Manual Yard Work Burns Thousands of Calories

Okay, so I haven't done a blog entry in a while because I've been busy doing yard work and enjoying the gorgeous spring weather. The other day, while I was picking weeds and manually chopping our out of control lilac bushes, I began to think about how much motorized lawn tools rob you out of burning calories and building muscles.

Had Justin and I had electric hedge trimmers, we could have neatened up the lilac bushes in a couple of hours. Instead, it took days of sweat inducing, muscle burning chopping to get the job done.

Had we had a chainsaw, we could have hacked down all of the dead tree limbs in our yard in about three seconds and then chopped them up into firewood within a few minutes. Instead, we sawed and sawed and sawed them all by hand and even after all of this work, we still have three more logs to chop into firewood.

To control the weed problem, we could have bought some deadly herbicide and simply sprayed the yard, but we're not into poisoning the yard and the dog, so we've spent the past few weeks weeding by hand, doing a little at a time, building finger muscle strength, building leg strength by squatting, standing, squatting, standing.

And finally, had we had a rototiller, we could have tilled the soil where we needed to plant grass seed, but we didn't, so we used a shovel to turn the dirt and prepare the soil.

Sure, it takes more time to finish yard work when you do it manually, but it's highly worth the effort. Not only is there a certain level of satisfaction that comes from doing manual yard work, but there's also a certain amount of satisfaction that comes with knowing that you've burned so many excess calories that a serving or two of ice cream isn't going to do you any harm.