Post summary
I’d appreciate your help on a big new project on rucking/walking with weight.
I’d love to hear:
Questions you have about rucking/walking with weight.
Tips that have helped you do it better.
Any other details/thoughts/benefits you’d like to share.
Please fill out this quick, three-question survey if you’re willing to help. Thanks!
I’ve also listed five helpful rucking tips below. They’ll help you walk with weight better.
Housekeeping
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ICYMI:
On Wednesday, we covered why more strength isn’t always better and why you should aim to be “strong enough.” Read about it here. That post also featured a great exercise that gives you a clear marker when you’re strong enough.
Friday’s AMA covered my thoughts on the health impacts of alcohol and how you can get really (really!) fit in six months.
We had a fun Two Percent Sunday Chat yesterday about community and how you find it. Weigh in here.
Audio/podcast edition
The post
I’ve accepted a sweeping project on rucking/walking with weight—putting something that weighs something in a backpack and going for a walk.
My goal is to offer up the most definitive resource on walking with weight for anyone and everyone.
This is important because humans are born to carry. It is our birthright and perhaps the single most important physical activity we can do.
Humans are the only species that can carry weight for long distances—and it shaped us into who we are.
Yet as our world modernized and became more comfortable, we lost the critical act of carrying. Technologies ranging from shopping carts to automobiles to strollers and much more removed carrying from our lives.
We need to walk with weight more often. Yet there aren’t many resources on the topic. I want to help you know:
How to get started walking with weight if you’re new.
How to do it far better if you’re already walking with weight.
How to optimize rucking for different goals (e.g., fat loss, lifespan and health span, muscle retention, etc).
How to use walking with weight to run, cycle, lift, etc better.
New challenges to increase your fitness, health, and mindset.
Why walking with weight is arguably the best exercises you can do (and why it’s particularly great for women).
Training and nutrition programs to help you reach specific goals.
And much, much more …
But I need your help!
I know a lot about walking with weight—I’ve studied it for years, read the research, and spoken with the top minds across different fields.
But the farther you get down the rabbit hole, the harder it becomes to see out of it.
The Two Percent community has a sweeping range of experiences with rucking. Everyone has questions, whether they’re just starting or have been rucking for over a decade. And, once you’ve started, you’ve probably stumbled upon some useful tips and techniques that have helped you do it better.
I’d like to hear everything.
Your questions—no matter how basic or complex.
Tricks you’ve discovered that have helped you ruck better.
Any personal details and benefits you’ve experienced that you’d like to submit.
Please consider taking a two minutes to fill out the following three-question survey.
Write as little or as much as you’d like. Don’t worry about grammar and perfect writing. Just get me the information in a way that is easiest for you.
5 of my favorite rucking tips
This edition of Two Percent would be truly parasitic if it were just me asking you for a favor.
So as a thanks for filling out the survey, here are five high-impact tips around walking with weight that have helped many people get started and do it better:
1. Use water or sand as a weight when you start
When you begin walking with weight, you often don’t know how much weight to use or how the weight will impact you over the miles.
For example, the podcaster Tim Ferris famously left his weight vest on a corner in San Francisco and walked home empty-handed after he started with too much weight.
An easy fix: Use water or sand as weight when you start.
The reason: You can dump some sand or water out if your pack is too heavy. For example:
A 2-Liter Platypus Water reservoir costs $8 and weighs roughly five pounds when full. Use as many as you’d like. Plus you’ll have plenty of water to drink.
Fill a dry bag with sand. The roll top of dry bags make them easy to dump in sand. A 17-liter dry bag can hold up to 50 pounds of sand. GORUCK Brick Bags are great (but often sold out), so also check out this super durable dry bag from Sea to Summit.
2. Keep a loaded pack by your door
Here’s an obvious idea that decades of behavioral psychology support: The easier it is to do something, the more likely you are to do it. Read this footnote1 for a wild example of how the gambling industry leverages this phenomenon.
I use this logic to walk with weight more often. I keep a loaded backpack right on my back porch.
When I go for a walk, I’m more likely to grab it and, in turn, get more from every step.
If I have a phone call, I’m more likely to toss on the pack and take the call while walking with weight.
3. Attach dog leashes to a hip belt
Walking with weight is harder than walking without weight. Duh.
But—in a strange pushback against common sense and physics—I find it easier to walk my dogs when I use a weighted pack. But this only works if I attached their leashes to the bag’s hip belt.
