Calories Burned Gardening Calculator

This calculator gives an estimate of how many calories are burned doing various gardening activities. The average person will burn 175-300 calories doing normal backyard gardening like putting plants in pots and planting plants in a small garden. More difficult gardening tasks like using a chainsaw and tilling a garden will burn 400-500 calories for an average person.

Calories Burned Gardening

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Calories burned with Daily Activities (weight: 175 lbs)

	MET	15 mins.	30 mins.	45 mins.	60 mins.
Mowing the Lawn	6	125	250	375	500
Stairs	8.8	183	367	550	733
Standing	2.5	52	104	156	208
Gardening	5	104	208	313	417
Sleeping	1.3	27	54	81	108
Sitting	1.3	27	54	81	108
Raking	4	83	167	250	333
Resting	1.3	27	54	81	108
Walking a Dog	3	63	125	188	250

How to Use The Calculator 

This calorie calculator is simple and only consists of plugging in 2 values. Once these values are plugged in, all it takes is for you to find the activity you spent your time doing or even multiple activities, and get the number of calories burnt from there. This is how you do that.  

1. Choose the unit of measurement – kilograms or pounds
2. Enter your weight and the time spent gardening
3. Look for the specific gardening activity you have done and the time you put into the task
4. Hit Calculate

Once you hit calculate you should see the number of calories you burned while doing the garden activity you have done. 

How The Gardening Calculator Works

MET

This calculator calculates how many calories you burn by using MET values and the MET formula. A MET value (metabolic equivalent) is a number that represents a ratio between your resting metabolic rate (RMR) or basal metabolic rate (BMR) relative to your active metabolic rate (AMR). Your resting metabolic rate is your body at rest when you are not actively digesting. This is the same thing as your basal metabolic rate. They both measure how many calories you burn at rest. Your active metabolic rate is the energy your body expends in addition to your resting metabolic rate.

A MET value is given to various physical activities to judge their energy expenditure. The higher the MET value, the more calories expended with that task. A task with a MET of 1 is equal to your RMR. A task with a MET of 6 uses 6 times as much energy as a task with a MET of 1 and burns 6 times as many calories as a task with a MET of 1.

The MET equation uses a number that equals the amount of oxygen used by the muscles per kilogram of body weight per minute, which is 3.5 ml. This number can be found by multiplying your weight in kilograms by 3.5. 3.5 ml is used in the MET formula along with your weight in kilograms, and the MET value of the activity. This is all divided by 200 to get the calories burned each minute of doing the activity.

Formula

Total Calories burned in 1 minute = (3.5 x MET x body weight in kg)/200

Examples

A person weighing 140 pounds will burn 100 to 430 calories per hour gardening (potting, planting, light effort gardening). 

• Calories burned (per minute) = (body weight in kg x MET x 3.5) / 200

The formula to calculate the calories burned per minute for a 140-pound person is done like this.  

• (63.5029 kg x 3 x 3.5) / 200 = 2.2226 calories burned per minute of gardening

To calculate the number of calories burned during an hour of gardening, you multiply the calories burned per minute by 60 (minutes)  

• Calories per hour burned = 2.2226 x 60

133 calories will be burned per hour gardening.  

Results: How Many Calories Does Gardening Burn?

That is how a 140-pound person will burn 133 calories in one hour doing light effort gardening using the MET formula. A 140-pound person will also burn 2.2226 calories per minute gardening.

What is Gardening?

Gardening is the practice of caring for and growing plants. Gardening has an array of uses. Gardening consists of using a variety of tools, such as trowels to dig in a small area, pruning shears to cut back bushes, watering hose and watering cans for watering your entire garden from small plants to whole residential gardening spaces, garden rake for the fall season raking leaves and for grass clippings and smoothing out soil and cultivating land, and an angled shovel to dig holes and move soil and plants more easily than normal shovels.

These tools are the most useful tools for a home garden of any kind. More professional tools can be used, such as extensions for water hoses, things like gardening gloves, kneeling pads, wheelbarrows, sprinklers instead of a hose or as a companion, and a handheld weeder for those pesky weeds. These tools are not needed to start a garden or even maintain it but they can provide you benefits such as extra personal protection and more efficiency within your garden.

