Gardening as exercise

mikewills1
mikewills1 Posts: 2 Member
edited November 2024 in Fitness and Exercise
Hi,

I'm a keen home gardener and grow a lot of veg and salads.

I've only just started using the food and exercise programme though and was really surprised by gardening as an exercise. 1 hour of gardening was about 460 calories. I'm assuming this is based on you digging with a shovel continuously.

How come there aren't any alternative forms, such as planting, weeding or watering. These don't use anywhere near as many calories but, are useful forms of exercise.

This morning I was up at 6.30 and was potting on some of my tomato plants which was about 45 mins of gentle exercise at most but, undertaken in a very warm greenhouse even at that time of day!!

How do I go about adding this onto my activities when there is only gardening general as an option?

Replies

  • 0ysterboy
    0ysterboy Posts: 192 Member
    460 cal/hour is a pretty good aerobic burn rate, that is approximately my rate in a moderate spin class. You really need to wear a heart rate monitor and get a more accurate idea of calorie consumption and even that would be potentially inaccurate. I think that sijomial's idea that you figure in into your daily activity to raise your TDEE is a good idea.
  • mikewills1
    mikewills1 Posts: 2 Member
    I did a little search and it came back with 200-300 calories an hour for weeding. I'm not looking for it to be 100% accurate, it just seemed a little strange that a programme that has virtually every food item doesn't have multiple options for exercise. Thanks
  • TavistockToad
    TavistockToad Posts: 35,719 Member
    if you regularly gardened before you were trying to lose weight then it counts in your activity setting.
  • snemberton
    snemberton Posts: 175 Member
    I was a little curious about a similar thing this weekend. A few times a year, we spend some time revamping flower beds or such in our yard. It's not daily, more like 3-4 times a summer, sometimes more. But that's usually a few hours of work carrying bags of mulch, bending and squatting and shoveling. Yesterday, my husband was doing some of this (making a new bed), but I was busy with other activities. However, he needed some help carrying bags of mulch he just bought, so I thought I'd log it as a "workout" on my watch to see. In the 10 minutes of carrying the mulch from our truck to the side yard, it says I had 45 active calories and 59 total. I can see that being somewhat accurate for that specific activity, as my heart rate was slightly elevated(121), but not at my typical cardio level (140-150). I could see 200-300 calories being reasonable for an hour of that kind of work.
  • hesn92
    hesn92 Posts: 5,966 Member
    If gardening is a normal part of your day I would just take that into consideration when setting your activity level.
  • drbeanie2000
    drbeanie2000 Posts: 81 Member
    Sometimes, I've motivated myself to exercise during the winter by saying "I need to be able to garden several hours at a time this spring and not poop out!"
  • Roobyzooby
    Roobyzooby Posts: 189 Member
    It depends on the type of gardening, pottering with my pots I don't count as exercise. But pruning the hedges or the climbing roses I do as it involves a lot of crouching, squating and ladder climbing but I usually only put half the amount of time I was actually working. Mowing the grass with a petrol mower takes me about 4 hours in total and its back breaking work as I have a lot of grass and 15 apple trees to limbo under and around and I am dripping with sweat by the time I'm done so I do add the full time to my activity count.
  • PaytraB
    PaytraB Posts: 2,360 Member
    When I garden lightly, I use "mild stretching" as the activity.
  • MegaMooseEsq
    MegaMooseEsq Posts: 3,118 Member
    I’ve used my watch to log activity strenuous enough that I’d skip another workout to do it - shoveling a heavy snow or turning over new beds being the kind of thing on that list. Otherwise it goes in the general activity level pool.
  • fishgutzy
    fishgutzy Posts: 2,807 Member
    edited July 2018
    I add it as an activity when I do a couple hours of weeding and other more vigorous yard work.
    I don't think an hour in my lawn tractor counts though. :D
  • jguldi11
    jguldi11 Posts: 201 Member
    I wear a FitBit Alta HR (heart rate) and was in my garden tilling manually and it counted it as 61 minutes of "sport" with 464 calories burned with my average HR being 116. But when I was planting for a couple of hours it didn't count as any extra activity, must not have raised my HR enough. That being said there are a lot of variables that impact HR so what elevates my HR may not elevate yours as much or vice versa. I suppose if you feel like what you're doing is a workout and your HR is raised, count it as gardening, and if it doesn't feel strenuous maybe just count it as walking or light stretching. I highly recommend a heart rate tracker if it's within your budget for accurate activity tracking. Hope this gives some perspective :)
  • NewBetterBest18
    NewBetterBest18 Posts: 165 Member
    These are all great tips. I've always wondered how to post my activities working in the garden. I do it regularly. Thanks everyone.
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 10,053 Member
    Hr is not as such telated to calorie burn and easily influenced by external factors such as heat. But high temperatures don’t increase calorie burn neither. I wouldn’t really add an hour of potting as exercise. If you did this a few hours on a day then you might want to look a how much more calories you get when you change your activity level from sedentary to slightly active- and then go with that. I mean, you don’t suddenly jump or run around potting. It’s mostly a task involving hands and arms. It can’t be much.
  • MelanieCN77
    MelanieCN77 Posts: 4,047 Member
    Yeah 460 cals in the hour, you better be going at a good clip and doing moderately strenuous activity the whole time. Like a dozen people said, if it's something you have done and will continue to do, consider it being part of your base calories. 100% if you log hours of gardening regularly at those calories you will run into problems.
  • DX2JX2
    DX2JX2 Posts: 1,921 Member
    edited July 2018
    If strenuous work is involved, add it as a similar activity. Otherwise, ignore it and take the bonus loss as gravy.

