Accidental Fitness: How to Get Lean While You Clean

Cleaning is possibly the most loathsome task of daily life, but sprucing up the house could help you to improve your fitness and lose weight. This is according to a new survey by fitted furniture retailer Betta Living, which found that the average UK adult spends eight hours per week doing housework, and has the potential to improve their wellness and lose a pound a week.

However, based on the data from 2,000 UK adults, the majority of us aren’t stretching ourselves to our full fat burning potential and are missing out on crucial wellbeing benefits as we dust, sweep and polish our homes. This is because you tend to clean your home in short bursts, and don’t really ‘go for it’. Yet personal trainer Faye Tomlinson asserts that it is possible to make the most of the 416 hours per year you spend cleaning by converting those wasted hours into fat-burning exercises.

According to Faye, ‘Eight hours per week sounds like a lot of time to be doing activity. In theory this should be enough exercise to keep the average person fit and slim.  However, it’s not how long we spend doing an activity, it’s the effort involved and how long we are keeping the muscle under tension that counts.  It’s not enough to do little bits throughout the week – it’s vital to incorporate high intense bursts so we can feel the burn!’

She explains, ‘By applying the general rules of exercise to housework you can get lean while you clean and could lose an extra one pound in weight a week – just think how trim you could be over a year of doing cleaning aerobics! For example, mix in 10 minute cardio sessions (mopping, hovering) with body weight sessions (squatting, lunging, calf raises) to get your blood pumping which will raise your heart rate and get a light sweat on; maximising fat burning results!’

And the best room for getting the most out of your cleaning calorie-cutting potential? ‘The kitchen is the ultimate fat buster, with the most pounds to be lost through mopping, window cleaning and scrubbing the floor,’ says Faye. ‘Bathrooms, bedrooms and the lounge respectively came in as the next best rooms in the house to carry out your “lean-cleaning” activity in, from cleaning the bath or shower through to hovering and dusting.’

Categories: housework, Kitchen Cleaning, Weight Loss

Husbands Who Share Housework Aren’t Rewarded in the Bedroom

Researchers from the USA and Spain have found that the sexual health of husbands who help out with household chores may be at risk, as they tend to have less sex than men in so-called “traditional” marriages where housework is done exclusively by the wife. Reporting in the journal American Sociological Review, the authors added that in faithful relationships, the sexual wellness of the wife whose husband is involved in housework obviously also suffers, as clearly this means she has less sex too.

Previous studies have indicated that married men generally have more sex in exchange for doing housework, but these results were based on studies that did not take into account which chores the husbands did. According to the researchers of this study, who are all sociologists, sex is not a bargaining chip in marriage, but it is associated with the kinds of chores each partner completes.

Married couples had sex more often when women did the cooking, cleaning and shopping and the men did the gardening, electrics and plumbing, car maintenance and paid the bills. According to co-author Julie Brines, professor of sociology at the University of Washington, ‘The results show that gender still organises quite a bit of everyday life in marriage. In particular, it seems that the gender identities husbands and wives express through the chores they do also help structure sexual behaviour.’

However, if you think you can ditch the marigolds, sprawl out in front of the TV and still get lucky, think again. According to lead author, Sabino Kornrich, men should not assume from these findings that they should not become involved in traditionally female household tasks, such as shopping, cleaning or cooking. Kornrich warned that if you do this, the wellbeing of your marriage can suffer, as ‘men who refuse to help around the house could increase conflict in their marriage and lower their wives’ marital satisfaction.’

Brines, an expert in family and household dynamics, commented that it’s no surprise that there was more sex among the traditional couples. ‘If anything surprised us, it was how robust the connection was between a traditional division of housework and sexual frequency,’ she said. ‘Marriage today isn’t what it was 30 or 40 years ago, but there are some things that remain important. Sex and housework are still key aspects of sharing a life, and both are related to marital satisfaction and how spouses express their gender identity,’ she added.

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Husbands Who Share Housework Aren’t Rewarded in the Bedroom

Categories: housework, Less Sex, Research

Revealed: Why Housework is Bad for Men’s Sex Lives

In these days of gender equality, it’s only natural for a wife to want her husband to his fair share of the household chores. But there might be some unintended consequences of this sharing that neither of you expected if the results of American research are to be believed.

The research has revealed that men who do more of the housework have less sex than the ones who do more traditionally masculine chores.

The chores most associated with women are cooking, cleaning and shopping, while gardening, taking care of the car and paying the bills are often seen as the province of the male partner.

The joint US-Spanish study was published in the American Sociological Review and is entitled Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage. The study analysed data taken from the National Survey of Families and Households and only involved straight, married couples in the US.

According to the research, men claimed to have had sex an average of 5.2 times in the month before the survey was carried out. Women reported that they had had sex 5.6 times.

However, the study revealed that both men and women in those homes where the division of household labour was based on more traditional gendered roles said they were having more sex.

The researchers, from the Centre for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid and the University of Washington, noted that their finds suggest that gendered scripts around sexual activity exist in certain households. And they believe adopting the roles most traditionally associated with men and women are important to couples’ sexual desire.

The study’s findings might be seized upon by men as a way to escape doing their fair share of the housework but the study’s authors concluded that was a recipe for marital discord because women are unhappy when their husbands don’t help around the house.

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Revealed: Why Housework is Bad for Men’s Sex Lives

Categories: housework, men, Sex