Dig This Workout!

By Barbara Call Bourassa

Do you love gardening? Do you get a great thrill out of finding the perfect spot in the dirt, digging a hole, and planting a bunch of fresh fruits, vegetables, or flowers? You may not know it, but gardening (as well as yardwork and lawncare) is a significant form of exercise. What’s more, at least one study has shown that older women who garden have stronger bones than women doing every other type of exercise except weight lifting.

A Winning Combination
None of this comes as any surprise to Charlie Nardozzi, a senior horticulturist with the National Gardening Association in South Burlington, Vermont. "Gardening is good exercise because it exercises a variety of muscle groups," he says. "Most garden activities are moderate, such as raking, planting flowers, moving soil, or dragging bags of soil. But if you do a variety of these nonstop for 30 minutes, that constitutes a workout."

Adding in higher-level activities can raise the heart rate and increase the number of calories burned. These tasks include turning over soil, digging holes, raking your lawn, hoeing, hauling mulch or topsoil in a wheelbarrow or cart, or pushing a lawn mower or fertilizer spreader, Nardozzi notes.

And if you're really looking for a good sweat, try more strenuous garden work, such as chopping and stacking wood, shoveling dirt or mulch, laying sod, pulling up and hauling away brush, pruning branches with a handsaw, or installing a lawn.

Better Bones
In addition to the calories you'll burn, you may also be preventing bone loss, says Lori W. Turner, professor of health science and senior scientist at the Center for Metabolic Bone Disease at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In 2003 Turner and her colleagues at the University of Arkansas released a study which examined what types of physical activity, including jogging, aerobics, swimming, gardening, and the like, led to the strongest bones.

"The two activities that correlated with the highest bone density were weight training and gardening," she says. "The exciting part for me was to find an activity that people like to do!" In the study, which looked at the physical activities of more than 3,300 women, close to 1,100 were doing gardening, compared with just 50 who were doing weight training, she notes. The more people like to do an activity, the more they are likely to do it, she notes. Also, because people who garden often set out with a specific goal in mind, they tend to do it longer, which might help explain the study results, she notes.

In addition to burning calories and maintaining bone strength, gardening also has other benefits. For starters, it gets people out in the sun, which helps the skin produce vitamin D, Turner notes. There's also the immediate gratification of seeing the results of your hard work, or the satisfaction of displaying your own flowers or eating your homegrown vegetables. Being outdoors and around nature can be very calming, notes Nardozzi, and all that fresh air is good for getting oxygen into your system.

If you're heading out to the yard this weekend, however, keep some tips in mind so you don't overdo it. For some, it may be easier to ease into gardening by spending one hour each day after work outdoors instead of putting in 8 hours on a weekend. Either way, "spend a little time stretching, as chances are your muscles aren't used to this level of activity," Nardozzi notes. Be sure to take breaks, drink plenty of water, and wear sunscreen or bug spray to protect yourself from the outdoor elements.