National Gardening Exercise Day

I like to check on the National Calendar days and I read that National Gardening Exercise Day is observed each year on June 6th and it encourages people to add some stretches and a few extra steps or squats while doing their gardening.

With our wheel barrow wild flower garden, I did lots of deep knee bends when getting the soil ready to plant. Lia did stretching by reaching over to check how the flowers were growing. This is our blog about the old wheel barrow our neighbor was going to threw away! http://themarthareview.com/dont-throw-that-away/

Gardening is a great hobby but can also be therapeutic plus it builds muscles and burns calories. Weeding, digging, planting, pruning, mowing, and raking are some of the gardening activities that are great for working your muscles and for burning calories.

Working in the garden is also healthy exercise as we walk back and forth plus lots of bending up and down while planting or weeding. Stretching while gardening may help to prevent injury, much like it does for athletes.  Gardening is like aerobics, it can increase your heart rate, tone muscles and burn calories. It’s a great stress reducer too and you can exercise your vocal chords if you like to sing when gardening like Lia and I do! Lia is a great weed puller, she grabs the weed and pulls it out, root and all! She definitely gets her daily exercise in the garden.

Lia gets so much exercise from bending down to plant her tree, walking her milkweed flower pot over to the garden and stretching to pick delicious strawberries. Some people may not realize just how much exercising you get with gardening!

Pop and Lia were both doing a workout when pop tilled an area that needed grass seed. Lia raked it smooth, put down the grass seed and watered it everyday. Just look at all the exercising here and it was well worth it by the looks of how beautiful the new grass turned out.

HOW TO OBSERVE #GardeningExerciseDay

Pull those weeds, plant some seeds, and get your muscles moving! Your garden will look great, and you will feel fantastic, too!

Other suggestions to get the most exercise out of your gardening:

• Start slowly. Just like any new workout program, small steps.
• Use the right and left hands equally.  When raking or shoveling, switch hands every 5-10 minutes to give each side a good workout.
• Make sure to breathe. Deep, cleansing breaths bring oxygen to those working muscles.
• Lift with your legs! When lifting, bend your knees. Don’t lift with your back.
• Drink plenty of water.
• Enjoy your garden. Visit it often!

CREDIT for How to Observe: National Gardening Day

But there is one more exercise that the National Garden Exercise Day didn’t think of. That’s exercising your SMILE muscles! Lia was so excited when she picked the first squash from her garden the other day. Can her smile get any bigger?

Are you going to get out in the fresh air and sunshine to celebrate National Gardening Exercise Day for a fun way to exercise?