Housecleaning = Physically DRAINING??

Question

I run 4 miles a day EASILY, and I'm perfectly active & healthy. (I'm 18, female, not pregnant). I live alone, but I HATE cleaning.

Why? Not necessarily because it bores me, (though it does). Because I literally get exhausted & out of breath. I end up NEEDING to take a nap (which NEVER happens to me from cardio exercise and/or serious mental activity like a college test, etc).

Squatting (impossible to avoid when housecleaning) makes me exhausted (I get kind of dizzy and have to sit down) and lifting things like boxes are difficult for me. Squatting & lifting everyday things SHOULD NOT be this difficult for me.

I always end up with sore muscles when I'm cleaning. Vacuuming is physically draining to me as well - I can't even scrub a pot hard without needing to sit down for a breather.

How can I become less lazy and pathetic? According to my doctor, I'm physically healthy.

I'm 5'10 and 122 lbs, and I don't smoke. I also eat pretty healthy (no meat, except fish - I eat veggie sources of protein). I also drink lots of water.

Answer 1

This really sounds like a psychological problem, not a physical one, especially since your doctor has given you the thumbs-up healthwise.

You can always make housecleaning more fun. Put on your favorite music and turn it up loud. Then clean to the beat. Dance while you vacuum. Stretch and twirl while you dust. Wiggle and bop while you vacuum. Make those muscles work for that soreness and you'll gain fitness while you gain a clean house!

It's also a lot easier to do minor straightening-up than heavy cleaning--maybe you're not tidy enough and you need to cultivate some new habits?

  Such as: put things away when you're done with them, don't leave them out and wait for "housecleaning day." They build up fast, and you'll see them as overwhelming.

When you take off your shoes, take them off IN your closet. When you change your clothes, have a laundry basket nearby to put dirty ones into--and throw the hangers in with them that the clothes hung on--so you can do your laundry with all your stuff in one spot. When you read a newspaper, put it in the trash (or recycling) right after. Every time you wash your hands or brush your teeth, use a disinfecting wipe (keep them under the sinks everywhere) and clean off the counter and faucets.

Don't let clutter accumulate. Buy some colorful boxes, bins, bags, milk crates or whatever to keep things in--and coordinate them with your decor.

Organize your closets and drawers and keep them that way. If you have to, label them so you'll put things in the right places.

If you have the right tools, housecleaning can be easy.  Swiffer sweepers are great--and handy. You can do both dry and wet sweeping with them. The dusters are great too. They have long extension-handles that make getting up and down easy. If you can't afford them, stick an old sock over a broom handle and dust high surfaces with that. (Bonus--the sock can then just be thrown in the laundry and used again!)

When you get dishes dirty from cooking, cleaning them AS you cook makes washing up easier afterwards. Rinse out the bowls, pots and pans, and soak them overnight if they get stuff burnt on--adding a shake or two of baking soda makes burnt-on stuff come right out after an hour or two soaking.

Don't stress over cleaning! There's no scoreboard! You don't have to keep everything looking like a House and Garden magazine layout.

Remember: less is more. Less furniture=more free time because there's less dusting, less surface to collect clutter and less stuff to wipe off or keep tidy.   And also remember: More is less!  More preparation and tidyness at the outset=less cleaning later!

It's easier to clean if you have a routine--start from the corners of your house and work your way in to the center. Or start upstairs and work your way down (or vice-versa.) Do what seems most sensible for your situation.  

Clean the bathroom right after you take a shower--while you're still naked and wet and standing in the tub---just grab the cleanser and then spray it all down and step out--and it's done!  Buy two kinds of trash bags: small ones and large ones. Line all your cans with the small ones, then when you empty trash, just take small ones with you for all the cans and pick up the full ones and put them all into the large one.

Get one of those pull-along caddy things--for all your cleaning supplies: cleaners, dusters, the Swiffer handle--(it collapses!) trash bags, etc. Take it with you from room to room. They sell them everywhere--they collapse into a flat package, but you can leave yours open and filled with all your cleaning stuff and keep it all in one place. When you do trash, it's also handy for carrying out your filled trash bag.

Set one day aside for each chore--so you don't have to do them all on one single day. Do bathrooms on Tuesday, kitchen on Wednesday, trash and clutter on Thursday---etc. etc.

Cleaning should be something you practically do in your sleep! It's easy, mindless work, and you can do so many other things while cleaning! Meditation, singing, dictating chapters of a novel to tape, listening to music or audio books--any number of things. Have fun with it, and you'll feel alot better!

Answer 2

Here are a couple of things that could help you not get so tired when cleaning:

1) Do a fair amount of small daily upkeep so that when it's time to really clean, you don't have a whole lot to do. (I'll include a list of daily and weekly cleaning tasks that are recommended below.)

2) When you're cleaning, listen to some fun music. It will uplift your mood and energize and make cleaning more enjoyable.

3) Make sure you are well-rested and well-fed before bigger cleaning tasks so that you are sure to have your regular amount of energy.

Alright, that list I talked about.

Daily tasks: making sure dirty laundry gets put in a hamper, rinse the tub and the sink after every use (this takes about five seconds for the sink and about 30-60 seconds for the tub), clean up right after every meal as much as possible, and empty or consolidate trash into the kitchen.

Weekly tasks: clean the floors (vacuum, sweep, and/or mop), wash your sheets and towels, lightly dust, clean and organize the bathroom, clean and organize the kitchen, wipe down garbage cans, and do laundry.

Some people do laundry every day, but when you live by yourself, you should be able to limit it to about once a week. Also, the weekly tasks can be done on different days. For example, you could make Tuesday the day you clean your bathroom, and Thursday the day you wipe the garbage cans and dust, and leave Sunday for doing the majority of the rest of it.

I hope this helped a bit!

Answer 3

~~Since you are a ruining 4 miles a day I know you are physically fit! I'd keel over in a few blocks. I wonder if you are having an allergic reaction to something you clean with, or dust mites or something. That would account for the breathlessness, sleepiness, etc. Try just using natural cleaners (like baking soda  and vinegar (go to www.about.com for every cleaning recipe you can think of using non-chemical cleaners), just enter into their search box what to clean. Make sure you vacuum using a hepa filter to help with dust allergies, or try wearing a face mask (like doctors use), and see if these things help. Good luck, I hope it is something that simple!~~

Answer 4

I hates cleaning too. Nothing wrong with you as you are physically fit, it's plain and simple, you hate to clean and will make excuses not to clean.

It's a normal human reaction to invent roadblocks to avoid chores we do not want to do.

Answer 5

sometimes NOT knowing the purpose of what you do or why something is done can make it tiresome.

You clean to make your enviroument a more pleasant place.

just as you exersise to make your body healthier.

so just clean little by little and it will fall into place.

you dot want cob-webs around, or maybe you do, truthfully they dont bug me but we clean to make them disapeer and not make our lives look to others like we are lazy and we dont care

Answer 6

Maybe the cleaning products you use are knocking you out. I know somebody that is allergic to dust, so that's another possibility.  Then you probably are using different muscles cleaning than the ones you use working out or running.