That's Fit

After a few warm days and some sunshine, I was amazed today when I strolled through my yard. Plants that had just been sprouting a mere week ago are now nearly a foot tall. Unfortunately, half of those plants are weeds and I have my work cut out for me. If you have a yard like mine -- large and untamed -- many of your spring weekends may be spent in the yard or garden. You may also wonder, like I often do, if gardening counts as exercise.

If I was keeping track of my daily activity on a calories burned calculator, I'd enter in gardening for sure. In my yard, it means heavy-duty digging, hauling heavy bags of mulch, digging up and moving large plants, and trimming and hauling away big branches. You can burn about 350 calories per hour doing that sort of work -- not too bad! The other great thing about gardening, for me, is that I can easily spend 4 hours working out in the yard, and I'd never commit that kind of time to a workout.

So, while gardening isn't a planned and focused "workout," it certainly can cut calories from your day and put plenty of activity back in. But you need to be realistic about how much you're really doing. If you're holding a hose or pulling a few weeds and not breaking a sweat, it's not exercise. But if you're bending and stretching, sweating and out of breath...then you're getting a workout of sorts. To find out exactly how many calories you're burning, check out this calculator that measures calories burned by the minute.