Five on Friday: Getting Shoveling to Count as Exercise

Not sure where you're reading this from, but where I live we've had a bit of snow lately.

 

First there was a 2+ foot dump over a 48-hour period followed by two or three (Or four? Five? I've lost track.) more smaller snowfalls. As a person who uncharacteristically likes shoveling (I hate being cold) and strives for near-daily exercise (if for no other reason but to live long enough to be a burden on my children), I've found myself recently wondering how much of my shoveling I can count as actual exercise.

Isn't it always exercise? Meh, sometimes it feels like a cop-out, like when it's not so much shoveling as just pushing a light dusting off to the side. In my completely unprofessional opinion, there are five steps one should follow to make sure that snow removal job is also a valid workout.

These include:

1. Dress in exercise clothes instead of snow clothes to get yourself in the workout mindset. Bonus: those pants are pretty thin so you'll have to really get moving to stay warm.

2. Try to make sure there's so much freaking snow that it becomes increasingly difficult to find a place to shovel it to thereby assuring you have to give a good, solid heave to get each shovelful off of the driveway.

3. Bend with the knees!

4. Get some headphones and blast dance music in your ears while you shovel.

5. Lastly, and I cannot stress this one enough: have your children see you dance-shoveling and singing out loud to music nobody else can hear out in the driveway. Every time they die a little death of embarrassment, you lose another 500 calories, at least. 

*This has not been proven yet but I am proud to help support scientific research.