It’s not a secret but a fitness style that takes time, patience, persistence and personal responsibility. Success is measured in seasons, years and decades, not a marathon sprint.

Getting Fit Through Gardening is a great suggestion for Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Obesity Campaign. Fighting childhood obesity is a worthy project and gardening is something anyone can do regardless of size or athletic ability. This is something the older generation can teach the younger generation.

By applying techniques from aerobics, weight-training and the martial-arts to gardening motions, you create something old yet entirely new — a lifelong, comprehensive fitness program based around gardening.

By lowering your center of gravity and harnessing the energy from your legs and torso versus the muscles of your lower back and arms, gardening now becomes more aerobic and more enjoyable. Also, this technique will reduce strain on your back, muscle soreness and even calluses on your hands.

Using the Aerobic Model while gardening and the proper tools can make all the difference between a sore back, aching joints and hating gardening to feeling as if you just stepped off of an elliptical machine at the gym, energetic and refreshed.

My advice is and has always been: gardening can be good for you but only if done correctly — and most don’t do it correctly (how they move their body) and use tools that were not ergonomically designed.

You can see a short, one-minute demonstration of my rocking and scooting gardening stance and technique on my website: http://www.getfitthroughgardening.com or my book of the same name: Get Fit Through Gardening. – Jeffrey Restuccio