Forget about the gym Chicken-sizing will keep you fit
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All the search engine hits for "chicken-sizing" point to that article, or else to material about measuring and sorting chickens.
I'll put it this way - I don't have any problems closing my exercise ring on my Apple Watch just by walking my dog and I walk at a pace that keeps my heart rate at 120 bpm and above. Add in some push-ups, wall sits, step lifts, crunches, and planks (in other words - any so-called "7-minute workout"), and you're set!
Only if you're a decent person. I'd be surprised if even half the dogs kept as pets get walked every day.
If you don't have a sizable yard.
I never saw this growing up. Dog walking was something people did maby on a weekend if they were “good owners” where I was at (west Michigan). Generally there was a decent sized yard with a fence though. Keeping a dog on a chain society marked you as lower class trash (as it should).
For me personally in the past 10 years there’s been a large and noticeable change in how often people walk dogs both where I currently live (PNW) and when I return to Michigan to visit family. Even my aging parents are in the habit of dog walking now. Though that’s in big part because they have more free time, no kids in the house, and need something to do.
For daily tasks, all you really need to do is collect the eggs. If you have a big enough feeder and water supply, you can just top those up once a week.
You do have to lock them up at night and release them in the morning, but that is covered by something like the devices here: https://chickenguard.co.uk/shop/
This is in the UK where the main predators are foxes.
I don't know why the author is chasing his chickens back to the pen. They normally want to go back to the coop to roost at night on their own.
I assume people like to put the chickens to bed before the chickens are actually ready to go to be themselves.
The solution was the simple butterfly stretch. Even 20 seconds resolves my lower back pain.
YMMV.
Failure is inevitable, much more so if you live alone, so living through disaster becomes the option. Variety is probably also good.
Running the numbers, though, the greater return is on managing your calorie intake. You can burn 200 extra calories managing chickens every day or you can figure out where that 200 calories needs to be cut out of your diet. The latter is a far more reliable approach.
Apparently you're not actually appreciably affecting your total calorie burn by doing exercise, as the body keeps that number within a narrow range.
Where does the energy come from then? Other processes, like inflammation, which are invested in less.
Within a limited range, I assume? Athletes being the obvious counter example of this failing past a certain limit.
> Other processes, like inflammation, which are invested in less.
Is the implication that inflammation is a response to not being active?
For a more granular look, comparing individuals instead of population averages, I recently joined Luke and her team, including Dugas, to examine activity and energy expenditure in a large, multiyear analysis known as the Modeling the Epidemiological Transition Study (METS). More than 300 participants wore accelerometers similar to a Fitbit or other fitness tracker 24 hours a day for an entire week while their daily energy expenditure was measured with doubly labeled water. We found that daily physical activity, tracked by the accelerometers, was only weakly related to metabolism. On average, couch potatoes tended to spend about 200 fewer calories each day than people who were moderately active: the kind of folks who get some exercise during the week and make a point to take the stairs. But more important, energy expenditure plateaued at higher activity levels: people with the most intensely active daily lives burned the same number of calories each day as those with moderately active lives. The same phenomenon keeping Hadza energy expenditure in line with that of other populations was evident among individuals in the study.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25162652/#:~:text=Caloric%20....
Until relatively recently(20 years) studies have been measuring the wrong thing, assuming metabolism is flexible and follows activity.
Studies measuring actual energy expenditure (using methods like double labelled water) confirmed, counterintuitively, that adjusted for weight, lean mass and age, people have roughly the same metabolic rate regardless of activity.
It's an evolutionary adaptation for periods of low food availability - the body does everything it can to not touch those fat stores.
Here's a podcast with one of the researchers who studied this:
https://theproof.com/rethinking-diet-exercise-with-herman-po...
The gist is that he went to a modern hunter-gatherer community, studied their activities and measured their energy expenditure. To his incredulity, the results indicated that these very active people use as much energy as their sedentary counterparts living in civilisation.
Initial conclusion was that there must have been a mistake somewhere, but the same measurement using a different method yielded the same results.
Similar studies on rats showed that increased activity reduces processes like inflammation, healing of wounds and production of reproductive hormones like estrogen.
Essentially our digestive systems are already doing their best.
There was an additional study in cooperation with several zoos which showed that other primates work the same. Humans have actually a pretty active metabolism in comparison, as it burns an average of 400kcal more.
Also it's not just this study. Research on this actually started in the 1980s when the double labelled water method became practical - unfortunately it's still massively expensive.
All in all there's a much larger body of research indicating that exercise is not effective at controlling weight. The Hadza study at least gives some clues and indicates that there's something we're missing and this mechanistic approach to metabolism where you can just coax it into burning more is a model that doesn't reflect reality.
"I can't clean the garage right now, I have to go to the gym!"