Workout in the garden

Gardens, as Rudyard Kipling said, “are not made by singing, ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.”

All those neat rows of flowers and vegetables require, well - gardening, and gardening is work. But does gardening count as exercise?

Bet your beans, it does. Gardening is “right up there on the same scale as walking and cycling,” says Dr. Ruth Thomas, orthopedic surgeon at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.

The doctor is a physical therapist-turned-surgeon, a farmer’s wife with a country home, and gardener of “everything you can think of,” eggplants to watermelons.

Gardening calls on “all your core muscles,” Thomas says,“thighs, arms, neck,” the works.

She recommends 30 minutes of gardening a day, which could be 15 minutes in the morning and 15 in the cooler part of the evening. But gardeners tend to lose track of time.

“You may be out in the garden for an hour and a half before you realize it,” she says. In that case, her advice is to plan much the same as for any other outdoor activity.

Drink plenty of water out there - doctor’s orders - avoid the hottest hours of the day as summer comes on, and wear sun protection.

Old Garden Granny didn’t have sunblock lotion, but she knew the wisdom when she tied on that well-named piece of headgear, the sunbonnet. Thomas adds to the equipment list: kneeling pads to go easy on the knees, a garden cart with a seat, and gloves to prevent blisters.

She readies for gardening with a stretch, a bend and “a little twist” 90 degrees left and 90 degrees right.

Garden work is not a complete fitness regimen, she says, but a good activity to go along with others - especially yoga, “and that’s for the stretching.”HOE, HOE, HOE

Gardeners have touted the body-and-soul benefits of dirt, fresh air and songbirds since ancient times - in fact, since the Garden of Eden and its crop of apples.

Gardening “is the purest of human pleasures,” Francis Bacon wrote with quill and ink 400years ago. Home and garden magazines and websites are today’s sure-as-sunshine places to find more good things said about getting down and dirty.

“If your goal is strength, endurance and low body weight, spend an extra half hour each day digging, weeding or doing pushups.”- Flower & Garden

“The very act of gardening promotes health.” - Country Journal

“Digging, planting, weeding and other repetitive tasks that require strength or stretching are excellent forms of low-impact exercise.” - Health.com

Added to the crop is a growing number of studies that back up Mistress Mary’s silver bells and cockleshells with scientific evidence that gardening is a good idea.

Women 50 and older show higher bone density if they garden at least once a week, according to a study conducted at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and reported in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport.

Thirty minutes of gardening can be enough to decrease a person’s cortisol level - bring down the stress hormone - according to the Journal of Health Psychology. Researchers found that gardening worked better than reading to help stressed out people wind down.

And gardening helps to bring people out of depression, according to a Norwegian study on the effectiveness of “therapeutic horticulture,” reported in Research and Theory for Nursing Practice.

Therapeutic horticulture is gardening as a treatment for mental problems - a practice credited to Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence and sometimes called “the father of American psychiatry.”

The good doctor’s advice to get out there, pull a weed, sniff the air and admire the beauty of growing things is applied to many other uses these days, according to the American Horticulture Therapy Association in King of Prussia, Pa. Gardening is a medicine for better muscle tone, they say, and better balance, sharper memory, and learning how to follow directions.

All this - and carrots, too.

BEET THAT

One way to think of the garden is like a gym with a series of different exercise challenges: raking for arm and leg stretches, weeding for torso twists.

Garvan Woodland Gardens in Hot Springs is a 210-acre showcase of landscaping, tulips and daffodils, but it’s also a fitness course, the way Associate Executive Director Bob Byers sometimes sees it.

Gardening “is fairly low impact,” he says, but a day’s gardening brings a lot of different muscles into play. He recommends a gym-like approach to the activity, planting some of the same tips as a fitness trainer:

Warm up: “Start with lighter tasks,” Byers says - a little raking, maybe - and build up to the shovel work.

Learn how to use the gear: “Understand the right way to hold and use a tool, and how to position yourself.”

Talk to the doctor: In case of backaches and other health concerns, “it’s wise to to talk to someone who knows how to handle these issues.”

The gardens offer health walks on Mondays and Tuesdays through June: moderate 3-mile walks on Mondays,and 1-mile beginners walks on Tuesdays.

At home, Byers has beans, carrots and broccoli in mind for this year’s garden.

IN SPADES

Lisa Washburn, health specialist for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture’s Cooperative Extension Service, says gardening “serves a dual purpose” of exercise and something to show for having made the effort.

Last year, she coaxed along a single cucumber plant, but wound up with actual cucumbers that “I swear tasted better than anything from the store.”

For exercise, Washburn recommends alternating easier gardening tasks with more difficult jobs, a gym-like rhythm and repetition. Even so, the more likely way to achieve the results of a gym is to hit the gym.

Gardeners and gym regulars both do squats, she reasons. But the gymgoer keeps squatting to the point of squat no-more. If the goal is to be in great shape, the gardener’s“one squat every 10 minutes is not going to do it.”

If the goal is to feel better and pick a tomato, that’s something else.

She has the garden bed ready to go this year, and looks forward to squash, bell peppers, tomatoes - and a’course, a cuke.

PASS THE ENGLISH PEAS, PLEASE

Kipling, author of The Jungle Book, is remembered by Kipling Gardens. The park is a landmark in Rottingdean, England. And whether or not he ever grew a proper British cabbage, his poem, “The Glory of the Garden,” seems to say it all for the health benefits of gardening:

There’s not a pair of legs so thin,

There’s not a head so thick,

There’s not a hand so weak and white,

Nor yet a heart so sick,

But it can find some needful job

That’s crying to be done,

For the Glory of the Garden

Glorifieth every one.