In recent findings, Candice Shoemaker, PhD, professor of horticulture at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, and her colleagues showed that older people who tend gardens have superior hand strength and finger dexterity compared to non-gardeners. Shoemaker, a weekend gardener herself, is convinced that gardening as a leisure-time activity offers other important benefits–and she’s hoping to prove it in her on-going research. With spring just around the corner, PDQhealth talked to her about getting back to the garden.

Obviously gardening is a physical activity. But is it really strenuous enough to constitute exercise, especially in older people?

That was the first question we asked. Charts that list calorie expenditure for a variety of activities often include gardening activities such as raking and shoveling. But those numbers are mostly interpretive. By that I mean the researchers looked at the body motions involved and then found something similar that had already been measured to determine the intensity of that particular activity. We wanted to know what’s really happening when gardeners garden. We identified nine common gardening tasks, things like digging, raking, planting, and pulling weeds. We tested older gardeners both in the lab and in their gardens, and we were able to show that gardening tasks that use upper body and lower body muscles constitute moderate intensity physical activity. By gardening 60 minutes most days of the week, these older people were definitely meeting the physical activity guidelines.

Are they getting the same health benefits associated with other forms of activity?

That’s what we’re looking at now. We’re doing a longitudinal study with a cohort of 60 older adults. We’ve taken a wide range of health measurements–physical health, psychological health, bone mineral density, resting heart rate, blood pressure, sleep quality, finger dexterity, hand strength, life satisfaction and other factors. Based on their leisure time activities, we’ve been able to determine which of the group are gardeners and which are non-gardeners. And now we’re in the process of comparing them.

What have you found so far?

We’ve only looked at data from the first year, but we’ve already seen some interesting differences. The gardeners in our group turned out to have better finger dexterity and hand strength than the non-gardeners. They also had improved self-esteem.

Why does hand strength and finger dexterity matter?

As people age, usually starting in their fifties, people begin to lose hand strength. And the loss of strength can affect their ability to do many activities. Anything that helps maintain strength is very valuable. A lot of older people develop arthritis in their hands, and we know that one of the things that helps control arthritis is continuous movement. If you continue to use your hands, the joints are going to remain more flexible and not freeze up.

I should mention that, because of our finding on hand strength and finger dexterity, we decided to test horticulture therapy in people who had experienced a stroke. Many people lose the full use of their hands after a stroke. Last summer and fall we worked with a local rehab hospital to run an intervention with stroke patients that focused on mixing soil, filling pots, taking cuttings, planting seeds, and other gardening activities that involve using hands. We haven’t analyzed the data yet, so I can’t say whether it helped. But I can tell you that the volunteers really loved it. If they hadn’t been gardening, they would have been squeezing a rubber ball to regain strength. It’s a lot easier to keep people motivated by gardening activities than squeezing a ball again and again.

Did other benefits show up in your study?

We had expected to find that gardeners had better bone mineral density, since at least one other trial has shown that, but we didn’t see a difference in our group. But then our study is still in its early stages, and most of the volunteers in our cohort are still pretty active. So some of the additional benefits of gardening may show up as we follow them over the coming years. One of the important benefits of gardening over time, we think, is that it has a lot of natural motivating factors. People really like to garden. There are tangible rewards–the sight and smell of beautiful flowers you’ve grown yourself, fruits and vegetables you can eat or share with neighbors, just the pleasure of being outdoors. Our study should eventually help us determine if gardeners are more likely than non-gardeners to stay active, and if so, if they maintain their level of physical activity over time.

Do older people adapt their gardening activities to acommodate the constraints of age–things like bad backs or bum knees?

You’d think so. But we found that older gardeners in our group didn’t. If they could no longer do something in the garden, they just didn’t do it any longer. Which is too bad. One of the things we tried to do in another program, which was purely an educational program we ran, was to encourage older gardeners to adapt. This was inspired by my dad, actually. We’ve always been a farming family. We’ve always had gardens. One year when I went home to see my parents in Michigan, I discovered that my dad hadn’t planted the garden because he sometimes couldn’t get up from kneeling. The garden was behind the barn, and he worried that if he couldn’t get up, my mom wouldn’t see him. So he just didn’t put in a garden. I told him about a nifty gardening stool you can get at Wal-Mart that you can sit on and also has armrests so you can push yourself up. The following summer he put in a garden, and I really think it helps him stay active and motivated. Little things like that can help gardeners continue to garden.

We’ve talked about older people. What about kids? With the epidemic of weight problems showing up even in pre-schoolers, is gardening a way to encourage them to be more active?

Absolutely. Kids love to garden. In fact, if you look at the natural life cycle of gardening, quite often young children love to garden. As people go through their twenties and thirties, they do very little gardening. They’re too busy getting their careers and families established. But as people move into their forties, they get back to gardening. And definitely after retirement, people who were once gardeners tend to pick it up again as a leisure time activity.

We’re in the midst of doing a study of fourth and fifth graders to see if an after-school gardening program offers benefits. We’re only in the first year of a two-year study, so we haven’t analyzed the data yet. But I can tell you that the kids love it. There’s a photo of a kid who has just picked a radish, and the smile on her face speaks volumes.

What about people who don’t have garden space of their own?

If you have a deck, it’s amazing how much gardening you can do in pots. And there are vertical garden systems that allow people to grow fruits and vegetables on walls. Another great resource is community gardens. We have one here in Manhattan, and it’s very inspiring to go there. Some of the gardeners are retired people, but others are college students who live in dorms or apartments and who always had gardens and want to do gardening again. So you have these two very distinct generations coming together, having harvest potlucks and things. It’s pretty neat.
 

© 2009 PDQhealth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: finger dexterity, gardening, hand strength