What does “gardening” mean on the exercise log for cardio?

jonason62
jonason62 Posts: 15 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I do several hours of gardening most days but most of it is not physically strenuous, eg weeding, using the strimmer. I also clock up a lot of “steps” but it’s not brisk walking. I do very little digging, mainly raking, hoeing, watering with a can. The impact on my weight loss is minimal, although I also do cardio and strength training at a gym most days.

Answers

  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 34,458 Member
    edited July 1
    I would call that your daily Activity and account for it in the "Activity Level" on your Goals page. If you aren't sure of your daily calorie needs, you can pick an Activity Level that sounds about right according to the description and just use it for a while and see if your weight changes in the direction you want.

    Here is the myfitnesspal explanation: https://support.myfitnesspal.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032625391-How-does-MyFitnessPal-calculate-my-initial-goals

    Or alternately you could pick some random number that you feel is appropriate. You can enter your own "Gardening" exercise entry into the database and/or you can edit the calories on any of the ones already in the database when you pull them up.

    All of this (estimating activity and exercise) is a bit of an experiment. Stick with a number for 4-6 weeks, adjust up or down after you've collected some good trending data.

  • SafariGalNYC
    SafariGalNYC Posts: 1,588 Member
    edited July 1
    I agree with watch your trending data. If you are logging the exercise and the weight loss isn’t on a downward trend.. 📉 change the process.

    I do a lot of gardening. 60 minutes of gardening supposedly allots me 300 burned exercise cals on MFP. According to my Apple Watch it’s 80 cals burned. So there are discrepancies.

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,627 Member
    The "Gardening, general" entry in the Cardiovascular section of the MFP is about a 4 METS activity, so equivalent to walking at about 3.7-3.8 mph, more or less. Personally, I wouldn't use that entry for something like routine weeding/trimming or planting. I feel like that's too high an estimate.

    If it were some routine amount of routine gardening for me, I'd just include it in activity level as others suggested. If I did hours at a time of something unusual and pretty vigorous, like digging new garden beds at a steady pace, I might use that entry. If it were an unusually large amount of time for me, but not vigorous, I've sometimes recorded it as walking at some slow rate, like 2mph.

    If it's something unusual, it's not necessary to obsess about precision, just make a reasonable guess, and move on. If you're in the weight loss phase, and aren't already losing aggressively fast (like more than 0.5% of current weight per week), then it's also find just to let it increase your calorie deficit if you don't feel extra hungry/tired. (If it were me, and enough duration or intensity to trigger hungry/tired, I'd probably log something and eat a bit extra, TBH. Suffering is optional. ;) )

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