Yard work calories

Yes you can get awesome burns from doing everday outside work. A month weeks ago I wondered how many calories i'd burn if i shoveled snow with a shovel instead of using my snow blower. I put on my heart rate monitor and was really surprised that it said i had burned about 675 calories for a solid hour of snow shoveling! I compaired it to MFP and I think the numbers were pretty close, my HR monitor comming in a little over. So now I can't wait for the summer to finally get here so I can add cutting the lawn to my activites for burning those excess fat calories!:drinker:

I too decided to rake part of the yard yesterday - spent about an hour. MFP was going to credit me aprox 460 calories, but I didn't think that was realistic, so cut it down to 200 - That I do think was accurate.

Yesterday I spent an hour bulding a raised garden bed out of bricks. It was pretty physical work and I decided to log it under construction - general. I was very surprised to find that it gave me a credit of 335 calories. I had no idea working around the house could burn so many calories. Is this accurate? Has anyone else experienced this?

This would be total cals burned but in MFP you would need to back out the calories you would have burned anyway, had you not done this work, which should be 1.25-1.5 cals/min or 75 to 90 cals per hour. So the amount you should enter into MFP should be more like 245 to 260.

I think you burn more than you think! I went on a long-fast paced walk yesterday and it didn't put me out too much, but cleaning, mopping, dusting and doing laundry gets my HR up and makes me sweat! Plus you do these things and don't even think about it as "working out" !

Hi, yes, per online calorie counters, you burn a good amount of calories per hour for yard work. It's based on the activity and your weight. Nothing comes up in Exercise section when you enter "Yard work" or Housework", however you find options when you enter "Gardening" and "Cleaning"

I did a little research to find out what other resources consider calorie burn per hour, then I base my yard work and cleaning entries based on what I think is realistic. You can put decimal points in when you enter food "servings" and exercise, so if an exercise in MyfitnessPal is only about 90% of the calories I want to enter, then I'll put the time as a decimal point - .9 instead of 1.0 for instance. Or .5 for half an hour, etc.

I Googled "yard work calories" and found these helpful links:

Here is one source:
http://www.webmd.com/parenting/fun-and-fit-family-11/calorie-burners

YARD WORK:
Shoveling snow: 400-600 calories per hour
Heavy yard work (landscaping, moving rocks, hauling dirt): 400-600 calories per hour
Raking and bagging leaves: 350-450 calories per hour
Gardening: pulling weeds, planting flowers, etc.: 200-400 calories per hour
Mowing the lawn: 250-350 calories per hour

Household Chores
The approximate average calorie count of typical housecleaning activities is:

Major cleaning (turning mattresses, washing windows, washing the car): 175-250 calories per hour.
Moderate housecleaning (laundry loads, mopping and sweeping, vacuuming): 150-200 calories per hour
Light housecleaning (dusting, straightening up, taking out the trash): 120-170 calories per hour.

Household Chores continued...

The approximate average calorie count of typical housecleaning activities is:

Major cleaning (turning mattresses, washing windows, washing the car): 175-250 calories per hour.
Moderate housecleaning (laundry loads, mopping and sweeping, vacuuming): 150-200 calories per hour
Light housecleaning (dusting, straightening up, taking out the trash): 120-170 calories per hour.