After a day of raking leaves out of your lawn or weeding your garden, chances are you'll wonder how much all this activity counts toward your day by day exercise quota. The answer? More than you possibly can imagine.
The US Physical Activity Guidelines call for a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week. You can accomplish this goal by doing garden or yard work—whether you do all of it in only a few weekends or spread it out over your entire week.
Lawn and Garden Care: How Much Effort?Metabolic equivalent (MET) is a measure utilized by exercise researchers based on how much oxygen the common person uses per minute during a specific activity. A MET is the quantity of energy you expend while sitting still. Activities rated at 2 METs use twice as much oxygen as sitting, 3 METs mean thrice as much oxygen, and so forth. Activities that use 3 to five.9 METs count as moderate exercise. Many common garden tasks fall into this category. |
|
|
Activity |
METs 
|
|
Walking and standing while picking flowers or vegetables |
3.0 |
|
Digging, spreading, filling the garden, composting (light to moderate effort) |
3.5 |
|
Lawn or leaf raking (moderate effort) |
4.0 |
|
Planting, crops, shrubs, including bending (moderate effort) |
4.3 |
|
Pushing a wheelbarrow or large garden cart |
4.8 |
|
Mowing the lawn, walking with an influence mower (moderate effort) |
5.0 |
|
Weeding, gardening, hoeing (moderate effort) |
5.0 |
|
Mowing the lawn with a push or hand mower (intensive effort) |
6.0 |
Strong and protected?
You can reap a number of additional health advantages from these outdoor endeavors. Many yard and garden tasks—digging holes, shoveling soil and spreading compost, or bagging lawn clippings or leaves, for instance—strengthen various muscles within the legs, arms, and core. As Dr. Lee points out, the exercise guidelines also recommend two days per week of muscle-strengthening exercises. Another profit: As is true for activities like walking, swimming, and dancing, gardening or yard work has a lower injury rate than more intense, vigorous activities like running.
Reap what you sow
According to a 2023 study, there's also evidence to support extensive body advantages from gardening. Lancet Planetary Health. Researchers enrolled nearly 300 adults who had never gardened before. They assigned half to a community gardening group, and told the others to attend a 12 months to begin gardening. All wore activity monitors and underwent periodic surveys to evaluate their dietary habits and mental health.
Those within the gardening group increased their physical activity levels by about 42 minutes per week. They also ate about 7% more fiber per day — likely because they ate what they grew — than those that didn't garden. In addition, gardeners reported greater reductions in stress and anxiety. All of those changes help reduce the danger of heart disease. Other evidence points to improvements in physical and mental health from gardening, even in the event you grow flowers or other landscape plants as a substitute of produce.
If you enjoy gardening and yard work, it could actually be a superb strategy to meet your exercise goals and boost your cardiovascular health, says Dr. Lee. “Ultimately, the best practice is to do activities you enjoy, because you're more likely to engage in them consistently,” she says.
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