Put Me in, Coach! I’m Ready to Play!

Coralie Thomas sprang up from Great Dixter’s famous long border like an Olympic gymnast who had stuck the landing. The assistant head gardener had crossed the finish line of a backbreaking seasonal changeover at the end of a sweltering summer day. She received a polite round of applause from the gallery of nearby gardeners, and then she trotted off to lug hoses.

For all of Coralie’s wind-blown charm, what I see in this triumphant photo is not just a happy gardener with dirt under her nails, but the face of an athlete. Merriam-Webster says an athlete is “a person who is trained or skilled in exercises, sports, or games requiring physical strength, agility, or stamina.”  

Serious gardeners must be athletes, because gardening is a real workout.

Even the experts know that. The American Heart Association recommends at least 150 minutes of physical activity each week and lists gardening as a moderate-intensity aerobic activity. Heavy yardwork (a.k.a. serious gardening) made their list of vigorous aerobic activities. That shouldn’t be a surprise to most gardeners. What may surprise you are the results of a 2011 South Korean study, which suggested that building and looking after a vegetable garden qualifies as moderate-intensity exercise for 20-year-olds. 

Gardeners are not couch potatoes! We have proof!

So why does the doctor roll their eyes when you tell them gardening is your exercise? If you’re like me, your step count quadruples on gardening days. Sometimes it seems that gardening is the Rodney Dangerfield of athletic activities, but if gardeners don’t give themselves enough credit for all the physical effort they put into their gardens, why should physicians or anyone else?

As Dr. Sue Stuart-Smith notes in her book The Well-Gardened Mind, people keep track of the minutes they spend at the gym, but no one keeps track of garden time. Where’s the line in that beautiful garden journal that asks how long you worked out in the garden that day? You ought to jot it down unprompted, if only so you can pat yourself on the back when you blow past the AHA’s activity goal in a single morning. 

Let’s talk about garden-variety strength training. 

This is the next big thing fitness gurus want us to do more of as we age. Do you give yourself credit for hitting that twice-weekly training goal? If you don’t, you should.

Gardeners carry a lot of weight, and not all of it is around our waistlines. A bag of mulch, depending on moisture levels, may weigh more than 20 pounds. The heaping mound of compost you haul around in your trusty rusty wheelbarrow can weigh upwards of 100 pounds.

Heck, watering the patio plants should count. The water in a two-gallon can weighs nearly 17 pounds, not counting the can. And, while you’re carrying that sloshy monster hither and yon, you’re working your core and practicing dynamic balance skills. 

If gardening is so good for us, why do we garden less as the years go by?

Gardeners are rarely forced into full retirement. We do that to ourselves, or a misguided doctor does it to us. Don’t surrender without a fight. Instead, think of yourself as an athlete in recovery. Adjust the intensity level, but don’t stop playing with your plants. Regular gardening can decrease the risk of becoming frail. It can reduce osteoarthritic knee pain for seniors in their sixties. It can also be good therapy for people who suffer from chronic lower back pain, despite what your back is telling you.

How we do things in the garden can either help us or hinder us. Sadly, we lack guidance on the finer points of our sport. There’s no coach or team trainer around to blow the whistle. I’ve never heard of a gardener counting “reps.” Who among us would dream of shooting video to assess the biomechanical soundness of how we swing an axe or wield a hula hoe?  We’re gardeners, not golfers. All that fancy falderal is reserved for the real athletes, the ones with the multi-year contracts.

Too many gardeners play hurt.

There’s nothing virtuous or good about weeding while your sciatic nerve is on fire. What is it that makes us keep going when we should hit the showers?

Sheer stupidity, at least on my part.

“Suck it up, buttercup” is what I told myself before the reckoning arrived. The MRIs were bad, all three of them. I was benched, totally benched. Quitting cold turkey was tough. By day, I moped. By night, I tossed and turned. I was lost without a Hori Hori in my hand.

Cue the world’s tiniest violins. Tune them to the tenor of the tears that sprang to my eyes when a long-awaited box of bulbs arrived on my doorstep. I feared condemning those costly geophytes to certain death when I left them, sad and unopened, sitting on the dusty shelf on my husband’s side of the garage because I couldn’t bring myself to look at them even a moment longer.

Then, fortune smiled. I had a bulb-sparing epiphany.

I remembered a PBS show called GardenFit, produced by Madeline Hooper, a real-deal gardener. I remembered Madeline’s thoughtful posts on Instagram.

