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Look Great in Those Greenjeans

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By late winter, our new year’s fitness resolutions may be slipping along with our waistlines. In Canada, the 45-year-old man is on average 20 pounds heavier than in 1981. Try walking around the block with two 10-pound bags of potatoes to get an idea of how much this really is. Here’s a solution for the multi-tasking professional… Something that will not only help you work out in the great outdoors, but score points with mother nature, and your neighbours as well; it’s called gardening.

Gardening can provide a gentle workout or be as demanding as some full-contact sports.  A joke, you think? Consider this: An hour's gardening can burn as many calories as jogging 6.4 kilometers.  And when you budget in the high cost of a gym membership just to access an indoor treadmill and barbell, it may make sense to acquaint yourself with new workout tools: the rake, wheelbarrow and manual core lawn aerator.

Burn, Baby Burn There are gardening exercises for all muscle groups. To focus on your gluteals and thighs, weeding while squatting is your most effective workout. Weeding on hands and knees, hoeing and turning compost will work out your abdominals, torso, arms and shoulders.

Warm Up If gardening sounds like your kind of workout, prepare as you would for a sport. Warm up to stretch legs, arms and back.  And pace yourself ­– after a long winter, we likely won’t have the stamina to build, prepare and plant a sprawling vegetable garden all in one day. Break big projects into smaller pieces and aim to do a little bit over several days or weekends. 


Keep Good Form Too many hours spent bent over a container garden or hauling heavy wheelbarrow loads can lead to a sore back. So be sure to bend at the knees and tighten your abs as you move around. Carry loads that challenge your muscles, but be careful not to injure yourself. Avoid repetitive strain by alternating tasks, taking breaks and using ergonomic tools that fit your body.

Advanced Maneuvers One easy way to get more fitness value from your gardening is to use manual tools. Besides helping your garden and benefitting your health, your efforts go a long way to help out the environment. Obvious choices would be rakes over leaf blowers (ever been woken up on a Saturday at 7:00am by one of those?) and garden shears over electric hedge trimmers. Besides contributing to a healthy lawn, the manual core aerator is as grueling as any step class*, and the good old-fashioned multi-blade push mower is also making a resurgence.

 

*If you start your spring aeration in late March, you might be ready to climb the 1,776 steps up the CN Tower for the WWF CN Tower climb April 17th.

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The Garden Gym Cast your eye over the backyard or park through this new gardening workout lens and look for places where you can get in some extra push-ups, crunches and steps. Map yourself out a circuit and you’ll be surprised at how many muscles you can target. The top bar of the swing set could be used for pull-ups. The steps from the garden to the porch could mimic a step class routine. The raised wooden border between the garden and the flowerbed could become a balance beam for dips, power lunges, and press-ups. Start with a few repetitions, eight or so of each, and build up to 15 when your fitness level improves.

Give and Get No garden? No excuse. Offer to help out a neighbour who could use some assistance spreading mulch or digging holes. Or, join a community garden in your neighbourhood. In the spring many gardens are looking for an extra hand to build beds and unload soil. From Evergreen’s national Common Grounds program, that include garden plots throughout Toronto from Fort York to Scarborough, to the innovative Not Far From the Tree initiative where volunteers harvest fruit trees, the opportunities across Canada are boundless and bountiful. Visit evergreen.ca to find a planting event in your area.

Harvesting the Benefits
Indeed, mowing, raking, lifting, digging and weeding are excellent exercises. Coupled with the psychological upside of communing with the earth, gardening is good for the body, soul and pocketbook. And as icing on the guilt-free cake, the rewards program for a garden workout is better than those offered by your average airline carrier. Besides the toned muscles and rosy cheeks, the benefits come in tomatoes, cucumbers, onions….whatever you decided to plant at the beginning of the season. 

Final word: Recent UK research reported in The Daily Dust revealed that the majority (64 percent) of people were planning to scale back their paid-for sporting activities and look for more free exercise opportunities.

 

 

Anthony Westenberg
~writes from Evergreen, a national charity that makes cities more livable. To learn more, visit www.evergreen.ca


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