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00:01:22.520Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM Podcast, which since 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers, and leaders that glean their edifying, life-improving insights without the fluff and filler.
00:01:35.060The AOM Podcast is just one part of the McKay mission to help individuals practice timeless virtues through thought, word, and deed.
00:01:41.280Also, be sure to explore our articles in artofmanliness.com, read the deeper dives we do in our Substack newsletter at dyingbreed.net, and turn our content into real-world action by joining the Strenuous Life program at strenuouslife.com.
00:01:54.320If you're looking for a way to improve your fitness, boost your mental health, and reconnect with a deeply human activity, all without going to the gym or pounding your knees on a daily run, then rucking may be the practice you've been looking for.
00:02:14.360Throw some weight on your back and start walking.
00:02:16.500But a little context and a few key tips can make it a safer, more effective, and more satisfying experience.
00:02:21.640Here to unpack those principles and practicals is Michael Easter, author of Walk With Weight, The Definitive Guide to Rucking.
00:02:28.020Michael and I first explored the evolutionary and military history of carrying load.
00:02:31.740We then dive into why rucking is perhaps the most successful form of training for strength and stamina, and such an effective tool for alleviating back pain, building bone health, and fostering fat loss.
00:02:40.720We get into using a backpack versus a weighted vest, how much weight you should carry, and how you get started today with stuff you probably already got lying around.
00:02:47.860After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash ruck.
00:02:51.640All right, Michael Easter, welcome back to the show.
00:03:25.360Simplest way to put it is rucking is just throwing some weight in a backpack and going for a walk.
00:03:32.380Now, I also think it gets interpreted and starts to capture things like putting on a weight vest and going for a walk, but basically carrying weight on your body, walking across the earth.
00:03:48.160So my background is I was an editor at Men's Health Magazine for about seven years.
00:03:54.560And so, you know, I'm always in that role looking for fitness trends coming out.
00:03:59.420And rucking had sort of popped up as this kind of interesting thing that was tied to the military.
00:04:04.180But I think when I started to really understand why it is such a powerful physical activity for humans, it came when I was reporting my book, The Comfort Crisis.
00:04:13.940And for that book, I spent about a month up in the Arctic and we were on this caribou hunt.
00:04:20.380So it took us about two weeks to finally hunt a caribou.
00:04:26.440And as I was doing that pack out, I started to sort of realize, and we can get into the sort of evolutionary science of this, that humans are really unique in our ability to carry weight.
00:04:38.740So we're the only mammal that can carry weight for distance.
00:04:41.700And I've always been really interested in, you know, how can the things that shaped us as humans in the past, how can they still help us today?
00:04:50.620So that sort of set off the idea, this like packing out 120 some odd pounds of caribou across this freezing tundra that's terrible to walk on.
00:09:49.400When it comes to warfare, especially for most of history, these soldiers were having to take equipment really long distances by marching it.
00:09:59.440So, you know, you might have to walk 300 miles to a battle site with all of your, you know, your unit, as it were, and you're carrying your gear the entire time.
00:10:08.500And a lot of this gear was very heavy.
00:10:10.720Loads in the past, you know, a couple thousand years ago, they might range from 35 pounds all the way up to 85 pounds.
00:10:17.580But this act of rucking, of carrying your gear as a soldier, that has really been the foundation of military training for basically all of time.
00:10:29.200Like if you look at how military units throughout the world have trained, the foundation has always been marching with weight.
00:10:52.800And a lot of the military units throughout time, when they were trying to test their soldiers to see if they were ready for battle, the tests were basically tests of being able to march with weight.
00:11:04.640It could be, hey, you have to be able to walk 12 miles with, say, 50 pounds in X amount of hours or whatever it might be.
00:11:12.820And these tests, they all sort of varied throughout different places, different military units and different periods of time.
00:11:19.200But they all are fundamentally based around, can you carry X load for Y distance in Z time?
00:11:26.420Yeah, you have some examples from history.
00:11:27.740So the Macedonian soldiers, Alexander the Great's soldiers, they marched to battle carrying about 80 pounds.
00:11:35.700A Greek hoplite, 50 pounds of gear in armor.
00:11:38.940And even like their armor was just heavy.
00:11:41.240I remember when I took a class in ancient Greek history and they described like how much the shin covers weighed, their spear, their shield.
