Atleast my cow-orker so claims. He said it did not count as exercise because it is start-stop activity and thus an Anaerobic activity and doesn’t help your health. He also said only continuous vigorous activity does your blood pressure d weight any good.
Another friend said that if you use a whirlpool after exercise that you don’t get as toned as you would if you just suffered with the pain that the whirlpool eases. Apparently the whirlpool washes away muscle firmness with the pain.
No I can’t. but I can say that yoga is a stop start excercise, and I’m sweating my balls off by the end of it and I have noticeably improved muscle tone.
as to the whirlpool claims…that sounds like UTTER CRAP…but that’s just my opinion…I could be wrong.
He admits it is work, but says that it is not nearly as heathful for you as real exercise like bike riding.He stated that as far as improving or maintianing your health, time spent gardening is wasted time.
Let’s see - when I’m gardening, I’m carrying and bending and squatting and lifting and climbing and sweating and swearing - yep - qualifies as exercise in MY book.
And regarding the whirlpool theory, may I just say: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Now I’ve heard everything…
Of course, that’s just one woman’s opinion, but I am, after all, me.
Gardening is exercise, but unless you do it vigorously enough to significantly raise your heart rate it is unlikely that you will lose much weight doing it. However, any activity is better than nothing and it will improve your health overall.
I’m not sure about the whirlpool claim, but it sounds bogus.
Well, I guess your co-worker needs to talk to my dad. His exercise comes from gardening. He is 78 and in great health. If it weren’t for that pesky skin cancer stuff from his years of working in the sun he would be perfect. Exercise is more than just creating muscles. Gardening tones the mind as well as the body.
A while ago, I tilled a spot in our yard-- about 8’ x 3’, 2’ deep-- to prepare it for some rose plants. It took me over three hot, hard, dirty, sweaty hours. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as much fun as it sounds.
My 90-minute, four-mile walks are a piece of cake by comparison.
You might want to explain to your co-worker that the reason we consider “exercise” as a desirable and separate activity from “work” is that most of us don’t do work like our grandfathers did. Does he believe that the railroad workers who kept the cars and locomotives in shape came home from their stop-and-start jobs and ran for an hour to get that aerobic benefit? Does he believe that the steelworkers came in from the mills and swam 20 laps at the Y?
“Exercise” as an activity that we “need” to do is a result of our modern sedentary lifestyle. In general, workers today don’t do as much brute physical gruntwork as used to be the norm. So that’s supplemented by health-minded people with “leisure-time activity” that consists of the latest “scientific” findings about what gives our bodies the greatest benefit in the least time…cause we’re all in a hurry, dontchaknow?
Tell you friend to relax a little and give an older man a break…the idea that if you’re not running 5 miles a day at 72 you’re letting yourself go is ridiculous, even though I hear similar sentiments all the time, in conversations, in commercials, in TV shows, in movies.
We Americans have a tendency to go overboard with our national obsessions. The fitness wave is definitely in that category…
Funniest thing I’ve heard in a while. As has already been observed here, tilling is definitely exercise. Digging a nice big hole in hard, heavy clay is also no walk in the park.
And if you really want some entertainment, try whacking down a six by six foot stand of pure thistle. Nothing else comes close, except maybe harvesting sugarcane in July in Florida.
Gardening burns about 350 calories an hour, approximately the same as walking or cycling at a moderate pace, but less than jogging or running. If my 3 hours of gardening yesterday doesn’t count as exercise, I may as well just sit on the couch and have another cookie.
One of the things which is often stressed in articles on weight loss is to be active. It’s usually recommended that one have a specific excercise routine, but aside from that, simply make certain that you’re using your body more. While gardening may not be anaerobic, it’s far from sedentary, as anyone who has weeded, hoed, shoveled, etc. can attest to.
All body movement is a form of excercise - it just varies in focus and effectiveness.
The “sustained activity” idea is a myth. I’ve seen at least one study that shows that 10 minutes of exercise 3 times a day burns more calories that 30 minutes of exercise once a day.
Your second friend is a victim of the no-pain, no-gain school of thought. Muscles get toned and larger because exercise causes mcro-tears in the muscle tissue, which then get repaired. The pain is caused by a buildup of lactic acid in the muscles. The whirlpool causes blood vessels in the muscle tissue to expand, allowing more blood flow, which speeds up the lactic acid removal, relaxes the muscle and allows more nutrients to reach the muscle tissue. So it actually probably helps with muscle formation.
There’s a lot of superstition and unproved theory in sports and exercise. Lots of people who are in good shape decide the way they like to exercise must be the right way, so they come up with a theory to explain it, write a book and it becomes ensconced in the exercise lore.
