Carrying Weight: The Simple, Powerful Workout That Builds Strength for Life

If you scour the internet looking for the “best exercises”, you’ll be inundated with a wide range of thoughts and opinions. Everyone from personal trainers and strength coaches to orthopedic surgeons and physical therapists offer up what they believe are the good (or the bad) exercises people should (or shouldn’t) be doing to lose weight, build muscle, or just stay healthy. Squats and deadlifts, two of the most widely debated exercises, are staples in any strength and conditioning program, yet are simultaneously slammed by certain fitness and medical professionals as “bad for your knees and back”.

Ordinarily, I am agnostic about training style because really, it’s more important to move, be consistent, and enjoy what you’re doing rather than about finding the “perfect” exercise. Your movement practice could be yoga, pilates, CrossFit, Zumba, powerlifting, running, pick up sports, you name it! As a society we don’t move enough, and I believe we should be encouraging MORE movement rather than try to scare people into thinking certain forms of exercise or specific movements will harm them. However, there is one exercise (or group of exercises) that we as humans are born to do and has positive benefits for EVERYONE, regardless of age or fitness level. And that is to carry weight.

Humans Evolved to Carry Weight

Member of the Hadza tribe in Northern Tanzania.

As a species, humans are the best animal at carrying weight. We have evolved to do it from our time as hunter gatherers on the African savanna. Our early ancestors would hunt and kill animals and then carry the bodies back to their tribe to eat. Anatomically, our bodies are optimized to carry weight in a variety of ways due to the development of our hands with opposable thumbs, our upright posture due to the shape and orientation of our spine, pelvis and legs, and the way our feet interact with the ground (1). The Hadza tribe in northern Tanzania are one of the last remaining examples of our hunter gatherer lineage, and they routinely carry portions of the animals they hunt over long distances (2). In developed nations like the United States, we no longer need to hunt down our prey and carry it back to our tribes, but our modern lifestyles bring its own set of challenges to our bodies. With the technological and medical advancements and all the modern conveniences those bring, we need to exercise in order to make up for general lack of movement. In the struggle to find the most “ideal” way to move, I suggest the humble carry as the simplest, safest, and most effective way to load our bodies as evolution intended.

The Benefits of Carrying Weight

Simple, Safe, and Infinitely Modifiable

The beautiful thing about carrying weight is that it’s one of the most widely accessible exercises. It can be done with any kind of implement you can think of, from dumbbells and kettlebells in the gym, a weighted backpack, jugs of water, buckets of rocks, bags of potting soil, you name it. While having a set of dumbbells to carry is nice, it’s not a necessity. You can get an equivalent benefit from just carrying the normal stuff you use in your life.

Rucking is as simple as walking with a weighted backpack.

When we examine the skill level required to carry compared with formal strength training movements, the barrier to entry is far lower. Take a movement like the squat. A full depth squat requires sufficient range of motion at the hips, ankles, and thoracic spine, as well as coordination, strength, and stability to perform well. Considering the relatively low amount of training experience and general body awareness the average person has, simply carrying a pair of dumbbells at your side or walking with a weighted backpack imposes far less demand on these domains, making it simpler and easier to get started. You can load a person with little to no training history more safely and build them up more quickly with carries than you can with more technical weightlifting movements that require a long period of learning to do the movement well.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t do squats and deadlifts! Squatting is an essential movement pattern to being human, much like carrying weight. Building body awareness, stability, and efficient motor patterning from compound movements like the squat is immensely beneficial for our bodies. It also has enormous functional carryover to help with human movement at all ends of the fitness and wellness spectrum, from helping people age well and remain independent into their later years to give elite athletes a competitive edge. However, the learning curve is steeper to perform a squat well and progressively load it over time. If we’re looking at low barrier ways to get people moving, carrying weight is far easier to get started for most people.

Carrying weight also scales with you as you get stronger and fitter. While a training novice may start out carrying two 15lb dumbbells or walking with 10lbs in a bag, we see elite caliber humans performing seemingly inhuman feats of carrying, requiring strength, toughness, and grit. Competitive strongmen and women compete in farmer’s carry events, walking with several hundred pounds of weight in each hand. Special forces soldiers train by rucking with packs weighing upwards of 100lbs to carry their gear into combat. The average person will no doubt fall somewhere in between these two ends of the carrying spectrum, but as you can see, it has relevance and can challenge humans of all fitness levels.

