Turn on the music: Upbeat music makes you work faster and more aggressively than a silent ambiance. Put on your workout playlist while you finish vacuuming the house or scrub your kitchen walls, and guess what, you’ll lose weight and the walls will shine brighter too!!
Treat the vacuum cleaner like a piece of gym equipment: Like seriously. Don’t just do it, make a plan. Extend and stretch your body to reach those notorious nooks and corners, twist your body randomly just for fun, squat for a while, as the vacuum cleaner sucks out the dust from the carpet. One thing to remember is to show equal love to both the arms; muscles on just the dominant hand will look funny.
Get creative with your standing poses: Waiting for the coffee to brew? check how many jumping jacks you can do before it is done. The soup is simmering? do that whilst you balance yourself on one leg. Cutting the veggies? do not try any stunts, you can hurt yourself..lol!! You got the idea though.
Consider gardening: Gardening needs you to bend and twist and sit working out your stomach, hips, and feet too. Activities, like digging, pulling out the wild plants and composting the soil, will leave your arms well-toned and strong. Having herbs and veggies grow in your backyard will also make your diet more organic and healthy. This one is a complete win-win.
Do your own laundry: It is a pretty mundane job and all of that, agreed. But it is an exercise in itself. Bending, lifting the laundry basket, loading and unloading the machine, shifting clothes from the washing machine to the dryer, all of it burns your calories. And if you have a community laundry place which requires you to do some walking, nothing like it.
Experiment with ironing: Standing and ironing burn a few calories anyway, but I prefer to modify it further. Arrange the apparatus in such a way, where you have to bend down to pick up the next item to be ironed and similarly keep your ironed clothes on the other side on a low lying stool requiring you to bend down to keep them.
These are some of the ways I try to squeeze in a little workout in my routine, and cannot wait to increase this list. Let me know of more creative ways that you can think of to get a sneaky workout in the comment section below and I’ll implement those in my routine, promise!!