It frees my hands. It keeps my upper body from being yanked if the dogs see a bunny and decide it must die. I can carry a coffee. I can write notes in my phone.
Despite the weight, it makes the walk more natural and relaxing. I pack in more fitness, and my dogs get their exercise.
4. Load the weight close to your back
You want the weight close to your back and not too low.
Having the weight close to your back and somewhere against your mid-back reduces the amount of weight sway in your bag. This helps you use better form and gait, which can improve your fitness and reduce your risk of issues.
Weight jostling most often occurs when people toss a dumbbell or kettlebell into the bottom of their bag. The weight shifts around and pulls downward.
An easy fix is to wrap the dumbbell in a towel and stack it vertically. The towel makes the load more comfortable and keeps it from shifting as you walk.
That’s the benefit of GORUCK’s Rucker pack, which holds weight plates right at your back. But you can, of course, find other ways to keep other weights tight on your back.
5. More weight isn’t always better
In our rucking calorie burn post, we explained that the more weight you use the more calories you burn.
This seems obvious. But an interesting new finding is that the relationship between weight and calorie burn isn’t linear.
At a certain threshold (which is different for everyone based on your body size), you begin burning more calories per pound you carry.
In a vacuum, this implies that you should carry more weight to burn more calories. But life isn’t a vacuum.
As you increase the weight, walking with weight starts to suck. Obviously weighted walking needs to be challenging—that’s why it gets you stronger, fitter, and leaner.
But if the act really starts to suck, two things happen:
You’ll likely cover less distance.
You’ll probably walk with weight less often.
The lesson: Find a weight that feels challenging but not soul crushing.
If you do that, you’ll probably end up cranking out more miles—leading you to burn more total calories compared to if you’d used a much heavier weight. (Follow this footnote2 for an example. )
For me, that’s around 35-40 pounds (a 30-pound weight, my pack, and any other stuff in my bag). This weight allows me to feel weighted down but not tortured, and I can crank out miles for days.
Have fun, don’t die, keep on walking with weight.
-Michael
Partnered with GOREWEAR
GOREWEAR designs outdoor gear for Two Percenters. Their products are tailored for endurance athletes and elevate our experiences across the best and worst weather conditions. GOREWEAR leverages the most cutting edge science and deeply comprehends the challenges endurance athletes encounter—leading to gear that works. No matter what Earth throws at us. Always. Use code EASTER30 for 30% off your next order. Discover more at www.gorewear.com.
Sponsored by Momentous
Momentous made me feel good about supplements again. Over 150 professional and collegiate sports teams and the US Military trust their products, thanks to the company’s rigorous science and testing. I don’t have the time or desire to cook perfectly balanced meals that give me all the necessary nutrients and protein I need (let’s face it, few of us do!). So I use their Recovery protein during hard workouts; essential multivitamin to cover my bases; creatine because it’s associated with all sorts of great things; and Fuel on my longest endurance workouts on 100+ degree days here in the desert (because Rule 2: Don’t die). And I also love (love!) that Momentous is researching and developing women-specific performance supplements.
**Use discount code EASTER for 15% off.**
Sponsored by GORUCK
When I decided to accept sponsorships for this newsletter, GORUCK was a natural fit. Not only is the company's story included in The Comfort Crisis, but I've been using GORUCK's gear since the brand was founded. Seriously. They've been around ~12 years and I still regularly use a pack of theirs that is 11 years old. Their gear is made in the USA by former Special Forces soldiers. They make my favorite rucking setup: A Rucker 4.0 and Ruck Plate.
**Use discount code EASTER for 10% off**
I see this all the time in my hometown of Las Vegas, where casinos do everything they can to make gambling easier and faster. For example, slot machines removed their handles, which took grabbing and pulling each game. They replaced the handles with buttons, which you can keep a finger on and press and re-press. This change led the average slot gamer to go from playing ~400 games an hour to ~900.
Here’s a made-up scenario to help us “get” this (and I’m making these numbers up). Let’s say walking one mile with 25 pounds burns 140 calories per mile, but walking with 50 pounds burns 180.
If you walked the same distance, you’d burn more calories with 50 pounds. Obviously! But what tends to happen is that people end up walking more miles with the lighter weight, leading them to burn more calories overall.
For example, with 50 pounds, you might walk two miles and burn 360 calories. But with 25 pounds, you might walk 4 miles, leading you to burn 560, or 200 extra calories.
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