Ticket 07 of 07

Does mowing the lawn count as exercise, or only the gym?

In one line. It counts, and so do the stairs, the errand on foot and the afternoon with a rake; what the research tallies is movement that raises the breath, not the building it happens in.

The man asking this has usually just been told, by someone, that he ought to move more, and has translated that into a membership he does not want. The counter's answer surprises him: much of the moving he already does is on the tally, it simply has never been counted. Research on activity has looked at the ordinary week, not the gym week, and it tends to measure minutes in which breathing picks up and talking gets a little harder, wherever those minutes happen.

By that measure, pushing a mower across a lawn for forty minutes is a brisk walk with a machine in front of it. Carrying groceries up two flights, washing the car by hand, digging a bed, walking the long way to the post office, hauling the bins to the kerb and back: these are the minutes the research counts, and a man with a house and a yard often collects more of them on a Saturday than he would in an hour on a treadmill. The gym is a fine place to do it; it is not the only place.

What matters more than the venue is that the minutes arrive most days, in pieces if need be, and that the body is a little warm and the breath a little quicker when they do. Ten minutes that get done beat forty that get planned. Some men notice that keeping an honest tally for a fortnight, in a notebook or on the fridge, changes the question from "how do I start" to "where did Tuesday go".

The one thing the yard cannot give is the slow start that a sensible programme builds in. A man who has not lifted anything heavier than a laptop in a year, and who then spends a whole Saturday shifting paving slabs, has not exercised; he has had an accident that has not happened yet. Begin with the lighter jobs, and let the heavy ones wait a few weekends.

Where the desk stops. This page is about ordinary activity. Whoever has been told to take it easy, is under a physician's watch for any reason, or gets chest discomfort, dizziness or unusual breathlessness with effort, asks that physician before the first Saturday, not after.