Honestly I’ve seen some attitudes and articles that “housework isn’t exercise” and… I’m guessing such people don’t do much housework? At a minimum, it could often be a lot of walking, which is fine low to moderate exercise.
Have you ever found housework (or chores) to be good exercise?
As anyone who does any actual housework can attest: Yes, housework burns a lot of calories. Which is one of the reasons why artificial exercise equipment at home - outside of specific sports use because you’re a professional - makes so little sense, you could burn more or equal amounts of calories just finally cleaning up, and both need extrinsic motivation as you’re too lazy to use them otherwise.
(Yes I know, you’re in this text and you don’t like it. Me neither :P )
Cleaning large areas or intensive scrubbing is definitely tiring. Vacuum or mop the whole house, or scrub the tub to remove soap scum - it will raise the heart rate and can make the arms tired.
Light duty stuff like dishes, not so much.
Yeah that’s kinda what I meant, I should have been more explicit. If you have a house, even just the daily cleaning and sorting, taken together, is quite a bit. A proper cleaning you do once a week or so if you do it in one session gets you pretty exhausted. And people rarely recognize it as such, plus of course we rarely do it in one session.
I only started noticing after my ex moved out and I established Saturday morning as the time I do all the weekly cleaning up, all in one go.
Doing housework is more cardio than not doing it, so there’s that
I find this train of thoughts void of a very important variable: there’s no single type of homework and while some might be definitely positive for health, both mental and physical, others are the opposite of that.
For example, gardening vs painting walls with a toxic fungicidal paint. Housework? Housework!
I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it one way or another, but I don’t really feel physically exhausted or sore after housework, so I guess I wouldn’t consider it exercise? For me at least, I don’t mean to say anyone is wrong for thinking otherwise.
I dunno, I sweep, mop, clean the bathroom, do the dishes, all the normal housework stuff - it’s definitely more strenuous than not doing anything, but in my mind there’s a place between sitting and exercise which is where housework kinda falls. Though the linked article also includes some yardwork like raking, weeding and mowing the lawn, which definitely feel more like exercise to me.
Everything burns calories, even breathing. That doesn’t make it exercise. The only things on that list that could count are shoveling snow, moving furniture, and gardening, depending on what you are doing.
These kind of articles are dangerous and misleading. There is no amount of house work that is going to give you a healthy heart.
I have a dog and vacuum almost daily, it’s not exercise compared to taking him on a 2 mile walk that takes the same amount of time.
It would depend on what you’re doing. It’s better than nothing, I guess.
They are really scraping the bottom of the barrel for content here. Who the fuck doesn’t know that moving is exercise?
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The amount of calories I have burnt in the last year doing housework is surely less than the calories I burnt on a single 10 mile trek on my peloton tread. Clearly others are doing a lot more than I am if it rises to the level of exercise.