00:11:48.940Like, man, that's got to be exhausting.
00:12:24.840I mean, these guys were unbelievably fit.
00:12:27.920And they were doing it for long distances and sometimes really fast.
00:12:30.360Like after the Battle of Marathon, the Athenian army marched 25 miles back to Athens to head off the Persians.
00:12:37.420And they got there pretty fast and they were carrying their gear.
00:12:40.040Yeah, I mean, it'll definitely make you feel a little bit soft when you start reading about these soldiers of the past.
00:12:46.540One thing that I would add that I found pretty interesting is that, you know, as technology advances, you would think that the loads that our soldiers carry would have gone down.
00:13:04.700So some of our gear did become lighter, but we started adding more and more gear.
00:13:10.040So by the time we are in, you know, World War II, Vietnam, even the Iraq War, the loads that the average American soldier was carrying were around 100 pounds.
00:13:20.400So we've kind of just ramped up the weight over time.
00:13:22.960That said, those soldiers were bigger, but these weights have just kind of gone up over time.
00:13:28.440If you saw Saving Private Ryan, the D-Day invasion scene at the very beginning, you saw some of those guys, they just drowned because they had too much stuff on them when they got into the water.
00:14:01.940There's some research, especially conducted around the 1950s, that found effectively the military was noticing, hey, as we've loaded these guys up with more and more weight, we're starting to see all these injuries.
00:14:16.020Not to mention, to your point about the D-Day invasion, if you load a soldier down with too much weight and someone starts shooting at him, like good luck getting out of the way, right?
00:14:26.120So the military started looking at, okay, what is an amount of weight that will, one, reduce injury risk, and two, allow our soldiers to move swiftly and efficiently when they need to.
00:14:38.140And they basically found that one third of your body weight is about as much weight as you should carry to reduce injury risk and also be able to move well.
00:14:49.260So going over that, if you go over one third of your body weight, so if you weigh 200 pounds, that's why am I doing math here?
00:14:59.720If you go over that, injury risk rises, you don't move as well.
00:15:03.040So there was this push to try to lighten soldiers' loads, but of course the sort of military industrial complex of, hey, you need more gear sort of won out.
00:15:14.660But that said, I think it gives the average person a good marker to know, hey, you should probably never go above this weight.
00:15:21.660And in the book, I argue most people, the vast majority of the time, for your average rucks, you should be going a lot lighter than that as well.
00:15:30.820I think one of the bad things is that because rucking, especially as it has become more popular, it has been framed through this sort of military lens.
00:15:40.800But remember, humans evolved to carry.
00:15:43.720I mean, this is like a fundamentally human act we've been doing very, very long before we had militaries.
00:15:49.820And so when rucking becomes popular, people look up rucking and they start to look at, okay, well, how much weight are soldiers carrying?
00:15:57.800But you got to remember, soldiers are carrying these massive weights because their mission is to win a war.
00:16:03.400Whereas the average person, you're not going into warfare.
00:16:06.120You're just trying to improve your health and fitness.
00:16:07.740And so a lighter load is going to be a lot more appropriate.
00:16:10.500And I think it pushed some people into using maybe a little too heavy a weight at first.
00:16:15.540Do you have any idea when rucking started becoming a civilian fitness activity?
00:16:20.920Were you able to figure out the evolution of that?
00:16:25.160I mean, I think you had soldiers come back from the military.
00:16:30.700You know, some groups of veterans were doing it.
00:16:32.500Those that hadn't been too scarred by the, you know, 100 mile rock marches they had to do in training.
00:16:37.240I think you had some brands sort of pop up like GORUCK that started to put it on people's radar.
00:16:43.340I think probably the rise of it being popular today.
00:16:49.460I think my book, The Comfort Crisis, helped with that a little bit.
00:16:52.180Now, I will say that took me going on shows like yours and talking about it to sort of give it a bump to the average person.
00:17:01.280But it's kind of been this slow trajectory of like more people doing it, people who have a sort of platform like I do, writing about it, people inviting me on their platforms, and it just sort of spreading.
00:17:59.900So by mixing those two things, you see that from a per mile perspective, rucking burns more calories than walking or running alone.
00:18:10.960And so you kind of get more bang for your buck.
00:18:13.460Now, I will say, of course, you can cover more miles in a quicker span of time if you're running, but then you won't get that strength stimulus.
