How Your Household Chores Become Your Housework Exercise Regimen

We all need motivation to pick up the mop or vacuum and starting cleaning the house, right? To be honest, you can think of countless other things to do than cleaning the home in the evening after work or God forbid, on the weekend.

Would you like a little motivation?

What if you discovered you were burning a significant amount of calories during this household chores workout? Sure, while no one will fool housework exercise with HIIT or boot camp and you shouldn’t completely abandon your workout regimen, you’ll be surprised at how many calories you burn cleaning your home.

Well, how many calories does cleaning burn?

We recently examined an article at Good Housekeeping and Calorie Lab and came away with this housework infographic to detail the energy you’re expending as you're using household chores as exercises.

Vacuuming

Get out the Dyson and take it for a trip around your entire home. If the average individual is taking 132 minutes to vacuum their entire house while burning 176 calories per hour then you can expect to burn 387 calories every week utilizing your vacuum. Next time you spot some dust bunnies around the house, use it as motivation to reach your body weight goals!

Doing Laundry

This one shocked us. If you factor in loading, unloading, folding and ironing into the equation, the average laundry session will burn 700 calories! Whoa! This doesn’t even include the obstacle course of carrying your laundry down or up your stairs while avoiding tripping over the kids’ toys on the floor.

Cooking and Preparing Food

Dinner time! With the usual dinner preparation of chopping, peeling, retrieving, et al, you’ve burned 100+ calories to create your gourmet feast! If you’re doing this throughout the entire week it equals to burning 700+ calories. This makes a little more room to now eat your favorite meals and leave a little room for dessert! Don't forget about the cleanup after the meal either. Washing dishes after your meal will also help you burn more calories.

Decluttering

Sorting the garbage/recycling and putting away your kids’ toys are yeoman’s work. These decluttering tasks seem to rear their ugly head every day in some capacity. But, you can expect to burn through 240 calories in your daily decluttering; a similar amount to an evening walk around the block. If you have more than two children, well, you’re in for a good workout… and a long evening.

Mopping

We’re all tired of mopping up our kids’ spills from breakfast, lunch and dinner but it does come with the benefit of torching 405 calories throughout the week. For this reason, it’s another great addition to the workout you get from cleaning your house. So grab that mop and that bucket, and get to burning some calories!

Cleaning Windows

While it may not sculpt Arnold like arms like bicep curls can, cleaning the windows can give you a serious arm and shoulder workout! Typically, you can expect to burn 231 calories per hour scrubbing the windows around the home.

Who knew you could expend so much energy using household chores as exercise? Sure, it’s tough to get yourself motivated to do these regular chores but once finished you’ll be the beneficiary of a cleaner house and an active lifestyle.

How many calories does cleaning burn? A lot. Feel free to share this infographic of housework exercises to your followers, but don't forget to give Goodhouse Keeping and Bin There Dump That credit.

We'd love to see your progress, use the hashtags #ChoreThatBurnThis and #Fit4Residential and tag us on Instagram @binthere.dumpthat

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How Many Calories Does Cleaning Burn?

With so many ways to clean, you’ll be happy to know there’s just as many ways you can burn calories. If you add all of the above methods, you’re looking at a total of roughly 4,100 calories burned per week! And if you want to burn more calories, adding an extra 20 minutes to your cleaning routine each day can significantly increase the number of calories burned each week. There are plenty of other methods we didn’t even discuss, like mowing the lawn or washing the car!

Don’t forget that it’s not all about how many calories you burn; rest is just as important. Spacing out your chores throughout the week is a great way to balance a healthy lifestyle. So remember do drink plenty of water, put on your sweats, and get to ready to burn more calories while you clean the house.