Garden Time vs. Gym Time

One of the most popular programs for building muscle in a short time is an exercise system known as P90X. Offering 12 different workout routines plus three 30-day diets, P90X promises to take you from "regular to ripped" in just 90 days. Serious gardeners, however, get some of the same benefits from working out with their flowers and veggies. Here are some similarities between gardening and the P90X program.

P90X requires users to do all the exercises, even the ones they don't like. Any serious gardener is going to run into situations that require exercising all their muscles, even ones they don't usually use.

Robert, for instance, had trouble taking groceries out of his car when he started gardening. After a few months, however, he was able to carry a railroad tie on each shoulder over hundreds of feet of muddy ground to build vegetable and flower beds. A particularly deep-rooted weed may test laterals and glutes, and a gardener who is determined to shoo bunnies from her begonias may find a new ability to sprint. Gardening requires gardeners to use all their muscles, even ones they don't like to use.

P90X requires users to concentrate on form first. Gardening requires gardeners to concentrate on technique to get all their gardening done.

The purpose of mastering form first is to prevent injuries later. Weak muscles are vulnerable muscles. The P90X system ensures that sore muscles and torn ligaments will be kept to a minimum.

Gardeners usually learn the importance of form the hard way. A back injury or a torn rotator cuff may keep a gardener indoors for weeks or even months. However, most gardens eventually become very efficient with routine gardening chores, and build new muscle and new eye-hand coordination skills when Mother Nature poses gardening challenges.

P90X tells its users to make the first month a crash program for success. For gardeners, the critical first month that lays the foundation for future success is called spring.

Gardeners who have space, as well as gardeners who don't, tend put in a lot of physical effort in a very short time as they start their garden seasons. Apartment-dwelling gardeners may lug heavy pots and bags of soil up flights of stairs to balconies and rooftops. Drought-stricken gardeners may carry buckets of water to plants their automatic watering systems don't reach. Frost-fearing gardeners may tuck their plants under frost-protective cloth every night and roll up the cloth every morning, and summer-struck gardeners may follow the opposite routine with shade cloths.

The physical challenge of gardening can make gardeners just as "ripped" as gym aficionados. And gardeners can enjoy the same metabolic benefits.

When a muscle is stressed so much that it needs to build new muscle fibers, there is a two- or three-hour window that it is approximately 50 times more sensitive to insulin. This enables the muscle to take in glucose and water to build the glycogen that "pumps it up," and amino acids to build new and stronger muscle fibers.

The change in insulin sensitivity that P90X encourages by "tricking" muscle groups and that gardening encourages by the reality that there's always something new to do has profound metabolic benefits for the entire body. Gardeners and gym rats alike become metabolically fit as they build new muscle.

And gardeners have the added advantage of being rewarded with healthy, safe, uncontaminated fresh food. Gardeners not only help themselves become more fit, they help the world become more fit, as they meet their needs for nourishment on multiple levels.