I'm guessing intense yard work is something you do rarely? If it's a career, then use it as part of your daily Activity Level setting, like yirara said.


Exercise calories are pretty difficult to get exactly right so I just use a flat 300 calories per hour of moderate exercise. Close enough - my weight does what I expect using that number.

herblovinmom

@ jtpinter10 In my iOS MFP app, I am able to log gardening under cardio exercise. I go to my diary select add exercise toggle over to all exercises and type search word gardening. It shows as gardening-general. Select the exercise and enter the time and minutes performed. Landscaping isn’t an option but gardening is 👍

Corina1143

I log lawn mowing and gardening, general under cardiovascular exercises listed by mfp at the bottom of the diary page

sollyn23l2

Yep, gardening is right there. You just have to click on exercise, choose cardiovascular, then type in gardening. Not sure why it's not showing up for you.

AnnPT77

The "gardening" option in the MFP database is iffy, in the sense that gardening covers a lot of activities of different intensities. Hand digging a new garden bed burns quite a few more calories than kneeling and weeding the flower bed, y'know?

One option for varied activities would be to get a METS estimate from the Compendium of Physical Activities for something more specific, then use a METS calculator to estimate calories.

The Compendium is here:

https://sites.google.com/site/compendiumofphysicalactivities/home

And one METS calculator is here:

https://ergo.human.cornell.edu/MetsCaloriesCalculator/MetsCaloriesCalculator.htm

There's a Lawn & Garden section on the Compendium site. The activities range from 1.5 METS ("watering lawn or garden, standing or walking") to 8.3 ("felling trees, large size"). At my bodyweight, an hour of those would be estimated at 90 calories or 498 calories respectively . . . quite a range.

MFP will let you create custom exercises of your own. This is one possible way to get a starting calorie estimate. After you set it up, MFP will scale the calories based on minutes and your then-current bodyweight, so you only need to do the Compendium/METS calculator steps once. (That's because MFP uses a METS approach under the covers, so this works OK.)

This isn't perfect, but it's a possibility.

yirara

AnnPT77 wrote: »

And one METS calculator is here:

https://ergo.human.cornell.edu/MetsCaloriesCalculator/MetsCaloriesCalculator.htm

Wow, that's a good'un! But is it gross or net calories? For a relaxed forest walk of 3hrs I get about 630 calories, which is probably very realistic compared to the 1500 garmin is giving me.

jtpinter10

Thanks to all those who answered found gardening and the Mets calculator I am on my way.
Jon