A Healthy Pastime - Gardening

Aerobic dancing, jogging, stationery cycling or weight lifting are some of the activities which come to our mind when we think of exercise. As a matter of fact nobody even ever considers gardening as exercise, but that is not correct. There is more than one benefit of gardening, you benefit by way of exercising and it helps you keep a well maintained garden. Isn’t it much better to grow plants than to sit on an exercise machine?

Various groups of muscle are at work at the time of gardening. It also works like an aerobic exercise when you do the same job like weeding and hoeing over and over.

You may not be using some of the muscles in your daily work but they are exercised while gardening. You might have heard an old adage “muscles hurt that I didn’t even know I had”. This is true when you do gardening. It is important to exercise all the muscles of the body to keep fit and you can achieve this by gardening.

When you pay attention to the muscles you are using for different gardening activities, it helps you to get complete advantage of fitness through gardening. It is good if you emphasize on the movements. You can do the movements for longer, like if you are bending for planting then stay in that position for more time.

If you are hoeing, lift the hoe higher than you normally would, and even swing it around each time you go to put it into the ground. Try to feel each muscle that you are using to accomplish different tasks, and try to vary what you do each day. Also, do some stretches before you begin any gardening, as this will help prevent muscle injury. After gardening for a while, you’ll start to notice a difference in the way you feel and the way you look.