Soldiers rucking during training for SFAS (Special Forces Assessment and Selection)

Farmers walk event in the 2020 World’s Strongest Man

Build Longevity and Resilience

Grip Strength

The benefits of carrying go far beyond simply making you fitter. The effects of the loading on your body can improve numerous health markers across all age groups including hand grip strength. Recently, grip strength has been shown to be a key indicator of longevity and has been proposed as a new vital sign due to its association with numerous health outcomes. Low grip strength has been correlated with the many chronic diseases that ravage our nation, including Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, chronic kidney and liver disease, and cancer. It is also strongly associated with sarcopenia, frailty, and fragility fractures in older adults. In addition, those exhibiting low grip strength have an increased risk of hospitalization, overall mortality, and reduced quality of life (3).

There may not be a simpler way to improve grip strength than picking up a weight and walking with it. Forget the little hand grip squeeze tool, the farmers carry offers far more meaningful benefits for your whole body while improving your grip strength at the same time. With the demands of a busy life, we want to prioritize efficiency in our exercise selection, and the farmer’s carry checks all the boxes.

Farmer carries are a simple but effective test of fitness.

Loading for your body’s tissues

Resistance training has been shown time and time again to have benefits for all of your body’s tissues, from bones and muscle, to tendons and ligaments. Two of the most vital tissues that require resistance training to adapt are bones and muscle. It is normal for our bodies to experience bone and muscle loss after the age of 30. However, we are seeing rates of bone and muscle loss in today’s society that are far beyond what is healthy for our bodies. According to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2017-28, 10.2 million people aged 50 and over had osteoporosis and 43.3 million more people had low bone mass or osteopenia. Women are far more likely to experience loss of bone mass, with 51.5% of women over 50 experiencing osteopenia compared to only 33.5% of men (4). In addition, the progressive loss of muscle mass and function, called sarcopenia, is known to affect 10-16% of people worldwide over the age of 60 (5).

These conditions rarely occur in isolation. Very often, older adults experience both conditions simultaneously, which are now collectively being termed osteosarcopenia. These conditions are strongly associated with physical disability later in life, resulting in a significant burden not only on the patient experiencing it but the medical system as a whole. The combination of these two conditions lead to an increased risk of falls due to the loss of functional strength and an increased risk of fracture due to the fragility of these patients’ bones. Falls are the single biggest risk factor of hospitalization in older adults, and 83% of deaths resulting from hip fractures are the direct result of a fall (6).

These statistics might be shocking, but it’s the sad reality of the sedentary lifestyles that have become commonplace in our society. However, osteosarcopenia is a PREVENTABLE condition, and resistance training such as rucking, is a safe, cheap, and effective way to help our bodies age in a healthy and resilient way. Our body’s adapt due to the imposed demand of the loading, and proper healing and remodeling can ONLY take place in the presence of the stresses placed on it from intentional resistance training. In order for the resistance training to be effective, it must produce mechanical stress which exceeds that encountered in daily life. The two types of training that can produce this effect are weight-bearing impact exercises, such as hopping and jumping, and progressive resistance training, such as weighted carries (7).

Contrary to popular belief, humans are not fragile creatures and resistance training is essential to make us more resilient. Too often, we are led to believe we need gentle exercise or low impact training to keep us healthy. However, while walking, swimming, and cycling are effective at training our aerobic systems, they do not provide an adequate stimulus to improve musculoskeletal health (7). Walking with a weighted pack, however, can simultaneously train the cardiovascular system and give the muscles and bones its desperately needed external loading to create denser, stronger muscles and bone. Rucking, therefore, can and should be a primary intervention to combat and prevent osteosarcopenia across our entire population.

Rucking can be done safely at any age.

