Don't kid yourself about housework being good exercise like my mother did; housework should never be considered as a form of aerobic exercise.
Fact is, if you're convinced you have a built-in cardio regime in the form of housework, it can be very dangerous to think this way. That’s what happened to my mother.
I’m a certified personal trainer and I’m about to shred to smithereens this myth that housework should count as cardiorespiratory exercise.
My mother has been doing housework all her life, and has told doctors, upon being asked if she exercises, that she maintains a 10-room house with a staircase that she’s “up and down all day long.” And all while my mother was doing her “exercise,” dangerous plaque was building up in her arteries.
If you believe that a staircase in your house gets you off the hook from structured, rhythmic cardio exercise, your head’s in the clouds.
My mother never performed structured aerobic exercise, save for about one year out of her life when she did brisk 40 minute walks and home step aerobics. But then she quit, and over the next 17 years, the plaque in her coronary arteries piled up.
All this time, my mother had believed (despite my rebuttals) that housework is good exercise. In fact, so hardcore was she in the belief that housework is good exercise, that after she underwent emergency quintuple bypass surgery, she droned numerous times, “How could this happen to me?”
Don’t be fooled by a few studies touting housework as great exercise. An example is the report in Breast Cancer Research stating that “vigorous activity” may protect against breast cancer, and “heavy housework” is considered “vigorous.”
Here are the flaws: The following activities were considered “heavy” housework: chopping wood, digging, heavy yard work, washing windows and scrubbing floors. Do you see the problem?
Chopping wood is wonderful, rigorous exercise, but…come on, how often does the average American woman chop wood? Digging can be strenuous, but…how often are American women digging up to a high heart rate?
And what’s “heavy yard work”? Is it pushing around heavy wheelbarrows and handling 40 pound bags of peat moss, mulch and garden stones?
As for women who indeed climb trees, saw off limbs, drag the heavy limbs around and grind down tree stumps, how often do they do this (save for professionals)?
Chopping wood and digging are not in the same category as washing windows and scrubbing floors. How is washing windows in a house “heavy”?
I did this as a child and never panted. How does window washing get in the same league as chopping wood? Is a bottle of Windex as heavy as an axe?
The BCR report also places window washing and scrubbing floors in the same category as cycling up hills, fast jogging, running and competitive tennis!
Scrubbing floors, washing windows, heavy yard work and digging do not comprise the mainstay of the housework that the vast majority of American women perform.
Housework is no good as exercise for the following reasons:
- It’s often done under emotional duress (e.g., getting the home tidied up for the in-laws’ visit, cleaning up after careless teenagers, etc.).
- It often involves poor biomechanics (e.g., potentially harmful back positions, lifting and reaching in ways that can strain shoulder tendons).
- It’s haphazard rather than rhythmic and methodical, and is not bilateral (symmetrical) to the body (e.g., who doesn’t use the same arm most of the time to push the vacuum cleaner?).
The British Women’s Heart and Health Study reports that women who did gardening, heavy housework and slow walking (and no structured exercise like group fitness classes or weight workouts) were in poor physical condition and often overweight.
But women who briskly walked two and a half hours a week were much fitter, slimmer and had slower resting heart rates.
Don’t be fooled like my mother that housework is good exercise and excuses you from the treadmill, elliptical, step classes, Tae Bo DVDs, power walking, or jogging.
If you believe that housework counts as exercise, you may end up with a massive heart attack -- like my mother almost did -- she underwent the bypass surgery before the heart attack happened – but over 700,000 Americans every year aren’t so lucky.
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