Men who garden during the day get a performance boost in the bedroom at night.
Regular bouts of weeding, digging and mowing will not only make your yard beautiful, but also serve as a kind of natural Viagra, revitalizing a man's sex drive, London's Daily Mail reports of a study of 674 middle-aged men from researchers at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria.
How much gardening is necessary for this unusual benefit? The key is to burn up 1,000 calories a week through exercise to reduce impotence by 38 percent. The level of aerobic exertion should be enough to raise the heart rate to 120 beats a minute or higher.
That translates to doing any one of these five days a week:
Gardening: 30 to 45 minutes a day
Dancing: 30 minutes a day
Cycling: 4 miles in 15 minutes
Jogging or running: 1.5 miles
The good news? You don't have to be a super athlete for exercise to give your sex life a boost, but men who exercise even more than 30 minutes a day so they burn up a total of 4,000 calories a week, will see their impotence risk drop by almost 52 percent, the Mail reports. At some point in their life, about 10 percent of men suffer from impotence, which is also known as erectile dysfunction. Although one-third of these cases are linked to such psychological problems as depression, stress or work pressure, the rest have an underlying physical cause, such as hypertension or diabetes. Impotence is seen as an early symptom of heart disease, since reduced blood flow to the genitals can be a sign of clogged arteries.
"Erectile function can be maintained even by low, regular physical activity. Energy expenditure of as little as 1,000 kilocalories a week reduces the risk," the authors write in the journal European Urology. "Doctors should use these findings to encourage their patients to do more physical training and adopt a healthier lifestyle."
--From the Editors at Netscape
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