How to Turn Weeding into an Effective Workout for Fitness and Fat Loss

Any activity can burn some calories, but just burning calories does not necessarily result in improved fitness or fat loss. Performing appropriately challenging workouts that stimulate positive changes in your body is the key to an effective exercise program. Well-designed cardio or resistance training workouts are the best way to achieve your goals, but common activities, such as weeding, can also be made into effective workouts.

Weeding is not naturally a good activity for increasing fitness or losing fat, because it involves repetitive movements of small muscles and it can put a lot of stress on your knees or back. This tends to result more in developing overused and overworked muscles than creating actual improvements in your body. However, you can turn weeding into an effective exercise by actually adding exercises to your weeding.

This can be done by weeding for a certain amount of time and then take a break from the weeding and performing one to three exercises. For example, you could pull 10 weeds and then perform some squats and push-ups. Then keep alternating back and forth between weeding and doing some exercises. The exercises can be anything you want from weighted exercises to sprints to abdominal work. The important thing is to make the exercises challenging for your ability level.

By alternating the weeding with exercises, you are actually doing two beneficial things at the same time. First, the exercises make weeding into a more demanding activity that causes physical improvements and stimulates fat loss. Also, by interrupting the weeding, you are breaking up the repetitive movements. This allows your muscles to recover and helps prevent possible overuse issues, particularly in your hands, forearms, and low back.

Adding exercises to your weeding activity will increase the amount of time it takes, but on the plus side, you can count the activity as a workout, so you won't have to do any other exercise that day. The toughest thing will just be figuring out what exercises you want to use between the bouts of weeding. Just be creative and pick exercises that you are able to perform correctly and are appropriately challenging.

One final safety note, it is always important to think about form and posture when doing any activity. People often pay attention to form when working out, but it is common to forget about posture and body alignment when doing activities like weeding. Poor posture, such as excessive rounding of the lower spine, increases your chances of becoming injured or developing chronic muscle problems.

Source:

14 years of experience and education in health and fitness