Scrub away those extra pounds! Cleaning the kitchen uses up more calories than dancing, study shows

Scrubbing the kitchen may be one of those chores you might be tempted to put off.

But it is not just the grimy oven that benefits from being made spotless.

Blitzing the kitchen for 50 minutes burns more calories than ballroom dancing or a bike ride of the same duration. And it burns more off than by cleaning any other room, a study found. Cleaning a kitchen burns on average 276 calories, a bathroom just 173, and a bedroom only 154. Ten professional cleaners were given Fitbits and assigned five houses each. The data collected suggests cleaning the kitchen, for an average of 50 minutes, burns more calories than an hour of ballroom dancing (219) or an hour-long bike ride (292).

Responding to the findings, from US-based cleaning service Homeaglow, Professor Amanda Daley, professor of behavioural medicine at Loughborough University, said housework ‘can get your heart pumping.’ But it does not really help to lose weight, as it often uses only a relatively small number of muscles.

So Joe Mitton, a personal trainer based in Cambridgeshire, suggested: ‘Rather than bending over to clean something, squat down and hold the squat.’