00:18:20.820So when you look at calorie burn, it really depends on how much weight you're carrying, what is the terrain like, et cetera, et cetera.
00:18:28.820But anywhere from 20 to about 200% more calories compared to walking or running.
00:18:55.440There's this one on this group of backcountry hunters.
00:18:58.060And what scientists did is they took this group of hunters, measured their body fat percentage, took a bunch of other health measurements, whatever.
00:19:07.100Then these guys went out and they did, I believe it was a 12-day hunt.
00:19:11.200So when you're doing a backcountry hunt, you have this heavy backpack full of all your gear.
00:19:16.040You're also not packing in a ton of food because food is heavy.
00:19:20.080So you're generally under eating, which sort of simulates the exact same thing that people do when they're trying to lose weight.
00:19:28.320Now, when most people lose weight, you lose a mix of fat, yes, but also muscle.
00:19:34.320So you want to lose the fat, but you ideally want to hang on to as much muscle as possible because muscle is going to be good for your ability to function.
00:19:43.080It's going to be better for your metabolism, on and on and on.
00:19:45.740But when these guys came back from their hunt and they retested them, these researchers found that the hunters lost, I think it was about 12 pounds on average.
00:19:54.880And the entirety of that loss came from fat, which is really surprising.
00:20:45.600And that determines how many calories you burn.
00:20:47.620So, you know, if you weigh 220 pounds, that requires a certain number of calories to maintain.
00:20:53.080But if you lose 20 pounds, now you're 200 pounds, your body is going to burn less calories.
00:20:59.000And so I've heard of this one trick you can do is as you're losing weight and you want to keep losing weight is to put on a weighted vest that weighs, you know, 20 pounds.
00:21:08.900And your body's still going to think it's 220.
00:21:12.020And then you'll burn calories as if it were 220.
00:21:15.860And it's not just because you burn more calories because it takes more effort to move, but it's because it like senses your body weighs more.
00:21:58.840Yeah, well, and first I'll say, you know, when you start talking about bone health, I think most people sort of roll their eyes because who the hell cares about their bones?
00:22:06.420But the reason this is important is because as you age, your bones start to lose density.
00:22:12.600Now, this is generally talked about from a female perspective because it happens more often in women.
00:22:19.600But that said, doctors are finding more and more men facing an issue with bone density.
00:22:25.380And the reason for that is because as a society, we've generally become a lot more sedentary.
00:22:29.980And so your bones need impact and loading in order to maintain and even improve their density.
00:22:36.640So rucking gives you this ability to load your bones for quite a long time, much longer than lifting, because the average set of, you know, lifting exercise is going to be, I don't know, 20, 30 seconds.
00:22:48.040So you can load your bones for about an hour, get those impact on them.
00:22:52.300And that seems to help maintain, maybe even improve bone density, which becomes really important because as you age, if you fall and break a hip, that is like the worst thing that can happen.
00:23:03.400I think the stat is about a third of people who are over 65 and break a hip die within the next six months because it just totally wrecks their function.
00:23:15.740So yeah, rucking is great for strengthening bones.
00:23:17.760You think carrying stuff on your back would be bad for back pain, but you point to research that carrying load on your back is probably one of the best things you can do for your back pain.
00:23:46.560Your back muscles actually end up working less when you have a weight on your back.
00:23:51.840And so then the question is, okay, well, what's keeping me upright?
00:23:55.020What happens is that your core actually picks up all of that slack.
00:23:58.860So your core ends up working a lot harder.
00:24:01.000And when you look at what one of the root causes is for back pain, and by the way, like 80% of people will experience back pain at some point in their life.
00:24:10.220Like this is one of the most common pains.
00:24:12.400The reason is because people's cores are so weak.
00:24:15.920So your core is really built to sort of stabilize your spine if you have to pick anything up or move a certain way.
00:24:21.260And so as we become more sedentary, our cores have become weaker, and then you have to go pick up a bag of mulch or whatever in the backyard.
00:24:30.300Your core is not strong enough to protect your spine, and then you get a problem.
00:24:33.540So by rucking, you're strengthening your core in a way that to me is a little more interesting than doing planks and bird dogs and whatever you might do.
00:24:41.080Now, that said, you should do those too.
00:24:42.840I wouldn't discourage you from any form of exercise.