    The calorie loss from general gardening activity is small and slow enough that the risk of running short of calories is minor and even if you should run short over time, it'll be slow enough that you can easily adjust yourself on the fly.
  • ServusChristi
    ServusChristi Posts: 98 Member
    I have logged it, but only in the spring during the most intense work of soil prep, etc. And I rejected the absurdly high burn suggested by MFP; I estimated it simply based on how it felt compared with my daily hour on the treadmill.
  • BrSpiritus
    BrSpiritus Posts: 190 Member
    I hand wash all my clothes, a habit I got in to when living in the Philippines. There's literally zip in the system for this but best estimate is around 200 cal per half hour. I just tack another exercise onto my daily that burns about this amount.
  • DX2JX2
    DX2JX2 Posts: 1,921 Member
    LouisTamsi wrote: »
    I hand wash all my clothes, a habit I got in to when living in the Philippines. There's literally zip in the system for this but best estimate is around 200 cal per half hour. I just tack another exercise onto my daily that burns about this amount.

    200 calories per half hour for hand washing clothes? How dirty are they?
  • MelanieCN77
    MelanieCN77 Posts: 4,047 Member
    Are the exercise calorie estimates in the MFP database accurate for anybody at all?
  • Jthanmyfitnesspal
    Jthanmyfitnesspal Posts: 3,524 Member
    Certain yard tasks burn significant calories: Raking, snow shoveling, digging, spreading mulch, manual hedge clipping. Others burn moderate calories: walk-behind mowing, running a heavy snow-blower, hand weeding.

    Generally, you can tell by elevated heart rate. A fitbit can help here. (Although, when mine worked, I still did not link it to MFP. I cherry picked segments that I felt actually burned significant calories and manually added them in.) And I totally agree with @sijomial that you could just increase your activity setting in MFP and leave it at that.
  • GOT_Obsessed
    GOT_Obsessed Posts: 817 Member
    If you want some great calorie burning gardening throw a dozen sunflower seeds in the garden. Come fall you will get an amazing workout digging those "$#$/#@ things up! Man those things have huge roots to them. NEVER AGAIN! lol
  • Purplebunnysarah
    Purplebunnysarah Posts: 3,252 Member
    GOT_Obsessed wrote: »
    If you want some great calorie burning gardening throw a dozen sunflower seeds in the garden. Come fall you will get an amazing workout digging those "$#$/#@ things up! Man those things have huge roots to them. NEVER AGAIN! lol

    This is why I'm growing mine in pots LOL.

    It's an experiment.
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