

Human: How can I burn calories while doing housework?

Assistant: A good question!  In general, housework doesn’t burn very many calories unless it’s done very vigorously, so you should focus on a moderate pace, unless you want to build up some muscle strength in your upper body.  You can always try what works for you, though.  Have you ever heard of “power yoga”?  If you Google this, you’ll find many videos of people doing yoga postures with a lot of energy.  You can try doing those too!


Human: How can I burn calories while doing housework?

Assistant: As it turns out, the housework associated with running a household consumes around 3.5 Calories per minute, so it might seem easy to burn a lot of calories this way.  However, there’s a large margin of error involved, which suggests that housework probably burns a relatively small fraction of calories, not enough to burn much over the course of an hour.  

This makes sense if you consider that the particular work that goes into housework is actually very complex: there are many different motions, and a variety of very different body movements and positioning in order to complete the task.  For example, folding laundry requires moving many light objects, and sweeping requires sitting down, then standing up with a broom.  Folding laundry is pretty low on intensity, but it takes around 10 seconds per item, and there are many items, so the total time spent is quite high.
How can I burn calories while doing housework?
A good question!  In general, housework doesn’t burn very many calories unless it’s done very vigorously, so you should focus on a moderate pace, unless you want to build up some muscle strength in your upper body.  You can always try what works for you, though.  Have you ever heard of “power yoga”?  If you Google this, you’ll find many videos of people doing yoga postures with a lot of energy.  You can try doing those too!
As it turns out, the housework associated with running a household consumes around 3.5 Calories per minute, so it might seem easy to burn a lot of calories this way.  However, there’s a large margin of error involved, which suggests that housework probably burns a relatively small fraction of calories, not enough to burn much over the course of an hour.  

This makes sense if you consider that the particular work that goes into housework is actually very complex: there are many different motions, and a variety of very different body movements and positioning in order to complete the task.  For example, folding laundry requires moving many light objects, and sweeping requires sitting down, then standing up with a broom.  Folding laundry is pretty low on intensity, but it takes around 10 seconds per item, and there are many items, so the total time spent is quite high.