00:24:45.820But rucking really allows you to strengthen your core.
00:24:48.020And there's also a researcher up in Canada, he's kind of considered the world's foremost back health expert.
00:24:54.180And one thing that he does with a lot of his back patients is have them ruck because he says it, you know, it strengthens their core.
00:25:02.500It also sort of decompresses their spine, like allows their spine to get some light motion in.
00:25:07.040And that tends to do some good things for your back.
00:25:10.020We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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00:28:23.620And it goes all the way back to the 80s.
00:28:25.380So we're talking like four decades of research.
00:28:27.080And it consistently finds that being outdoors tends to reduce stress levels, tends to increase happiness, tends to lead people to be more productive once they get back into the office, tends to improve focus.
00:28:40.040And it also actually boosts a lot of physical health markers.
00:28:43.320So time in the outdoors has been shown to lower blood sugar, all these different good things for your health.
00:28:49.340And then I think on the social component, so when you look at a lot of exercise that's endurance focused, it can be hard to sort of pair it right with another person and make it social.
00:29:12.840If you and I are going to go for a run and try and have a conversation, well, your sort of lack of running fitness means that in order for us to talk, you're going to be running rather slow.
00:29:23.140And that's really not going to give me that much.
00:29:25.380Like I'm really going to be sort of held back, right?
00:29:28.520On the opposite coin, if I go, all right, I'm setting the tempo of this run, you're going to be dragging behind like this sucks.
00:29:34.940We're not going to be able to talk at all.
00:29:36.040So it's hard to sort of get into a deep conversation.
00:29:38.960You can run together, but you're not really going to talk.
00:29:41.040Whereas with rucking, I'll give you the, I'll give you the benefit here.
00:29:45.220Let's say you're a way better rucker than me and you can carry more weight.
00:29:48.740Well, you can simply carry say 45 pounds and get a great workout and walk.
00:29:54.340And I can just carry say 30 pounds and I can get an equally good workout and we can have that walk, go rucking together and have a long conversation and really connect.
00:30:06.040And when you look at research about when do humans have the best conversations, how do we connect for men in particular?
00:30:12.820This is for everyone, but I will say for men in particular, it tends to happen when we are shoulder to shoulder out moving across the earth.
00:30:21.120And so rucking really allows us to capture that.
00:30:23.920You get in a good workout, but you're able to really talk about things with people, connect with people.
00:30:29.520And that just makes it really sort of universal.
00:30:31.980So another example is like, I'm not going to go for a run with my mother, right?
00:30:35.920She's 75 years old, but I could say, Hey mom, do you want to go ruck together?
00:45:11.820And there's even sometimes a workout that I love and it'll make you feel like a pack mule is to throw like, you can really load this thing.
00:45:22.420Throw like a lot of weight in a pack, get on a treadmill, set it to say an incline, 10 to 15 incline, and just walk slowly for like an hour.
00:45:32.820That will get you ready for the mountains.
00:45:37.280And because you're on a treadmill, you don't have to worry as much about injury.
00:45:40.660Because one of the reasons injury risk gets higher when you have heavier loads is that if you misstep and you roll an ankle with, say, 80 pounds on your back.
00:45:50.220Well, now that ankle that would have been a sort of minor little spring, that can become a real problem.
00:45:54.760But with the treadmill, you don't really have to worry about curbs you didn't see, crap in the road, things like that.
00:45:59.820And there's a little bit of give to the treadmill.
00:46:01.640So most people tend to not ever get injured doing that.
00:46:05.100You mentioned how you ruck whenever you walk your dog.
00:46:07.960That's something you talk about in the book is that you can just ruck whenever.
00:46:11.360You don't have to make rucking like I'm setting aside time for a ruck.
00:46:14.920You can just put on a rucksack or a weighted vest when you're doing chores around the house.
00:46:42.020And so to get ready to have a pack on my back 12 hours a day, I would just wear my ruck around the house as I was vacuuming, picking up, living life, whatever it might be.
00:46:52.180And that really sort of slowly got my body ready to be able to carry that weight.
00:46:56.460And I'm burning more calories just doing my everyday tasks that I already had to do.
00:47:01.800Have you noticed for people who are doing rucking as a civilian activity for fitness, are there common injuries you see with this population?
00:47:12.280And if so, what are some of the things you can do to mitigate those injuries?
