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.’
