The benefits of Tidying as a weight training session

Workout for life

That last point is the kind of thing I am training for: playing with my family and going on holiday. Those are my training goals, and the result will be that I can play for longer and more intensely on a day-to-day basis. I know it will work because tidying the house involves the same movements as going on holiday and playing with my family, including:

• packing for the trip
• loading and unloading the car
• lots of walking around with heavy things
  • going up and down a lot of steps (to find your room or get toys from other parts of the house)
  • bring your luggage up to your room or carry your little one around the house (The reasons to carry them are varied, some fun, some less fun)
  • carrying everything while you visit all the places you want to visit.

This is true, especially if you have kids, so the better trained you are, the easier it all will be, and the less you will feel the effects the day after.

The workout

The workout this time was a challenge because it involved packing and moving a lot of boxes to store them in the garage and create space in the house. This involved a lot of heavy lifting and awkward movements under load, and I could tell I was doing a proper weight training workout. The only problem is that I have never quite known how much weight I am lifting when I do this kind of work.

So, for the first time, I weighed a few of the boxes to get an idea of the workout I was undertaking. To weigh the boxes, I just used some bathroom scales.

I didn’t weigh everything, but the weights involved included:

A 42-litre box of books that weighed 20 kg.

A box of Christmas decorations was lighter but bigger at 6kg in a 65-litre box.

Birthday decorations weighed 0.5kg and filled a 42-litre box

I also moved

• a 30 kg thin shelf unit from the garage back into the house
• Plus a loaded table weighing approximately 40 – 50kg

These weren’t the only weights, just a sample.

The lifts

The specific lifts that were utilised included:

• squats.
  • standard squat
  • hack squat.
• Bent over row.
• Single leg raises.
• Shoulder press.
• Bicep curls.
• Tricep press.
• Single arm row
• standing bench press

I wasn’t thinking about the specific lifts I was performing at the time because they were all part of a wider chain of movement and part of getting the job done, but I performed each move, and I repeated many times with varied angles and weights.

So, the workout was quite thorough and intense, lasting longer than the workouts I used to do.

Practical

The problem of gym workouts is the limited nature of their training challenge. In a gym, you lift in a very static way, just up and down in the same place on the floor.

This is because weight training a gym has a culture focused on the technique of lifting weights and not moving around the room with the weight. The focus is often on lifting the weight a certain number of times over sets and repetitions. This rigid planned nature is rarely the most important thing in real life. Whether you are

• jump-starting a car,
• playing with a rambunctious toddler,
• moving heavy furniture
• carrying a lot of luggage
• tidying the house

You will be moving a weight across terrain and often through narrow and awkward doors and stairs. So, these home workouts are more useful as training for real life. The movements themselves often have random patterns, not predictable movements like in a gym. You do not always work through a full range of motion or other aspects you focus on in the gym.

Moving each of these weights during the tidy-up involved:

• going up and down stairs
• negotiating the rooms and avoiding all items like walls and doors.
• walking around the house
• going outside into the garage
• lean over stuff while putting each box in the right place.

These complications force me to work on technique and minimising injury, instead of how much weight I lift or how many repetitions I complete. it also challenges so many different parts of my body in a way that just isn’t easy to do at the gym.

As opposed to gym exercises, these were practical exercises that I need to be able to do regularly. As a result, I have encouraged my body to get stronger at something that benefits me in real life, not the fictional life of the gym.

Productive Fun

The workout was longer than a normal gym session, and I enjoyed it because:

• I listened to music, sports, and some podcasts on my phone and wireless headset.
• No travelling time was required
• I saved time by completing real-life tasks
• I wasn’t soaked in sweat, so I didn’t have to change afterwards
• It cost me nothing
• I didn’t have to wait for equipment to be ready

At the same time, gym exercises literally waste your effort and output because they don’t help you achieve your day-to-day tasks; instead, they add extra requirements to your life that weigh you down.

Measure work

One limitation I have always been frustrated with is that I cannot properly record the actual movement I am performing in this complicated workout because the tools to measure calories and work during exercise aren’t good enough.

For example, I can measure the steps I take, but that doesn’t consider the loads I was under when taking these steps. That may not have increased the calories burned by much, but it does add a new challenge that impacts the body, which we can’t measure right now.

I would have recorded the number of steps but can’t track them because my wife has my stepper. If I had it, I would still have work to do to figure out the calories burnt, but I don’t believe in calories burnt as the only statistic to use. There are so many more that you need to track to fully understand the work you have done.

I could go into detail, but the point is that because it can’t easily be measured, the value is generally missed by the scientific community and most gym instructors.

Lifting a weight over terrain and in different stances is so much more than the sum of its parts. So this workout has so much more value than a workout at the gym and the advantage is that I am not sweating or short of breath the whole time, it’s actually quite a comfortable thing to do.

My core is the strongest it has ever been, and so are my legs. For example one-legged squats have become really easy, and leaning over while carrying weights is also much easier. This is because my infrastructure (muscles, bones, ligaments, etc.) can support these actions now. Plus, I always focus on quality technique, and I never push through pain.

Go tidy

That was yesterday, and a day later, I can feel the workout. I have worked muscles, improved mobility, and built endurance, and I benefit from this every day because I develop my strength in the same place where I spend most of my time, in the comfort of my own home.

So, the adaptations I gain from the workout fit the adaptations I need to enjoy my house.

A practical benefit is that there is more space, and the house is tidier, so I didn’t just build myself, I created a better place to play 🙂

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Katy Bowman: Nutritious Movement