You can garden to produce plants for eating like tomatoes, peppers, and fruits. Gardening is mostly used for growing food and for decorative use. Plants like trees, shrubs, and flowers are taken care of and grown to improve the appearance of homes and property. Gardening can be as specific as growing only certain plants and growing only for one purpose, or it can be very free, and a variety of things can be grown and taken care of through a long and fruitful process.

Gardening as an exercise can be a great workout that can be as simple as mowing the lawn, raking and bagging leaves, or putting all your focus into a single plant to grow for your lawn. It is a physical activity that will help you to burn calories and be outdoors while doing it, but will it be great for weight loss?

Here’s a chart that the calculator uses to determine METs based on backpacking activity.

Type of Activity	MET	Calories Burned
Watering lawn or garden, standing or walking	1.5	107
Planting, potting, transplanting seedlings or plants, light effort	2	143
Gardening, using containers, older adults >60 years	2.3	165
Driving tractor	2.8	200
Walking, gathering gardening tools	3	215
Clearing light brush, moderate effort	3.5	251
Thinning garden, moderate effort	3.5	251
Weeding, cultivating garden, light-to-moderate effort	3.5	251
Picking fruit/vegetables, moderate effort	3.5	251
Gardening, general, moderate effort	3.8	272
Irrigation channels, opening and closing ports	4	286
Planting seedling, shrub, stooping, moderate effort	4.3	308
Planting crops or garden, stooping, moderate effort	4.3	308
Planting trees	4.5	322
Weeding, cultivating garden (Taylor code 580)	4.5	322
Picking fruit/vegetables, vigorous effort	4.5	322
Laying sod	5	358
Weeding, cultivating garden, using a hoe, moderate-to-vigorous effort	5	358
Wheelbarrow, pushing garden cart or wheelbarrow	5.5	394
Gardening with heavy power tools	5.8	415
Tilling a garden	5.8	415
Chainsaw	5.8	415
Clearing brush/land, undergrowth, vigorous effort	6.3	451
Hauling branches	6.3	451
Wheelbarrow chores	6.3	451
Laying crushed rock	6.3	451

Is Gardening Great for Weight Loss? 

Gardening is a great moderate intensity exercise for weight loss because if done on a daily basis, it can be a fun but worthwhile pastime that will actually yield results beyond simply to burn calories. When you tend to a garden and grow plants, you are getting physical activity and exercising, and you can grow food to eat in your healthy diet to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight. That is a kind of work that benefits you in many ways towards your health journey, so the motivation can come from wanting to reach your goal to lose weight and wanting to eat a healthy diet to reach that goal.

To get the most calorie burn gardening can be a good workout if you put a lot of effort into your garden on a regular basis, which could potentially not be possible. After a garden is built completely, all there is to do is wait for the plants to grow, then you pick them or leave them be for appearance purposes. You will do work every now and then to do raking, to replace things like soil, entire plants, or maybe the whole garden, but these things will not be consistent. Other than the fact that consistent garden work is not possible unless you work on a farm, gardening is great for weight loss.  

Conclusion

Gardening in general is great for burning calories when done with many tools and used more often than a couple of times a week. Gardening can burn anywhere from 175-300 calories for the average person doing normal backyard gardening, and around 400-500 calories when doing more difficult gardening tasks like hauling dirt and tilling a garden. Anyone can benefit from gardening, and it is a healthy way to get exercise while growing plants for consumption in your healthy diet or to create beautiful decorative plants, big or small. Gardening can range from growing trees to the most common gardening activity, mowing and watering lawn flowers and grass.

Gardening is very safe when done correctly, so anyone can do it, and get benefits from it. Gardening can be learned from the internet very easily, and it is cheap to start. Tools such as trowels, pruning shears, watering cans/hoses, garden rake, and an angled shovel are the most important to start and take care of gardens. These can be bought for cheap from secondhand dealers, and seeds and soil can be found for cheap also. Anyone can garden if the effort is put into it.

References:

1. Jetté, M.; Sidney, K.; Blümchen, G. (1990-08). Metabolic equivalents (METS) in exercise testing, exercise prescription, and evaluation of functional capacity. Clinical Cardiology. 13 (8): 555–565. doi:10.1002/clc.4960130809.

Additional References:

1. Compendium of physical activities: Arizona State University
2. WHO global recommendations on physical activity for health (updated): https://www.who.int

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