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If you are like me, the words “wellness trend” by now generate a Pavlovian response where you grit your teeth, wince and anticipate hearing something weird. There is snail slime on the face, peptides in the buttocks or, gulp, wellness vaping. And to each their own, but because a good night’s sleep and a daily run is mostly all I need to feel like myself, I struggle to relate.
So the emergence of rucking – hiking with a weighted backpack, or rucksack, in military speak – into the mainstream came as a pleasant surprise. Some are calling it the workout of 2024, and why not? It’s hard to hate on a glorified nature walk with a sprinkle of resistance training and a healthy dose of sunlight. The most scandalous part of rucking is when your autocorrect gets it wrong.
Yet, when fitness fans consider rucking, they’re quick to note that its leisurely nature contrasts sharply with the more popular high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts, such as those in CrossFit, known for burning more calories, shedding fat and boosting metabolism – all in a fraction of the time. It made me wonder: On top of the obvious psychological benefits of walking in nature, does rucking also provide meaningful physiological benefits too?
Michael Tschakovsky, exercise scientist and cardiovascular physiologist at Queen’s University, says yes. While the body of specific research around rucking is limited, its upside appears straightforward. It’s a low-impact activity that can provide better resistance training for the muscles and bones than walking, and it’s easier on the joints than running. And unlike running, where roughly 50 per cent of participants incur an injury in any given year, rucking might actually make you more injury-resilient.
Tschakovsky says rucking can be useful to someone like him, a lifelong skier and soccer player who cannot run because of hip pain and who, at 58 years old, is reaching the age when adults begin losing muscle mass. Same with his wife: a former marathoner who wants an endurance exercise that’s harder than walking.
Rucking should not be seen exclusively as a replacement for more intense training, but as a complement to it. A 2023 study of elite young soccer players found that training with weighted vests helped improve their sprint performance during games, and research from the University of New Mexico showed that running with a weighted vest burned more calories than running without one.
“The concepts are somewhat common sense: more weight increases the force required for a given movement, improving one’s ability for the movement,” says Tschakovsky, who likens it to more established training methods such as sprinters running with resistance parachutes at their back. Though exercisers must be careful: Resistance training with enough weight to alter the desired movement could expose the body to various kinds of injuries.
Rucking is not a new activity; it has long been used as a military training method for developing physical and mental toughness. In fact, Jason McCarthy, the American man largely responsible for popularizing rucking through the gear and apparel company GORUCK that he founded in 2008, is an ex-military green beret. More recently, large-scale fitness thinkers, podcasters and influencers such as Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Andrew Huberman have adopted the hobby as their own and touted its benefits; Attia even said he occasionally wears a rucksack around the weight room.
Regardless of its popularity with influencers, it is unsurprising that rucking became a desired activity, for how complementary it sounds to most of our realities. Many of us spend a significant portion of our days sitting, with our back flexed forward, intensely focusing on a screen. Long, weighted hikes in the wild that encourage an engaged core and a wandering mind is healthily antithetical to many of our nine-to-fives.
And while military-grade rucking appears designed to push people to their physical limits, sometimes requiring soldiers to carry their full body weight in a backpack, civilian rucking is more meditative than daunting. It’s a workout disguised as a mindfulness practice, whose challenge one can adjust over time. Beginners are recommended to start by lugging just 10 to 15 per cent of their body weight in a backpack, before working their way up and seeing subtle health benefits accrue over time.
“If rucking routinely gets you outside,” said Tschakovsky, “and it makes you active and sweat a little bit, then it’s absolutely worth pursuing.”