Are we getting exercise wrong?

One of the pleasures of home ownership, to me, is the work involved in keeping up with a place. That's because I'm one of those people who really does enjoy gardening, painting, fixing things, and (sometimes) even taking a hula hoe to the weeds. There's a primitive satisfaction in a simple job, done well, somehow more so if it involves manual labor rather than something I'd use my brain for.

What I enjoy the most is the same thing I enjoy after a vigorous hike or workout: the pleasant tiredness at the day's end that comes from exertion. It's probably the endorphins. I've been painting ceilings again this week and my shoulders are, frankly, feeling it. But roller painting a ceiling is a great upper body workout, and any ladder work you do, whether with a paintbrush or hammer in hand is, in my opinion, a better workout than Pilates or even yoga for improving balance and working smaller muscle groups we don't normally use in our regular life of standing, sitting and walking.

Even housework is a good workout, if we're honest, although it can certainly become tedious if you don't ever vary your routine or schedule. But if you move furniture to vacuum, stretch to high places when you dust, or put some serious oomph behind your mop, you're building or maintaining muscle mass, flexibility and strength. I despise having to clean behind the toilet but it does get me bending and flexing in some interesting positions, which in the end is probably good for me.

Yet in modern society, the stuff I just described is the work that healthy, middle-class Americans are most likely to hire out, given the chance. Several of my friends will religiously go to the gym or to yoga class, but have a gardener come in to look after the yard, a housekeeper who comes in on Fridays and does all the housework, and a full-service, $35 car wash they like to use every time their car gets dirty. Some of them are even on fixed incomes, and are pinching pennies to pay for their water aerobics class and their car washes (and complaining about it)! 

And it's not so much distaste that makes them opt for bouncing around on an exercise ball instead of running a Swiffer over the floor -- it's that it's never occurred to them to pick up the mantle of housework or gardener themselves. At some point, they just got out of the habit of doing things themselves, and never went back. But if you need exercise, you're healthy and pain-free and there just happens to be a floor mop in the laundry room, well...just sayin'. Take the opportunity where it finds you. 

 The way I look at it, doing these things myself pays me exactly three times. First, it saves me the price of the class or fitness center I'd be attending for my exercise. Second, I get to keep for myself whatever money I'd be paying the occasional "staff" to clean my house or prune my shrubs. And last but not least, it pays the priceless dividends of good health, flexibility and strength, which are worth more than any amount of money, in my opinion.  

And lest you think I'm being preachy, when Big Ag and I were both working, we had both biweekly lawn care and housekeeping; with nice people who came in to do what we didn't have time to do ourselves. But now that I'm retired, I intend to do manual labor as long as I'm able, in the hope that the pushing, pulling, bending, lifting, and kneeling that it takes to clean a house and tend to a yard will keep me fitter than just going to a gym. I still love yoga (more honestly, I hate the stretching but love the result of being more flexible) but I can do it at home as part of my day's tasks now. I have another friend who does the same with four other friends, so it can even be a home-based social activity...and free of charge, of course. 

When I can't do the household chores anymore, I hope I will relinquish things gracefully, and if that means going out to a senior's water aerobics class while someone else cleans around the back of the toilet, so be it. But for now, I'm all about the free workout I get from doing manual labor -- the under-appreciated set of tasks I used to pay a bunch of under-appreciated people to do.