How to Add More Weight When Rucking, And When to Stop

You ruck a lot, and you don’t even realize it. Hunters have no choice. Carrying your climber into that bedding area you found on public land, that’s rucking. Hauling your saddle, your bow, and all the accoutrements for a late October sit, that’s also rucking. Use a shoulder harness to drag your deer out of the woods? You’re rucking, friend. Even if you're a whitetail hunter with no grand ambitions of scaling mountains to chase the animals who live near their snowcaps, you will lug weight through the woods throughout the rest of your hunting life. 

You ought to be good at it.

Good, for our current purpose, means training with enough weight to build your fitness, but not so much that you beat the hell out of your joints. It also means understanding that consistently training with too much weight makes you worse at rucking. You must Goldilocks the whole deal. Add weight until you’re a Mac truck cruising through the woods. Stop before you beat the brakes off your machine. 

Here’s how to do that.

Efficiency and Volume, Rucking’s Most Important Training Variables

The next time you teach someone to shoot a bow, have them start by sprinting 200 yards then immediately sling arrows at an 80-yard target. Make that target a 3D raccoon with vitals the size of a grapefruit. Also, set the draw weight to 70 pounds and an inch longer than they need. Sounds asinine, doesn’t it? They wouldn’t learn a damn thing. They’d likely leave thinking they’ll never be able to shoot a bow.

Since you’re a sensible and decent person, you wouldn’t dream of doing that. Instead, you’d teach them how to develop a shot process (you’d make them efficient). You’d have them shoot the right amount of arrows to gain some skill before they got tired (you’d give them the right volume.) And you’d set the bow up to fit them. Rucking works the same way.

Rucking’s main goal is to build efficiency under load. That means you can move at a good pace while carrying weight without too much cost to your body. Posture, breathing, strength, and aerobic conditioning all contribute to efficiency under load. As does properly loading the weight in your pack. 

Efficiency is built through training volume, the same as with archery. You start with the right amount, then build. You accrue that volume over time, not by cramming it in at the beginning with long sessions. Longer rucks become necessary, but you earn them by being consistent with shorter sessions. 

Accruing volume over time makes you efficient enough to add pack weight.

Start Rucking with This Much Pack Weight

It’s important to start rucking with a pack weight that allows you to maintain good posture, keep a mostly normal gait, and keep your heart rate from shooting to the moon. For most folks new to ruck training, that weight is somewhere between 10% and 15% of your body weight, depending on how fit you are and if you’re overweight. If you’re on the heavier side, and if you’re out of shape, start with 10%. If you have a healthy body weight and you’re in decent shape, start with 15%. This approach gives your body enough stress to adapt without giving it so much that your posture suffers, you move like shit, and you create a bunch of bad habits.

The Rucking Weight Goal

The goal is to consistently ruck with 20% to 25% of your body weight in your pack. This is the sweet spot for developing efficiency without beating the brakes off of your legs, hips, and back. For a 180-pound hunter, that’s between 35 and 45 pounds. You’re in a good spot when you can cruise with that much weight on your back. Cruise means that you can maintain a 15-minute mile on flat ground for at least 3 miles without your heart rate climbing out of Zone 2.

Some folks push this up to 30% of body weight, but this takes getting stronger, improving your aerobic capacity, and accruing a lot of rucking volume over time. It’s sometimes appropriate to go above 30%, but only during specific workouts and to prepare for backpack mountain hunting. Getting efficient with 20% to 25% of body weight is the base. And it’s all that most whitetail hunters need.

Now, how do we walk the weight up from 10% or 15% up to 20% to 25%?

How to Gradually Add Weight to Your Rucks

We use cost to track efficiency. The fewer resources an activity takes from you, the more efficient you are at doing it. There are a few simple metrics that track how much rucking taxes you.

Start with your heart rate. It’s a solid proxy for energy expenditure. A higher heart rate means you’re burning more energy, a lower heart rate means you’re burning less. Let’s say you’ve been rucking with 15% of your body weight in your pack for a couple miles at a time. For the first couple of weeks, your heart rate hangs around 150 during each workout. Then you notice it’s averaging 145, and eventually 140, while maintaining the same pace. You’ve gained efficiency.

Then compare pace and heart rate. Say your heart rate is still around 150, but you’ve increased your average pace by .3 of a mile per hour. That’s some efficiency for you. Let’s further say that you’ve increased your pace by .3 of a mile per hour and your average heart rate has dropped to 145. You’re piling on the efficiency. At this point, you’re ready to add weight to your pack. You could bump up to 20% and start working there. But know that you’ll likely have to slow down until you gain efficiency with that weight. Eventually, you’ll again see your average speed increase and average heart rate decrease. Then, you’re likely ready to add another variable, such as an incline or increasing your rucking volume. 

But don’t guess, test. Do the 3-Mile Rucking Assessment I mentioned earlier. Set a flat, three-mile course, strap on your heart rate monitor, and load your pack with 20% of your body weight. Walk at your fastest sustainable pace. You have solid base efficiency under load if you finish in 45 minutes or less with an average heart rate in Zone 2. 

It’s key to avoid forcing it. Add pack weight when your body shows you that you’re ready for it. Don’t just pick some arbitrary time frame for adding more weight.

Other Types of Training That Increase Your Pack Weight

Strength training hugely benefits rucking. The stronger you are relative to your body weight, the less energy you expend during each step of a rucking workout. Strength training also makes you more resilient, helping you to maintain better posture while also limiting the amount of stress the pack puts on your body.

Easy running also improves your rucking. It improves the spring in your lower legs, which saves you energy during each step. Easy running also builds your aerobic capacity faster than any other aerobic training method. Greater aerobic capacity means more efficiency.

Don’t Load Your Pack Like a Ding Dong

A poorly loaded pack kills your rucking efficiency faster than anything else. It’ll toss you left and right while it bends you over or pulls you back. Don’t get ragdolled by your pack. It’s embarrassing.

You want the weight centered in the middle of your back and as tight to your spine as possible. This limits how much the load can pull you left or right and keeps it from pulling you back or bending you over. 

If the weight shifts during the middle of a workout, stop and adjust your pack. Toughing it out just beats you up while engraining poor movement and breathing habits.

Add Weight to Your Pack, But Stop Before it Becomes a Problem

You need to ruck with appropriate weights to build fitness and efficiency. But you have to start light with 10% to 15% of your body weight and build up to 20% to 25%. Consistently rucking north of 30% of body weight beats you up while creating bad movement habits. So, don’t do it unless there’s a good and specific reason to do it. 

Also, don’t load your pack like a ding dong.

 

Written by Todd Bumgardner

Todd grew up hunting and playing sports in Central Pennsylvania. He went on to play college football and earn a master's degree in Exercise Science. He's been a strength and conditioning coach for the past 20 years, working with everyone from youth athletes and everyday folks to NFL veterans. Along with running the ship at Packmule, Todd also co-owns and operates Beyond Strength, a training gym in Northern Virginia and spent 8 years as human performance coach for a tier 1 unit. He travels all across North America to hunt.