Ditch the Gym and Clean Your Home

It can be really quite expensive to go the gym and just how daunting is it knowing that you’ve booked onto a class or that you have a 20 minute session on the treadmill lurking. Well….good news because research has found that cleaning your home might burn just as many calories as a gym session.

Incorporating the cleaning into your daily workout could potentially do wonders for reaching your weight goals in time for a summer holiday. Dr Clark of Sharecare Fitness has stated that it is possible to burn anywhere between 100 to 300 calories per hour whilst going about the housework, this does depend on the activity and rigorousness that is emphasised during the actions too.

Boost the Burn!

You could quite easily incorporate different exercises whilst doing the cleaning. Here’s some of our calorie burning suggestions:

1. Gluteal Squeeze

Contract your butt muscles and hold tight for 3 seconds, you could do this while stood doing the dishes or whilst bleaching your cups. This is a personal favourite of mine because you can pretty much do it wherever you are, whatever you’re doing.

2. Calf Raises

For well-defined calves, raise your heels a little from the ground. Hold this position and then slowly lower your heels back down. Again this could be used whilst doing so many tasks, try it whilst dusting those really hard to reach spots!

3. Stretches

Break up your cleaning with some stretches, stretch and touch your toes when picking things up on the floor.

Just general household cleaning, stretching, running up and down stairs and hoovering all helps to burn those calories and help get your summer body. Try turning on some of your favourite music whilst doing the cleaning and inserting some extra energy into it. If you get your heart pumping and break into a little sweat…you know it’s working!

What Are the Benefits

The benefits of this are two-fold, firstly you remove a large portion of the dust and bacteria that is present within your home (result) – leading to an overall more hygienic environment for all involved, ensuring the use antibacterial wipes and correct use of cleaning fluids on the appropriate surfaces can eliminate a multitude of bacteria that can cause infections and illness to those in the household, a consistent cleaning routine is mandatory. Secondly, it adds extra caloric burn in your day-to-day, you must keep in mind that for an excellent gym figure cleaning alone will not be sufficient, however, as an added extra you cannot fault it when your classic household chores will aid in fulfilling your personal goals.

How Many Calories Will I Actually Burn?

These caloric burn figures will largely boil down to a few factors: current weight, duration, intensity, and, type of activity. As such a 150-lb person would burn approximately 99 calories in 30 minutes of housework, compared to a 200-lb individual who would burn around 131 calories within the same elapsed duration, according to a study by Health Status.

Axiomatically, the duration of the work accounts for the number of calories burnt, this goes for any activity, if you do something for longer then this means that more calories are burnt as a result of your extended activity. Furthermore, the intensity of work accounts for a substantial increase in the caloric burn, as you would expect light cleaning will burn less calories than a heavy, intensive clean; according to Pro Health, for an 150lb individual, light cleaning for 30 minutes results in around 85 calories burnt whereas intensive cleaning means that approximately 153 calories are burned – an increase of 80%. Finally, accounting for the type of activity that is carried out, as you would expect, washing dishes for 20 minutes will burn far less calories than thoroughly mopping the floors since there is more strenuous and extensive activity involved

…..Does that make sense? Basically the more cleaning that you do and the more intensive the clean, the more calories you will burn!

Let’s get cleaning!!!