WHAT with working, socialising, keeping your house clean, it can seem impossible to fit exercise into our busy schedules.
But did you know one of these activities can actually burn up to 1,300 calories?
Cleaning your house can get your heart rate up and burn hundreds of calories
You guessed it: cleaning your digs can set your heart racing as much as a HIIT class would.
House-cleaning service Homeaglow decided to test just how much of a sweat we work up when scrubbing, vacuuming and mopping, and which rooms burn the most calories.
It asked 10 pro cleaners to wear Fitbits while they scoured five houses each.
“Our experiment revealed that when professionally cleaning a house consisting of one bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room, cleaners burn a whopping average of 830 calories,” Homeaglow said.
“To put this into perspective this is equivalent to doing a HIIT workout for over 1 hour and 30 mins for the average person,” it added.
But if you’re tacking an ‘average’ house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen and a living room, you can actually burn about 1,311 calories, according to Homeaglow.
Out of the four rooms, kitchens proved to be the most calorie-burning to clean.
“Our results show that the cleaners in our experiment averaged burning 276 calories per kitchen — which is equivalent to jogging for just under 40 mins straight.”
But cleaning your living room could burn more calories per minute: one average, cleaners expended 227 calories but took less time clean it than the kitchen.
By comparison, bedroom-cleaning expended the least calories.
The room that drove heart rates the highest was also the kitchen, with the cleaners averaging 140 bpm.
Fitness Expert, Joe Mitton explained: “Spikes in heart rate tend to occur with bursts of cardio exercise. This is most likely to happen during kitchen cleaning because of the tasks involved, like scrubbing, mopping, and vacuuming.”
If you want to make your tidying tasks feel a bit more like a workout, physiotherapist Dr Dave candy recommended incorporate squatting and lunging movements whilst cleaning hard-to-reach areas in your home.
He also suggested you try “to stay moving the whole time, and mak[e] additional trips up and down the stairs”.
And if you want to target bigger muscle groups fitness expert Joe Mitton said: “Don’t be afraid to really scrub down those surfaces and tiles or run the vacuum around the house.”
“Rather than bending over to clean something, squat down and hold the squat,” he continued.
According to wellness coach Esther Avant, anything can be a workout if you think about it as such.
“Rather than thinking exercise has to be in a gym, shifting one’s mindset to think of any form of movement as exercise can make a big difference,” she explained.
“Making the shift to viewing yourself as a regular exerciser because you engage in active “chores” can improve your health, largely because identifying as a healthy person has a ripple effect into other decisions and areas of one’s life.”
How much physical activity should you be doing per week?
Adults aged 19 to 64 should do some type of physical activity every day if they’re able to, NHS guidance states.
They should aim to:
do strengthening activities that work all the major muscle groups – legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders and arms- at least twice a week
do at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity a week or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity a week
spread exercise evenly over four to five days a week, or every day
reduce time spent sitting or lying down and break up long periods of not moving with some activity
It’s not as intimidating as it sounds.
Moderate activity counts as any activity that will raise your heart rate and make you breathe faster and feel warmer.
Examples include brisk walking, water aerobics, riding a bike, dancing, pushing a lawn mower and hiking.
Vigorous activity will make you breath hard and fast, and includes running, swimming, riding a bike fast or on hills, walking up the stairs, and sports, like football, rugby, netball and hockey.
Carrying shopping bags, yoga, Pilates, lifting weights and wheeling a wheel chair all count as muscle strengthening activities.