00:47:15.880The most common thing, and I wouldn't consider it an injury, is that people will say their shoulders are uncomfortable during a ruck or after a ruck.
00:47:24.780And I think that's just because we rarely carry weight in backpacks anymore.
00:47:30.440So it's like you throw some weight on your shoulders, they're going, what the hell is this?
00:47:34.460We haven't done this since you were in high school.
00:47:36.600But that discomfort isn't necessarily injury.
00:47:39.460It's just your body saying, what the hell are we doing here?
00:49:25.680Now, to me, 100% of people know that taking the stairs is going to be better for their long-term health, maybe even their long-term mental health.
00:49:35.300But 98% of people choose to do the easy, effortless thing, even though it might harm them in the long run in the context of how little we move today.
00:49:44.000So the 2% mindset, it's not really about the stairs, though, in that study.
00:49:48.900To me, it's like this overarching idea of being willing to embrace short-term discomfort to get a long-term benefit.
00:49:57.320So, yes, it's the stairs facing the discomfort of the stairs to get to that second floor instead of doing the easy thing.
00:50:04.360But you can apply that to so many different areas of your life.
00:50:07.660And I think by applying that in as many different areas as you can find, those little benefits you get from each uncomfortable act, they really compound over time and lead to sort of these massive changes.
00:50:20.480Now, to apply it to rucking, I think it goes back to if you have something that you already have to do, but you could throw a rock on as you do it to make it a little bit harder to get more from every step.
00:50:33.660Like, to me, that feels like a massive win.
00:50:35.940It's like if you got to walk down to your mailbox, like in our neighborhood, our mailbox is set away.
00:50:40.940It's like a, you know, quarter mile away or whatever.
00:50:43.320If I could just throw a rock on, I'm getting more from every step.
00:50:46.140And if I do that every single day that I get the mail, like that's going to add up a lot over time.
00:50:53.180If I'm doing a nightly walk with my kids or whatever, I'm going to throw on the rock.
00:50:57.920And so I think it's really just finding ways, how can I add this tool into things I already have to do in order to get a bigger long-term benefit from that thing?
00:51:08.980For example, my, my doctor, great dude.
00:51:12.140He started wearing a rock as he was doing rounds.
00:51:16.100So he's literally walk, walking around the hospital all day, visiting patients, and he just rolls in and consults with people and he's got this pack on.
00:51:23.800And it's like, to me, that is awesome because he already has to do rounds.
00:51:27.900It's not impeding his ability to do his job in any way.
00:51:32.040And he's also showing his patients a really valuable lesson that like this exercise thing that I've been telling you to do for all these years, it doesn't have to be that hard.
00:51:43.380I think that one problem with the way that society views exercise is we view it as this like separate distinct thing from our normal lives, right?
00:51:52.400It's like, we got our 30 minutes in the gym where we run on a treadmill.
00:52:47.760I list a handful in the book, and a lot of them are based off of some of the military challenges that we talked about.
00:52:55.060I've, of course, adapted them for the average person.
00:52:59.320So there's a big list there, but I think just, you know, it could be using a certain weight for a certain distance.
00:53:04.640I mean, my favorite thing personally is once a year, I'm going to take a long backpacking trip somewhere, say three days out with my friends.
00:53:12.400That gives me incentive to keep rucking all year so I'm able to handle those loads when I go into the mountains.
00:53:20.200And that in itself is a good challenge.
00:53:21.740It's like, all right, we're going to try and do 20 miles a day.
00:53:24.840We got, you know, our 35, 40 pounds of gear on our backs, and we're going to do this big loop, this big circuit, wherever it is in the mountains.
00:53:32.080And so I think, you know, finding these big challenges, I think, can incentivize you to get those little wins we talked about with the 2% mindset and then give you something that sort of pushes you up against the boundaries of your limits and teaches you something about yourself.
00:53:48.660Well, Michael, this has been a great conversation.
00:53:50.560Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:53:53.020Probably the best place to find me is on my sub stack.
00:53:55.460It's called 2%, as we talked about, and the website is twopct.com.
00:54:02.080There's a lot of rucking material on there.
00:54:04.280You can find links to the book on there.
00:54:06.380And the book is, of course, available at pretty much anywhere you buy books, which I think for the vast majority of people is amazon.com now.