Gardening can turn the biggest weed into a blooming athlete

As anyone who has ever taken out an argument on a thistle will know, gardening is good for the head. Not a gardener in the land was surprised when a GP recently prescribed gardening for mental health problems. But what about our physical health? Is it really better than going to the gym?

A team of boffins at Coventry University, working with the Royal Horticultural Society, is trying to find out. They are currently putting a group of volunteers through their paces in a motion-capture lab to monitor how trimming hedges, pruning and weeding affect the human body. More than 20 volunteers could right now be dead-heading in lab conditions.

Well, I could save them the three years of their exhaustive experiment. A gardener’s daily toil combines fine motor skills, dedication and impressive aerobic ability and I practice some pretty complicated moves on a daily basis.

The Weed Side-lunge, for instance, is a deceptively simple exercise combining fine motor skills and handto-eye co-ordination with a good work-out to the side muscles. Advanced weed side-lungers can do up to 20 of these on a regular saunter down the garden path without even breaking stride.

The Rose Bush Wiggle is a complex manoeuvre that takes years to master and combines almost all the muscles in the body. From a starting position inside a large rose bush, adopt a pruning stance and then try to disentangle yourself without leaving most of your DNA behind. The fairweather gardener will probably need a sit down afterwards.

The Secateur Squeeze seems to start easily enough but it builds to a great burn for the hand and lower arm muscles. Dig deep and find levels of endurance you never knew you had as you stretch out for that just-outof-reach twig while it’s getting dark and you’re balancing on a wobbly chair.

All the slap-dash gardeners will know the Trowel Squat and be familiar with way you feel the burn first and then lose all feeling in your legs as you try to dig a hole in stony ground with a garden tool that you know is woefully too small for the task. You’re using a trowel, by the way, because you can’t be bothered to get up to find a decent-sized fork in the garden shed.

While gardeners don’t generally run – we wander around in a continual state of motion (see Weed Side-lunge and Secateur Squeeze) – the Bonfire Sprint is a challenging aerobic task undertaken on the odd occasion when you have set next door’s pampas on fire and can’t find the right connector to the garden hose. This can really get the blood pumping.

But if you are deadly serious about getting in trim, throw away the rowing machine and invest instead in an erratic pull-cord lawnmower. Start in a crouching position and pull back hard in sets of 30. Sprightly gardeners can add dirty spark plugs for an extra level of difficulty.

None of these is practised without danger, however. Gardening is also a discipline that can leave you with repetitive strain injury, tetanus and do untold damage to your back.

But in pretty much every way you can think of, it also hones the body better than a Lycra-clad session on one of those machines you have to wipe clean first. And you can do it in your pyjamas. I’m not sure they’ll be allowed to do that in Coventry.