THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 12, 1995 TAG: 9511100084
SECTION: HOME & GARDEN PAGE: G1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: Fitness Quest
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 130 lines
IF IT'S FALL, that means Sheryl A. Grumney is sprinting. Every 15 minutes, from wherever she is in her two-story colonial house in Virginia Beach, she dashes outside, turns around and runs back in.
Grumney has no idea what she weighs, doesn't own a scale and doesn't count calories.
``I don't have time to figure it out,'' she says. The wind sprints are timed to move the lawn sprinkler to a fresh patch of newly sprouted grass every quarter hour.
Like a lot of people, Grumney lives a busy life. She has four children, a husband, a house, a yard and a part-time job. It's what keeps her slim.
Sometimes it's chasing after kids, sometimes it's having a physically demanding job, sometimes it's loving yard work. A lot of people do without pricey exercise equipment or memberships to tony gyms. They stay lean and fit the old-fashioned way - keeping busy.
Take Nathan Jones. This morning when he hopped on the scale, the Norfolk resident weighed 149 pounds.
``That's one pound less than when I registered for the draft in 1940,'' he says. He's 80 now. His waistline is trim, his body muscled, his face evenly bronzed. His yard is his training ground.
``I don't like to sit down,'' he says, the neatly cut St. Augustine lawn outside his Edgewater home a testimony to his industry. ``Living on the corner like we do, we have over 800 feet of edging. It takes over three hours to edge and trim it. I use an electric edger but around the beds I use shears.''
Jones gets a good aerobic workout using a 60-year-old reel-type lawn mower.
Ivy that blankets the back of the house needs clipping regularly, too, and Jones keep the gutters clean and the windows washed, even though his wife puts up a fuss at him going up and down ladders. So he compromises. He only climbs to the top of the first floor and tends to second floor windows by stepping out on the roof.
When he's not in the yard, trimming, raking and pruning, Jones is striding through the neighborhood.
``I try to walk every day about a mile and a half to three miles. If it rains, I wear a raincoat. If it snows, I wear boots,'' he says. ``I hate to see a man with his stomach hanging over.''
No stomach at this address. No stomach at the Grumney's either.
The Virginia Beach mom's four kids are 4, 7, 9 and 13 years old. She isn't likely to put on weight with eight loads of laundry to wash and fold twice a week. She runs up and down two staircases in her house with five hampers each time. That's after she makes three out of the five beds every morning and before she mows the lawn.
OK, so she walks. ``I walk with my neighbor in the neighborhood or we drive down to the Boardwalk,'' she says and starts laughing. ``But I just walk because she's walking and I'm listening. Mainly, it's for the socializing.''
She's in and out of her car all day, selling Mary Kay cosmetics or delivering children to soccer, ice hockey, gymnastics, dance, field hockey, cheerleading and track.
In her idle moments, she dreams up projects, like painting the house.
Grumney owns a few exercise videos, and there's a bench in her garage where she lifts free weights. But, she says, finding the time to work out and release a few endorphins sometimes means doing step aerobics at 5:30 a.m.
That is not Sarah Gilbury's cup of tea.
``I just can't make myself get up at 6 a.m. to exercise,'' says this Virginia Beach mother of three boys, 5 months old and 4 and 5 years old. ``And in the evening I'm just too tired.''
No matter. Even though her NordicTrack has gathered dust since her youngest was born, she's lost all but five pounds of her pregnancy weight.
Between keeping up the household and hoisting children around, she burns off plenty of calories. And she walks. All over the neighborhood with her three children in tow.
``I put two in the stroller and the third one rides his trike,'' she said. It's easy to tell when her workout is done. ``We have to go home when he gets tired of pedaling.''
Then there are people who get their ``workout'' on the job as well around the house. Jay Mears owns a landscaping business, Virginia Landscapes, in Chesapeake. In high school and college he used to run and lift weights.
Now that he's married with children, he counts on his home life and career to keep his 6-foot-one build in fighting trim.
Aside from the energy he expends running after a 3- and 5-year-old once he gets home, Mears burns up calories all day long. Some days start with running a rototiller and raking out a yard and end with shoveling topsoil and trotting behind a drop spreader.
``The most strenuous thing I do is probably removing old and overgrown trees and shrubs. We do a lot of it by hand with a shovel, ax and chain saw. The second hardest job is probably planting a tree. It is very physical work, but I like being outside,'' he said. At the end of the day, aching muscles tell him if he's had a good workout.
Carol Pratt, a busy Portsmouth resident, purposefully builds workouts into her work day. She's the type who will park her car an extra block away from her destination just to get a few more walking steps in.
``I'm aware of how I can exercise without going to a gym,'' Pratt said.
The petite 48-year-old is on the run a lot with her job. She is manager of WGOV-Channel 48, Portsmouth's government television channel.
``I do a lot of videotaping and carry 30 to 40 pounds of equipment around. I know I'm burning up more calories that way,'' she says. ``I'll also deliberately walk up six flights of steps instead of using the elevator,'' she says. ``And people always say I walk so fast. I do. From my office to the Xerox machine is about 100 feet. I walk very briskly to get there.''
At home, she mows her three-quarter-acre lawn with a gas-powered push mower.
``A lot of times my friends will say, `Why don't you get someone to do it for you?' But I've measured it, and I walk 4 1/2 miles up and down pushing the mower,'' she says. ``That's one of the things you can do to tone yourself.''
So does this mean couch potatoes should cancel their lawn service in favor of fitness?
It's a good start, says David P. Swain, director of Old Dominion University's Wellness Institute and Research Center. But simply counting calories burned can be misleading, he cautions. Weight loss results only from burning more calories while eating fewer calories.
And it's important to pay attention to all components of fitness - aerobic capacity, muscular strength, flexibility and body composition, or body fat.
``The answer is to do a variety of activities to achieve a good level of fitness,'' Swain says.
Letting go the cleaning lady could be a step in the right direction. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by Charlie Meads, The Virginian-Pilot
Sheryl A. Grumney...
Photo by LAWRENCE JACKSON, The Virginian-Pilot
Chesapeake landscaper Jay Mears gets a good workout lifting,
digging, raking and shoveling.
Chart
Energy used in activities
KEYWORDS: EXERCISE by CNB