What Are The Benefits Of Carrying A Heavy Backpack?

Carrying or Hiking with an excessively heavy backpack, also known as Rucking is a well known and very efficient way to exercise, lose weight and get fit quickly. It has a long and well documented history in the Military as a means to get it’s soldiers into shape quickly, and for good reason. Carrying a heavy backpack get’s results.

But what are the benefits of carrying a heavy backpack, and are they available to everyone? In the following few paragraphs we’ll have a closer look at the main benefits and drawbacks of Carrying a Heavy Backpack as an aid to training our bodies.

Contents

• 1 Will Carrying A Heavy Backpack Burn More Calories?
• 2 Does Carrying A Heavy Backpack Build Endurance?
• 3 Is Carrying A Heavy Backpack A Good Weight Loss Strategy?
• 4 Can Carrying A Heavy Backpack Build Bone Density?
• 5 Is Carrying A Heavy Backpack Bad For My Back?
• 6 What Is The Best Way To Pack A Heavy Backpack For Rucking?
• 7 How Far Should I Hike With A Heavy Backpack?
• 8 What Are The Benefits Of Carrying A Heavy Backpack? – Conclusion

Will Carrying A Heavy Backpack Burn More Calories?

This is an easy question to answer and it is a resounding Yes. If you are doing the same hike, with or without wearing a heavy backpack, you will burn more Calories when doing it with the backpack, fact.

A simple analogy would be “Moving a bigger truck requires more fuel than moving a smaller one”. If we make ourselves significantly heavier, which we will be doing by carrying a heavy backpack, we will need to burn more Calories in the form of Glycogen and Fat to enable our bodies to continue to move.

Sustaining this higher level of calorie burning over an extended distance, such as when we are on a hike, will help us to burn significantly more calories than we would do if we were doing the hike and not carrying the backpack.

Does Carrying A Heavy Backpack Build Endurance?

What is building endurance? Endurance is described as our body’s physical capability to sustain an exercise for an extended period of time without having to quit physically or mentally.

Endurance can be thought of similarly to a muscle, the more we exercise it and push it to it’s limits the more it will grow.

Hiking with a Heavy Backpack, especially for extended periods of time, will increase your cardiovascular fitness, build muscle strength, build stamina and toughen us up mentally. This is one of the reasons that military forces from all around the globe have used Backpacking, Rucking, Yomping or Load Carrying, to name but a few of it’s names as a major part of their strength and endurance building training packages.

If you want to build up strength and endurance quickly, go hiking while carrying a heavy backpack, it really works. Read more...