Charity works fine for fitness

Volunteering for a cause that calls for physical labour, can provide exercise and satisfaction at the same time

It was a prototypically Washington group - a lawyer, a defense contractor, the requisite consultants and activists - convened recently to set aside their desk work for pickaxes and shovels, and help the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club (PATC) maintain a piece of the region's hiking network.

If you have wondered why large timbers are stretched across that trail, I can tell you from experience that they are not 'steps' but erosion-control devices that catch soil and divert storm runoff.

Putting them in place involves a strenuous process of hauling and hammering - which I joined in on recently, not as a do-gooder but to try to answer a fitness question.

Workaday watch
Given the proliferation of advice on fitness and short of retraining as a steamfitter, it seemed worth exploring what one could accomplish through daily activities - shopping, doing yardwork and volunteering in the community.

So I strapped on a demo version of a new Activity Watch from Polar - a device that tracks how much you are walking, climbing and moving - and spent a week experimenting with how little and how much I could cram into a day just living my life.

Here is some good news I learned: You probably move more than you think. I knocked off 1,500 steps during one medium-length shopping trip in the grocery store.

Cannot cut slack
Here is the bad: Daily life, in a lot of ways, does not cut it. I tried to be deliberate in the experiment, staying extra sedentary on one day, doing what I normally do on another, then pushing it on the weekend.

It was only on a Saturday of trail work and chopping wood at home that I really felt I had improved my health, something the watch confirmed, buttressed by readings from a heart-rate monitor.

Before looking at the results, a couple of notes about the watch - it is a device to let people track daily activity through their motion. It is not meant for the gym or structured exercise.

If you are running on a treadmill, it will not count that as activity. Do not ask me how it knows: I have spent a month trying to fool it.

It is pricey, at roughly $200 (Dh735) retail, and has a few quirks. (When you are pushing a grocery cart, for example, the activity does not register unless you drop the watch-wearing hand and steer with the other.)

But if you are following the 10,000-steps-a-day principle, or looking for an overview of how active you are at work, it is a decent tool.

Lifestyle check
The watch "is trying to talk to the busy mum or professional who does not go to the gym - trying to tell them what their lifestyle is", said Marcello Aller, athletics manager for Polar.

If that mum or professional's base-line workday is anything like mine - well, it is grim. Recently, I stuck close to my desk at work, took the elevator when I needed to go out and spent most of my home time in front of the computer.

Bottom line: only about 5,500 steps walked and 2,900 calories burned in 18 hours - pretty modest, considering that a man of my age, height and weight burns about 2,500 calories a day sitting still.

According to the watch, I was active for only about 40 minutes of the day.

On another day, I used the stairs at work for trips to the mailroom and cafeteria, volunteered at my son's school after work and met friends for an outdoor party.

With those simple changes, I logged more than 14,000 steps, burned 3,000 calories over a much shorter time - just about 12 hours - and was active for a full three hours. But I knew little had been done to elevate my heart rate or tax my muscles.

Cause and effect
Saturday showed how the addition of some creative volunteering can help a worthy cause and keep us healthy. Working with the PATC group to divert runoff from the trail, I expended more than 1,700 calories by noon and logged more than 4,000 steps in a couple of hours.

According to the heart-rate monitor I wore that day, the combination of shovelling and hammering kept me in the range of 70 to 90 per cent of maximum for an hour and 45 minutes - a good aerobic workout.

I put in another hour and a half of wood-chopping; as a result, I had burned 3,000 calories by about 2pm. Over the whole day, I logged nearly 20,000 steps. That felt like a workout - not to mention the satisfaction of volunteering some time.

So if you want to avoid the gym and still get fit, it is possible. But, like making the most of a gym, it will take some planning for office-dwellers to milk what we need from daily life.

Find a group or charity that meshes with your interests and keeps you moving and commit what time you can spare. Better still if it involves a pickaxe.