Introduction
You don’t have to join a gym or buy an expensive elliptical machine to get a good workout. All you need is some household chores. If you’re looking for an easy way to burn calories without spending lots of money on equipment, try doing household chores that will help you lose weight—and tone your muscles at the same time! There are plenty of ways to get active without going outside or having any fancy equipment:
Vacuuming burns 3 calories per minute, or 180 calories per hour
- Vacuuming is a great way to burn calories.
- Cleanliness is next to godliness.
- Vacuuming helps keep your house clean, which results in better air quality for you and your family members.
- Vacuuming helps keep your house from getting dirty, which means it will require less cleaning overall!
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Sweeping burns 3 calories per minute, or 180 calories per hour
Sweeping burns 3 calories per minute. That’s 180 calories per hour. Sweeping can be a great way to get exercise and burn some extra calories, provided you push yourself! Try sweeping faster or longer to burn more calories!
Dusting burn 2.5 calories per minute, or 150 calories per hour
Dusting is one of the most common household chores—and it’s a healthy one. Dusting can help you breathe easier, as dust is a major cause of allergies and asthma. In fact, some research has shown that people who dust on a regular basis have fewer respiratory problems than those who don’t dust at all.
That said, there are certain types of dust that can be harmful to your health:
- Mold spores
- Asbestos (a mineral)
- Lead paint
Mopping burns 4.5 calories per minute, or 270 calories per hour
Mopping is a great way to burn calories and prevent slips and falls. It also helps to keep your house clean, which can prevent the spread of germs.
The average person burns about 4.5 calories per minute when mopping, or 270 calories per hour. If you want to really challenge yourself, try doing this chore on an incline!
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Washing dishes burns 3.5 calories per minute, or 210 calories per hour
Washing dishes is one of the best ways to burn calories because it’s so easy. If you’re not already doing this, start now! You can burn 3.5 calories per minute while washing dishes through vigorous arm movements and extension of your arms above your head.
This will also strengthen your shoulders, back and core muscles, which are all important for good posture and balance during other activities throughout the day.
Dishwashing is a great way to keep yourself moving throughout the day if you’re feeling tired or lazy. If nothing else, make sure that you do any kind of household chore with gusto in order to maximize its calorie-burning potential!
Scrubbing the bathroom burns 4.5 calories per minute, or 270 calorie sper hour
- If you want to burn the most calories, use a loofah mitt.
- For every minute of scrubbing, you’ll burn 4.5 calories (270 total per hour).
- Scrubbing is a great way to get in shape for your next trip to the beach!
If you’re looking for an excuse to be lazy and sit on the couch all day after work, here’s another one: scrubbing your bathroom!
The physical activity involved in cleaning can help you lose weight—especially if you use a loofah mitt instead of just rinsing out with water or using a spray bottle. These two household chores burn more than 270 calories per hour of scrubbing or spraying (which equates to roughly one glass of Red Bull).
Gardening burns 4.5 calories per minute, or 270 calorie sper hour
Gardening is one of the best ways to burn calories. You can get some fresh air and exercise at the same time! Anyone can garden, but seniors in particular find it an excellent way to stay healthy.
It’s also a great way for people living in apartments or other small spaces to be active. With gardening you don’t need a gym membership and you don’t even have to leave your home!
Mowing the lawn burns 5.5 calories per minute, or 330 calorie sper hour
Mowing the lawn burns 5.5 calories per minute, or 330 calorie sper hour. It is a good way to lose weight, if you mow for an hour a day. If you would like to burn more calories, use a push mower instead of power mower.
Raking leaves burns 5.5 calories per minute, or 330 calorie sper hour
Raking leaves is a great way to burn calories. A person weighing 150 pounds can burn 5.5 calories per minute raking leaves, or 330 calories per hour.
If you rake faster, you’ll move more quickly and burn even more calories. If you rake longer than an hour, your total calorie count will rise accordingly. Finally, if your lawn has hills or slopes (as many lawns do), then that adds extra work for your arms and shoulders—so expect to burn even more!
You can burn a lot of calories with household tasks
The website FitDay.com estimates that you can burn between 75 and 500 calories per hour doing household chores, depending on the task. The site’s calorie burn calculator (http://www.fitday.com/fitness/calories-burned-exercises/) gives an example of how many calories you would burn picking up a piece of paper:
- Picking up a piece of paper burns 1 calorie per sheet.* If you were to pick up 10 pieces of paper every day, that would add up to 100 calories burned per week.* If you were picking up paper for one hour each day, it would take approximately 3 months before your extra efforts started adding up to noticeable weight loss or weight maintenance!
Conclusion
If you want to lose weight and stay healthy, you need to burn more calories than you eat. Some people are looking for ways to make this easier, but it’s actually not hard at all if you just focus on doing simple chores around the house.
By vacuuming or sweeping once every week or two weeks instead of once every month, mopping every other day instead of once per week or less often than that (depending on how often your floors get dirty), doing dishes by hand rather than using a dishwasher all the time could save hundreds of calories each year!