Walking vs Household Chores: Which Burns More Calories? Click to learn more

Combining walking with household chores can create a well-rounded, active lifestyle.

Engaging in walking and household tasks both contribute to calorie burning and promote health. While brisk walking may lead to a higher calorie expenditure, intense chores such as mopping and gardening can also be quite beneficial. Combining walking with household chores can create a well-rounded, active lifestyle.

There is a common belief that household chores require a comparable level of physical effort as walking. This raises the question: should we consider replacing our walking time with doing household tasks?

The effectiveness of conventional exercises like walking versus the calorie-burning potential of routine chores is a topic of ongoing discussion. Each has its own advantages, but which one is more effective for burning calories?

You can effectively burn between 100 and 200 calories for every hour spent walking. Walking stands out as one of the most popular forms of exercise due to its simplicity, accessibility, and effectiveness.

The calories you burn while walking are influenced by your walking speed, body weight, and the duration of your walk. This activity is beneficial for cardiovascular health, muscle strengthening, and mental well-being by alleviating stress. As a low-impact exercise, it is accessible to individuals of all ages and fitness levels. Additionally, walking outside offers extra advantages like fresh air and sunlight, which can elevate your vitamin D levels.

To optimize calorie burning, try walking faster or including intervals of brisk walking. You can also increase calorie burn by using weights or walking on an incline.

Household chores, often overlooked as mundane, can actually help you burn a significant amount of calories. Activities like vacuuming, mopping, gardening, and washing windows qualify as light to moderate exercise and demand physical effort. The number of calories burned depends on the specific task and its intensity.

Tasks that involve lifting, bending, or continuous movement, like scrubbing floors or moving furniture, tend to burn more calories compared to sedentary activities. It’s important to recognize that the calorie expenditure linked to each household chore can differ from one individual to another.

Let’s take a look at some statistics. Vacuuming can burn around 175 calories in an hour for someone weighing 70 kg. Mopping is slightly more intense, burning roughly 200 calories per hour. Gardening varies, with calorie expenditure ranging from 250 to 300 calories per hour based on the specific activities involved. Washing dishes typically burns about 90 calories per hour. Walking for an hour at a pace of 4 miles per hour can help you burn between 300 and 400 calories, depending on your body weight.

Engaging in one hour of vigorous cleaning activities, such as sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, and vacuuming, can burn around 250-300 calories, which is comparable to the calories burned during a brisk walk at a moderate pace.

Walking at a brisk pace typically burns more calories per hour compared to lighter household tasks like washing dishes or folding laundry. However, more intense chores, such as scrubbing floors or gardening, can match or even surpass the calorie expenditure of walking.

While walking offers a steady calorie burn, the intensity of household chores can vary greatly depending on the specific task. Walking is generally easier to maintain over longer periods due to its rhythmic and repetitive nature.

In contrast, household chores often involve more varied movements, making them less sustainable over time.

Walking mainly targets the lower body muscles, while household tasks can engage a wider array of muscle groups, depending on the activity. For instance, mopping and vacuuming work the arms, shoulders, and core, in addition to the legs.

Spending time outdoors can significantly enhance mental well-being by alleviating anxiety and boosting mood, effects that may not be as evident when doing household chores. However, chores provide the advantage of completing tasks that enhance your environment, serving as a productive workout that engages the arms, shoulders, core, and legs.

“Moderate-to-vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (MV-ILPA) bouts of between 1 min and 5 min were associated with reductions in all-cause mortality and major adverse cardiovascular events and that these associations were similar for MV-ILPA bouts of 5 min to less than 10 mins, for which risk of all-cause mortality and major cardiovascular events was 29–44% lower than bouts of less than 1 min,” says a 2023 Lancet Study.

Suggestions:

Begin your day with a brisk 30-minute walk to elevate your heart rate and kickstart your metabolism. Follow it up with 30 minutes of household tasks to engage various muscle groups and keep yourself moving.