Manual Labour For Fitness

I agree with you one hundred percent! I am a stay-at-home mom and I must say that I do manual labor everyday. There are just too many household chores I could think of that I can consider as my form of exercise. I find these chores to be helpful in maintaining my physical health because I don't really have the budget and time to go to a gym. Just a simple chore of sweeping the floor from the upper floor to the lower floor already keeps me up and going everyday.

 

It is a free way to get some physical activity, especially when you have chores to get done or if your livelihood is actually based on manual labor. Things like doing the laundry manually, getting down to do clean the floors, and gardening. Even playing with my kid and my dog also counts. But if you must do a lot of it, make sure you are also getting supplements as other factors may cause you to get sick.

 

I agree that manual labor is a good way to help stay in shape we work at a farm weekly and it really whips you in shape. I do have a gym memeber ship but it was a gift and I love going to the gy but i find that I feel like I should be doing something at home like mowing, cleaning etc when I am there.

 

Oh most certainly. This immediately reminded me of a job that I had a couple of years ago, and it was pretty intense lifting and moving, and I walked out of there everyday knowing that I got my workout in. The same goes for things around the house, and I always try to keep busy for this exact reason. Moving around and reaching and having a little hustle going is a great way to get a simple exercise in. Good stuff, and thanks for sharing.

 

Absolutely. Gyms are completely unnecessary unless you need the motivation via other people/trainers etc, but any movement is good movement (unless you're lifting; there is a right and wrong way to do that to avoid injury and most people in gyms are using momentum to lift.. not exactly safe and healthy lol). I don't know when we started believing health and fitness meant exhausting ourselves. Just keep moving and eat right! Whatever is most sustainable for you.. that's the right fit.

 

That's a good idea, no doubt, but only if your goal is to maintain your physique. If you want to tone or enhance a particular body part, say your abs or arms, then manual labor alone won't suffice. You really need a specific kind of workout for a specific kind of body toning. I do see a number of blue collar workers getting toned without the need for gym. Their job requires a lot of strength, endurance and stamina. Their body is honed in the process.

 

I worked in a restaurant as my forum of a fitness workout. I think I walked about 3 miles during each shift of work and then you had to lift the heavy plates and move chairs and tables often. A very good way to workout and make money. Some people do not use walking or physical working as a way to stay fit when working in a restaurant, some of my co-workers only moved when they had to very slowly.

 

Like the others here, I have to agree because I used to do that. During weekends, I would be up early to mop the floor of the entire house as a form of my exercise. We have this thing called coconut husk which we use to polish the floor by using the foot. That's a very good exercise that would give me a good amount of sweat. However, I am now too old for those physical activities and I'm only good for bending and stretching exercises. But for the younger generation, that kind of exercise will give you double benefits although you need to have perseverance.

 

I don't work out, however, I do manual labor to burn calories. I always walk to the grocery store (a replacement of jogging). I carry heavy load of food to my home (replacement to weight lifting). I also do cleaning (better than walking on a tread mill) gardening etc. House work is very tiring, however, it is also rewarding because you don't have to exercise.

 

I think that manual labor is a great way to burn calories. No matter what you are doing, if you are outside and moving around it is probably going to be pretty healthy. Gardening helps me burn calories because it is something that I take very seriously and it is also something that is good for me because of the calories I burn and the healthy foods that I get out of it in return.

 

I agree this is a great way to get exercise. You can look up exercise calculators on the web and some of them will break down how much calories you burn doing regular chores. Grocery shopping for one, is a real winner. You burn tons of calories doing that. I cleaned out a messy old room today, that counts!!

 

I have no hesitation in accepting the fact that manual labor is perhaps the best exercise that saves you money in multiple ways. You can save on garden, house help and other smaller jobs by doing them yourself and save money while keeping physically active.

 

I agree with your views to some extent. But at the same time it cannot be considered as a substitute for exercise unless and until you engage yourself in hard labor. Take the case of walking, ideally you should start your walking at a slower pace, then increase the speed and you can reduce the speed as you near the end. But its effect will be reduced considerably if you do walking in a more relaxed mood. Yes, we can burn fat by doing daily activities like walking and washing clothes but not up to the extent it should be. It can definitely add to burning of fat but we should not stop our daily exercise because of this.

But if you engage in activities that demand high amount of manual labor I think there is no need of a separate exercise session. It can burn fat faster than exercise.

 

There are a lot of manual labor jobs that are quite hard, physically, but they do not work your muscles the same way that dedicated exercising does.
Lifting and carrying heavy loads involves only a very limited range of motion.
In fact, the term "muscle bound" was applied not to weight lifters but to stevedores who carried such loads.

Ask yourself this... Can you think of any employment that would require an aerobic heartrate and heavy breathing for at least 20 minutes at a time? Or that involves moving all the body's limbs through their full range of motion?

 

Manual labor in the exercise point of you is already a form of exercise. It lacks a formal sequence or order of exercise. Unlike going to the gym for a workout, you have to follow the procedures and then the next, and the next until you are done for a certain hour. Manual labor is an informal way of doing an exercise but it is not actually an exercise it is a routine whether you like it or not like going upstairs, carrying or transporting a load or a furniture to another place, among others.

 

I couldn't agree with the OP anymore, and in the old days so to speak people were often fitter than what they are now because their work and home life required them to be a lot more physically active. While when it comes to employment computers and machinery have taken a lot of the workload on board, but that doesn't mean that we still can't be physically active around the home.

People tend to be content to finish work and sit around playing computer games or watching TV but then go and spend money on a gym membership when really if we took on more physical hobbies then we wouldn't have to do that.

 

Agreed, it depends on what kind of manual work are you involved with. I know a persona who works in a tire factory's loading section and handles hundreds of truck tires manually everyday. His arms are strong but rest of the body is not matching with his arms.

 

Exactly, it will not give exercise to your whole body. As @pwarbi has rightly said in the old days there were very strong people just because of the work they did daily. They did all types of works that demand physical labor like farming. But today's world is dominated by machines and there is only limited need for any human effort. Almost all activities are being done by machines. Just think of a computer professional who spend most of his life in front of a computer without doing any exercise.

So following an exercise routine is very important to lead a healthy life. Lack of exercise coupled with fast food culture is really killing us at an early stage or forcing us to live on medication for the rest of our lives.

 

I am the gardener in our home and I find doing garden work as part of my exercise (not to mention that I save on labor expenses). When there is a house repair being done, I help the carpenter or the mason in mixing the cement. I perspire a lot and I know it is good for my health. Instead of going to the gym, doing hard labor has a double purpose and I'm sure most of those practical people around are doing the same thing - working hard for the exercise.