Last week I made a quilt. It wasn’t a quilt with a fitness theme, but I did get my fit on. I deliberately set up my cutting mat on a table quite far away from my sewing machine, and I positioned my ironing board equally far from both the mat and the machine.
The end result, I easily got my 10K steps in. I had previously noticed that when I spend time on housework, I get my 10K steps in be it going up and down stairs, carrying baskets or vacuum cleaners, cleaning, sweeping and the like. I tend to think of sewing as sedentary, but last weekend I realized the only sitting I did was when I bound the quilt.
The next day I felt in my shoulders the effort required to push three layers of a 70 inch by 50 inch lapquilt through the sewing machine. Upper body workout for the win!
I work as a writer so I am often at my laptop for long stretches. Generally though, I try to move around in between those stretches. I’m glad to find out that even without my regular workouts (suspended during this winter’s lock down), I’m reasonably active.
Now that the weather is better, I aim to get outside more frequently as a walk outside beats housework any day!
Luckily for us, lockdown has been lifted and I’ll be back training with my socially distant, but no less enthusiastic trainer this week.
That’s hard work. Surely it has to be good exercise, maybe not cardio but definitely bone and muscle strength.