The fast pace of modern life often means that it’s difficult to make household chores and fitness a priority. Luckily, you can save a lot of time (and money) through getting your work out as you clean your house. By incorporating a work out into your housework, you can turn everyday activities into weight loss and strength-building tasks.
- Make a playlist
Fast-paced, energetic music will keep you moving throughout the day. By choosing energetic music you like to dance to, you’ll find yourself cleaning the house with a lot more enthusiasm than usual. Dancing burns a lot of calories, which you can combine with cleaning for a great aerobic workout.
- Plan your cleaning
To get a good workout from cleaning your house, you need to be putting in a lot of effort and moving round as much as possible. A great way to do this is to plan the order in which you clean your rooms. By maximising the amount of times you have to go up and down stairs to clean your house, you’ll burn more calories. You can make this even more intense by running up and down the stairs between rooms.
- Use your body
Build up your muscle through turning dusting, polishing, mopping and vacuuming into a full body work out, and through stretching and bending you can keep yourself limber. If you’re cleaning your windows, for example, combine fast circular motions with long stretches to tone your muscles. To ensure both sides of your body benefit equally from this, switch hands regularly.
The perfect exercise for your waistline, legs, thighs and arms is to switch your mop from side to side as you clean your floors. Make sure to reach and pull back with full extension for the best results of the exercise.
Getting on your hands and knees to scrub your floors offers an amazing workout for your shoulders and arms. For maximum results, make sure you have to reach out and stretch to scrub the floor.
- Get rid of modern conveniences
Using modern conveniences can save you time, but leave you with fewer work out opportunities. Rather than using a dishwasher, washing your dishes by hand will give you an extra work out for your arms, and you can use the opportunity to complete standing exercises to tone up your leg muscles. By beating eggs with a hand whisk, kneading dough, chopping vegetables and mixing cakes, you can tone up your arms. Kneading dough gives you a particularly good work out for your arms and shoulders, as you need to take at least five minutes to do it.
- Include grocery shopping into your work out
Whilst it may be convenient to get in the car and do your weekly shopping as quickly as possible, it can be a great opportunity to get more exercise. Walking to the supermarket burns calories; it’s better for the environment and will save you petrol money. If you’re worried you won’t be able to carry it all home, a little rolling trolley is a great way to lighten the load. If you’re completing a big shop, why not park your car at the far end of the car park so that you have just that little bit further to walk?
Then lift and stretch each time you put your bags in and out of the car, and again when you unpack the bags into your cupboards.
Each one of these tasks offers just a little way you can incorporate a work out into your household cleaning, simply and effectively. If you can minimise the amount of time you spend cleaning your house and going to the gym, you’ll have more time for the things you love.