Perhaps GardenFit could be helpful?

I hoped it would. I adjusted my pillows, clicked the link I found on the GardenFit website, and I settled in for a twenty-six-episode binge. I took notes. And then, I went out and planted 200 bulbs. Not all at once, but all without pain.

GardenFit got me back in the game.

If not for Madeline Hooper, I would never have questioned the wisdom of the doctor who told me to quit gardening and try walking with a cane. Nor would I have found the new doc who wrote the physical therapy prescriptions I needed for my back, hips, knees, shoulders, and Achilles. And, if not for Madeline, I never would have shown my physical therapist exactly the kinds of moves I needed to master as a gardener athlete. Never underestimate the mood-lifting value of a well-executed chair squat.

Fired up with newfound hope, I called Madeline to thank her for GardenFit.

She shared that she had once been like me, an enthusiastic gardener in pain.

“I gardened hunched, and I really suffered from that. I’d get up with a headache. And it got worse and worse, because I wanted to garden more and more, and I just couldn’t.”

On the advice of a friend, Madeline began working with Jeff Hughes, a professional trainer who tailored a program to support her functional needs as a gardener. Within a month, she felt much better.

“The more I worked with Jeff, the more I realized that nobody has taught gardeners that gardening is like a sport. It’s like if you want to play golf, somebody has to teach you how to swing the club.” 

Madeline wanted all her gardening friends to get the help they needed, so when Jeff Hughes suggested she produce a TV show, the retired P.R. pro did exactly that. She pitched her GardenFit concept to PBS. They snapped it up. The program ran for two seasons, and you can still find it online at GardenFit. 

Each GardenFit episode features Madeline and her fitness trainer co-hosts (Jeff Hughes-Season One/Adam Schersten-Season Two), as they tour idyllic green spaces and meet interesting gardeners. The programs are a pleasant mélange of imagery and plant talk, seasoned with practical demonstrations of how gardeners can move through garden tasks with greater comfort and ease. Madeline, as a retired professional ballroom dancer, demonstrates each helpful movement with cheerful grace.

The program gently leads you to believe that becoming more garden fit is possible for everyone. Madeline sees GardenFit as “a passport to gardening slightly differently, understanding a little bit more how to use your body with simple things.” She assured me, “This is not hard. These are not exercises. We recommend some stretches, but that’s really to do in between chores.”

Madeline’s approach is not just a bunch of hooey.

Research done in 2022 at the University of Utah demonstrated that teaching gardeners about proper posture and tool use can help them garden with less pain and strain. After working my way through somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 intensive physical therapy appointments in the past 6 months, I can vouch for many of the strategies recommended on GardenFit. The hip hinge you see on GardenFit is the same one I practiced in P.T. If you learn it with GardenFit, you can skip the insurance co-pay.

If you’re in pain for any reason, get it checked out, so you can do something about it.

Start with a trusted medical professional who can evaluate your symptoms. If you run across a doctor who doesn’t listen, push back. If you lack the courage to push back, borrow some moxy from The Impatient Gardener Erin Schanen. She posted this gold nugget on her social media.

I had a doctor laugh out loud at me when he asked me what I do that I might need my knees for (a discussion of whether I should have surgery to fix my two torn ACLs). I wanted to pick his ass up like a 50-pound bag of soil, toss him over my shoulder and carry him to the compost pile, where I’d toss him in like I was rotating the pile for the first time of the year and then ask him what he thought I meant when I said gardening. 

Don’t suffer alone.

Get help building the skills and strength you need to garden in the way you want to garden.

Madeline encouraged me to be patient. “You can do this. You’ll get there.”

No matter your age or fitness level, just watching GardenFit will make you feel better. It is never too late to become the kind of garden athlete you were meant to be. Madeline told me that if she could, she would love to be in your garden with you to encourage you and show you that gardening doesn’t have to hurt. She was delighted to tell me that a GardenFit book may be coming soon. “It really will put the whole idea of how to be GardenFit in people’s hands, and they can take it as far as they want to go.” For now, you can find Madeline through her website and social media. She also enjoys delivering both in-person and virtual presentations for all kinds of gardening groups.

I hope you’ll find something helpful from GardenFit, as I did, and then share it forward. As Madeline says, “All gardeners should know they don’t have to accept the aches and pains associated with gardening.” 

Meanwhile, stay off the sidelines!

Enjoy your garden workouts!