Rehab low back pain

Carries can be an effective element to rehabilitate all kinds of injuries. They are particularly effective in guarding against, and rehabbing from one of the most common complaints in the US and a leading cause of disability worldwide, low back pain. Low back pain can be complex to diagnose and treat given the wide variety of presentations. However, when we examine the primary function of the musculature around the low back and the most efficient ways to train it, we start to see some commonalities.

According to Dr. Stu McGill, one of the world’s foremost researchers on the lumbar spine, the job of the core musculature is to create stiffness of the torso and allow for more efficient and powerful activation of the limb musculature. Studies of strongman training have demonstrated that performance across multiple types of strongman events are enhanced by a competitors ability to efficiently generate power at the hips and transmit it through a stiffened trunk. Similarly, recent work has shown that the limiting factor to pressing weight overhead in strongman training is, in fact, core stability and strength, not shoulder strength (8).

Loaded carries present an efficient way to train trunk stiffness for patients with low back pain. Work performed by Dr. McGill demonstrated that carrying 20kg of weight in a pack and walking over gently undulating ground, for instance, can help desensitize the discs of the lumbar spine while reducing the demand of the spinal extensor muscles, thereby decreasing muscular back pain (9).

In addition, loaded carrying will challenge the body to create spinal stiffness in a more functional way than traditional “core” exercises such as sit-ups. While you might feel a sit-up burning in your abs after a few hundred reps, they are training the “motion” of the abdominals, but not their function. While the motion created by your abdominals is to flex the spine, efficient trunk stabilization requires co-contraction of multiple muscles around the trunk, including the abdominals, obliques, transverse abdominus, spinal erectors, and quadratus lumborum. Carrying weight, and its many variations like the suitcase carry, where weight is carried in one hand, are able to train spinal stiffness by resisting trunk motion from different directions. When you carry a weight in one hand, your trunk is being pulled downward by the weight, and the trunk musculature on the opposite side, including your quadratus lumborum, must contract to stabilize your trunk. We call this “anti-sidebending” training (8).

Two examples of unilateral carries.

Similarly, if you carry a single kettlebell in the front of your body, the trunk is simultaneously being pulled forward and sideways, therefore our trunk is being trained to resist flexion and sidebending. You can vary how you carry the weight and create progressive overload by manipulating variables such as the weight of the object you are carrying and how far you carry it. This is the foundation for graded exposure that allows the spine and trunk musculature to adapt over time and create a resilient low back.

How to Get Started Carrying Weight

At the gym

You can easily add weighted carries into your normal gym routine without adding significant training volume. If you don’t have space to walk, simply march in place. You’ll still get the benefits without needing a ton of space. Challenge yourself a couple times a week with different weights and distances. Try to go for a longer distance with a moderate weight one day, and a shorter distance with a heavy weight the second day. Here’s an example:

Day 1: 3 x 100m carry (or ~90 sec walking) at a moderate weight

Day 2: 3 x 100ft carry (or ~30 sec walking) at a heavy weight

If you’re really looking to create an additional challenge for your midline, hold two different size weights or just carry in one hand. Don’t feel limited to just dumbbells either! If your gym has other odd objects like a sandbag, try a bear hug carry (shown below). You’ll challenge your legs and back in a totally different way than holding dumbbells at your side. But before you go searching youtube for the whackiest way to carry a kettlebell, remember that simple doesn’t mean easy. Stick with a basic farmer’s carry if you’re new, and if you follow a basic progressive overload principle of adding a little bit of weight each week, you will get stronger and fitter!

Sandbag bear-hug carries.

Rucking

Rucking has become increasingly popular in the civilian world over the last few years thanks to the hard work of Jason McCarthy, founder of GORUCK. McCarthy was looking to bring the training that forges special forces soldiers to the everyday person. You don’t need to be a SEAL or Ranger to benefit from this training! Grab a backpack, wrap some rocks up in a towel, cinch the bag up as high as you can on your shoulders, and walk. A rucking bag can help situate the weight more comfortably on your back, but ultimately, you don’t need one to get started. The most important thing is to get some weight on your back, get outside and start walking. A great starting point for most people is ~10-20lbs. If you consider yourself pretty fit, go for 20-30lbs. McCarthy recommends staying under ⅓ of your total body weight to balance your body’s capabilities with the total load of the ruck. Looking for more resources on rucking? Check out all the information GORUCK has on their website to get started today.

