Gardening as a Means to Enhance Children’s Physical Fitness
Key Takeaways:
- Gardening can serve as a valuable exercise for children, providing moderate to high physical activity levels.
- Tasks such as digging and raking are classified as high-intensity activities, while others like watering, mulching, and planting are rated as moderate intensity.
- The research paves the way for the creation of garden-centric fitness programs for children.
- The experiment involved an evaluation of 17 children as they performed varied gardening duties, with their heart rate, energy expenditure, and oxygen consumption monitored.
- The children were given five minutes for each gardening task, separated by five-minute rest intervals.
In search of innovative tactics to inspire your kids to be more physically active? A new study suggests that gardening may serve as a valuable exercises for children.
Researchers evaluated 17 South Korean children, averaging around 12 years of age, as they performed various gardening duties such as digging, raking, hoeing, weeding, mixing growing medium, planting seeds and saplings, watering, and mulching.
The participating kids visited two different gardens twice, taking part in five distinct tasks on each visit.
They were given five minutes to accomplish each function with a five-minute rest interval in between each task. A team of researchers, led by Sin-Ae Park, kept track of the children’s heart rate, energy expenditure, and oxygen consumption.
The gardening responsibilities rendered moderate to high physical activity levels for the youngsters. Digging and raking were classified as high intensity, whereas the rest of the tasks were deemed to be of moderate intensity, as per the results published in the reputed journal, HortTechnology.
These findings can be utilized to create garden-centered fitness programs for children, the researchers proposed in a press release related to the said journal.
Further Information
The U.S. National Library of Medicine offers more details about children and exercise.
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