Gardening Good Physical Activity for Kids, Says Study

By engaging in regular gardening tasks such as digging, watering and harvesting, children can reap several physical and health benefits, claims a new South Korean study.

Gardening is a healthy activity and is enjoyed by people of different age groups, mostly the older adults. Getting the spade out and digging actually boosts health, enhances the quality of life and helps you save your bucks by reducing hospital visits. The health benefits of gardening are well known.

But apart from the adults and the seniors, even kids can benefit from gardening. According to the study reported in HortTechnology, gardening activities like weeding, digging and raking offers high to moderate physical activity for children.

The study was conducted by researchers Sin-Ae Park, Ho-Sang Lee, Kwan-Suk Lee, Ki-Cheol Son and Candice Shoemaker. They suggest that the data of this study can be used for the future development of garden based programs that can help children involve in physical activity to improve the health lifestyle.

The study was conducted on 17 children who were engaged in 10 gardening tasks that included digging, weeding, raking, mulching, watering, hoeing, sowing seeds, harvesting, mixing growing medium, and planning transplants, according to the news release.

The study was conducted in two different gardening environments in South Korea. One was a high tunnel and the other an outdoor area. Twice in a week the children visited the gardens during which they performed five different tasks.  Each gardening task had to be completed in 5 minutes and they were given 5 minutes rest time between each task.

While gardening the children were fitted with portable telemetric calorimeters and heart rate monitors and the researchers measured the level of oxygen used and energy spent as well as the heart rate.

The researchers noticed that the 10 gardening tasks represented moderate to high intensity physical activity for children. The high intensity physical activities included digging and raking, The highest intense task among the10 tasks was digging. On the other hand, weeding, mulching, hoeing, sowing seeds, harvesting, watering, mixing growing medium and planting transplants were rated as moderate intensity physical activities.

A study conducted earlier, documented in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, uncovered that gardening lowered the risk of heart and stroke in people over the age of 60.

The current study is useful as the data can be used to design gardening-based therapeutic intervention for kids who have low levels of physical activity.