Rucking is always better with friends!

Work it into your everyday life

You can sneak carrying into your life in more ways than you might think. Going on a business trip? Pack a duffel and carry it instead of rolling a suitcase behind you at the airport. Leave a ruck by your door and grab it when you go to walk the dog. Take another bag to your office and go for a loop around the block during lunch or take that next business call outside as you walk. Even better, get your whole office out there! Our new moms and dads can reap the benefits of carrying their babies in a carrier on their back when going out for a walk. If you live near a grocery store, consider walking and only bringing two reusable bags to fill with groceries and carry them home. If you think outside the box and you’ll find countless ways to work carrying into your life!

Get out and carry some weight!

Citations

1. Easter M. The comfort crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self. Rodale Books; 2021.
2. BBC News. Trying the Hadza hunter-gatherer berry and porcupine diet. Published July 22, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40686373
3. Vaishya R, Misra A, Vaish A, Ursino N, D’Ambrosi R. Hand grip strength as a proposed new vital sign of health: a narrative review of evidences. J Health Popul Nutr. 2024;43(1):7. Published 2024 Jan 9. doi:10.1186/s41043-024-00500-y
4. Sarafrazi N. Osteoporosis or Low Bone Mass in Older Adults: United States, 2017-2018.; 2021. doi:10.15620/cdc:103477
5. Yuan S, Larsson SC. Epidemiology of sarcopenia: Prevalence, risk factors, and consequences. Metabolism. 2023;144:155533. doi:10.1016/j.metabol.2023.155533
6. Facts about falls. Older Adult Fall Prevention. Published May 9, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/falls/data-research/facts-stats/index.html
7. Hong AR, Kim SW. Effects of Resistance Exercise on Bone Health. Endocrinol Metab (Seoul). 2018;33(4):435-444. doi:10.3803/EnM.2018.33.4.435
8. McGill S. Core training: evidence translating to better performance and injury prevention. Strength and Conditioning Journal. 2010;32(3):33-46. doi:10.1519/ssc.0b013e3181df4521
9. Mills K. Benefits to Rucking & Your Back with Dr. McGill. GORUCK. Published March 25, 2024. https://www.goruck.com/blogs/news-stories/benefits-to-rucking-your-back-with-dr-mcgill

Picture References

1. BBC News. Trying the Hadza hunter-gatherer berry and porcupine diet. Published July 22, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40686373
2. What is Rucking? Complete Guide to Amazing Benefits & More. GORUCK. https://www.goruck.com/pages/what-is-rucking
3. Walton D. How Important is Rucking for SFAS? — TF VooDoo. TF VooDoo. Published January 23, 2023. https://tfvoodoo.com/articles/how-important-is-rucking-for-sfas-special-forces-assesment-selection
4. Farmer’s Walk – The world’s strongest Man. World’s Strongest Man. https://theworldsstrongestman.com/events/farmers-walk/
5. Barker B. Crossfit Grunt Work: Embrace the Suck with Weighted Carries | BOXROX. BOXROX – Competitive Fitness Magazine. https://www.boxrox.com/crossfit-grunt-work/. Published April 10, 2017.
6. Maric F. The Risks and Rewards of rucking for Seniors – RuckingBasics.com. Jason Vaught Site. Published November 15, 2024. https://ruckingbasics.com/articles/rucking-for-seniors/
7. Full Body/Integrated Exercises | Suitcase carry. https://www.acefitness.org/resources/everyone/exercise-library/389/suitcase-carry/
8. Full Body/Integrated Exercises | Waiter’s Carry. https://www.acefitness.org/resources/everyone/exercise-library/390/waiter-s-carry/
9. Sekulovski K. The power of sandbag training – Invictus fitness. Invictus Fitness. Published September 26, 2024. https://www.crossfitinvictus.com/blog/sandbag-training/
10. What is Rucking? Complete Guide to Amazing Benefits & More. GORUCK. https://www.goruck.com/pages/what-is-rucking