If you live someplace cold, like winter and snow cold, then you know the value of chopping wood. It keeps you warm twice. You get fired up chopping that wood (not to mentioned it’s great for your physique) but when you burn it in the fireplace, it warms you again. If it’s cold enough, you’ll volunteer for that work just to stay warm.
(Source: imgflip.com)
Gardening is fashioned in the same way; it feeds a healthy lifestyle in more ways than one.
Once you get it, you start to see why people tend to garden more as they age. It connects us to the earth through body, mind and soul like nothing else.
For young adults, there are four immediate arguments for toiling in the soil. Why wait until you are aging beyond your body to learn these things?
Gardening Burns Calories
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)
Depending on the rigor of the work, gardening burns from 200 to 600 calories an hour. That’s about the same as most workouts, especially if you consider the 200 end of the range is likely pulling weeds.
The process of burning calories is about more than just losing weight. We burn calories all the time. Doing so, is good for your system, just like running a car is good for the car.
How you burn those calories is just as important as how your burn the gas in your car. Gas burned on the freeway is far better for traditional cars (not hybrids) than the stop and go of city driving.
In much the same way, for all of the reasons captured in this blog, gardening is a superior way to burn those calories.
Gardening Uses Your Body Dynamically
(Source: acefitness.org)
A good gym workout will cycle through all three plains of motion, but most will not.
Most workouts move forward and backward. They often miss side-to-side, and rarely see rotational movement.
Gardening doesn’t tolerate singular planes of motion. You are bending, side-stepping, twisting and lifting more dynamical than 90% of the workout at the gym.
This is the way we used to exercise, back before humans needed to exercise. Pre-civilization there were no monthly contracts. There were also no washing machines, dishwashers, cars, etc. Everything was done by hand.
Gardening is the original workout.
You Can Grow Healthy Food, Duh
(Source: divinehomecare.com)
This should be obvious, but gardening allows you to grow healthy food. This is food, that you get to eat if you don’t give it away. That’s pretty cool.
When we talk about chopping wood and how it warms us twice, this is the perfect example of veggies rewarding you twice.
You burn quality calories making them grow, which almost literally translates into the vegetables themselves (since it takes calories for those veggies to grow), eating your spent calories back.
As a calorie source, veggies are where we take our most important micronutrients. You could, in theory, burn cheeseburgers to grow and eat sweet peppers.
Working the Land Promotes Quality Family Time
(Source: clovertoys.com)
If you garden by yourself, that’s your prerogative, but what a great time to share with family.
Taking time to teach someone what you’ve learned about gardening echoes the annals of time. This is what humans have done since we started gardening; taught the next generation what to do.
This oral experience is timeless.
Not to mention, it’s valuable time to the person learning. It’s far more valuable than another trip to Six Flags, lost in the myriad of theme park memories.
Of course, the conversation doesn’t have to stick to gardening. Quiet time spent together is the time where we sometimes find the strength to finally confront difficult subjects.
(Source: clovertoys.com)
Even if it’s one day a week, what better way to get your fitness on than tilling the Earth? More than just your body, your mind and soul will thank you for this time.
Plus, think how jealous your friends will be when they see the awesome things you’ve grown because you keep posting pics of them on Instagram?
#gardening