Functional exercise, at its heart, is training that improves how you perform in your everyday responsibilities and the things you do for fun.
Carrying loads is part of daily life. Packages, groceries, the couch that needs to move to the other wall. It’s worth having the confidence to handle those jobs without worrying about getting hurt or coming up short.
🎙️ Related Podcast: Walking and Carrying Exercises
Don’t overthink this one. Get something fairly heavy and carry it around for a while.
It does help to have some good starting points, though, so you can stay safe and get quality practice in before you figure out what works best for you.
And taking some weights for a stroll might make you some friends.
View this post on Instagram
What are Loaded Carries?
Put simply, loaded carries are a class of exercises where you add weight to your body and walk. There are a lot of ways to do them, depending on the qualities you want to develop. You can hold the load in both hands, one hand, wear it as a pack, carry it on your shoulders, or any combination of those.
What are Loaded Carries Good For?
If we’re talking about which muscles get stronger, there are quite a few. Loaded carries build your grip strength, shoulder rotator cuff, upper back, and core. They’re also great conditioning without high impact forces, and they’ll get your heart rate up in a hurry.
Examples of Loaded Carry Exercises
- Farmer’s Walk
- Suitcase Carry
- Rack Carry
- Bear Hug Carry
- Overhead Carry
- Shoulder Carry
- Rucking
- Goblet Carry
- Zercher Carry
Benefits of Loaded Carry Exercises
Training to carry stuff will get you better at… carrying stuff. But is it worth adding to your routine as an exercise?
We think so. Here’s why:
Connection Between Your Lower and Upper Body
If you’re familiar with what we do here at GMB, you know we teach a lot of locomotion (moving using all four limbs). Just like the variety of locomotion patterns, loaded carries involve exerting force through your hands and feet in a coordinated fashion. The difference is that carries use a pattern you already know cold, and that’s simple walking.
When you add a significant load to your gait, you’ll become aware of how your core works and what it does for you in a hurry. That transfers directly to everyday activities like walking around with lighter loads than you train with, and you’ll likely notice it in your athletic pursuits too. Throwing and kicking, in ball sports as well as combat sports, improve a lot when the bridge between your lower body and upper body gets stronger.
Automatic Bracing at the Core
Speaking of the core, another benefit of loaded carries is how they take advantage of the body’s natural, automatic core activation when we walk. There’s a good amount of research on how our low back and deep abdominal muscles work during gait. For our purposes, it’s enough to know that when we stay tall and level while walking with added load, the core is working. To strengthen it further, it’s just a matter of progressively heavier loads, faster walking, or both.
Practical Strength/Skill Development
There’s a reason moving boxes sucks. We can be pretty strong when our feet are planted, but moving around with a load (especially a load that shifts) means dealing with forces that change step to step. Nobody’s telling you to squat on a stability ball here. But there’s great value in “adding stress to the gait pattern,” as Dan John puts it.
Carrying heavy loads takes a coordinated effort from your grip to your toes, and you’ll find out fast where you could use some extra work. The nice part about finding out this way is you’ll likely progress quickly there. Thank you, “beginner gains.”
Loaded Carry Exercise Tutorial
| Loaded Carry Exercises | |
|---|---|
| #1 - Backpacking | • A sturdy backpack is a must! • One with a hip belt/strap helps a lot to keep from shifting |
| #2 - Farmer's Walk | • Load in both hands • Dumbells, kettlebells, bags with handles |
| #3 - Suitcase Carry | • Load in one hand • Equal work on each side |
| #4 - Sandbag Carry | • "Bear hug" style • Elbow crook (Zercher) style • Over shoulder style • While carrying load in free hand |
| #5 - Advanced Move: Fireman's Carry | • Carrying another person! |
Fundamentals of Loaded Carry Technique
Before you get started, let’s cover the fundamentals of loaded carries and what to think about while you do them.
Correct Posture for Carries
It defeats the purpose of the exercise to do these hunched over. You’ll have some form breakdown as you fatigue and get ready to set the load down, and you don’t need to be ramrod straight, but an emphasis on solid posture gets you the most benefit from your effort.
Keep these four cues in mind and you’ll be good to go.
- Keep Your Chest Up
- Roll Your Shoulders Down and Back
- Try to Keep Your Shoulders Level
- Keep Your Hips Under You
If you’re loading a backpack to carry, make sure to fit it tight to your body and keep an upright posture. Evil eye is optional.
Carrying is a Skill
Lugging heavy stuff around might look like a brute force caveman activity, but treat it as a skill, because it is one. Keep the posture cues in your head, and remember why you’re adding these to your training. We’re working on physical autonomy, the ability to physically handle whatever life throws at us.
We do these to build confidence. Sweaty and tired is a side effect.
Exploring Variations for Fun and Variety
The sets and reps guidelines below are a good place to start, but don’t get too hung up on specific progressions and goals. As you practice loaded carries, you’ll see which ones are more difficult for you and which you seem to be “a natural” at. The obvious advice is to work on your weaknesses (and you should). But work on your strengths too. It’s good for you mentally, and it gives you a carry you can push hard with. That’s always a nice thing to have.
Programming for Adding Loaded Carries to Your Routine
One of the best things about carrying exercises like farmer’s walks and rucking is that you don’t need to rearrange your entire schedule to add them in.
How to Fit Loaded Carries into Your Training
In the GMB Method we emphasize cycling to improve the physical attributes you want to prioritize. You can do, and improve, a lot of things. You just shouldn’t do it all at once.
Here are a few examples of how to incorporate carries into your current routine.
Adding Carries to Your Training Session
Pick one variation with a corresponding load and distance/time duration that fits with the rest of your workout that day.
- Heavy and short bursts in a strength focused session
- Lighter and more time/distance in a conditioning focused session
- Lighter and more complex in a skill based session
Standalone Loaded Carry Workouts
Several variations with multiple varied loads/distance/time
- Farmer’s Walks with heaviest manageable loads for several short sets
- Suitcase Carries with moderate loads for a couple of long sets
- Waiter Walks with light loads for one long set
End of a Session “Finisher”
Either once or twice a week depending on your needs, choose one variation as a conditioning exercise to end your training.
- Farmer’s Walks with heavy load for one long set
- Sandbag Carry in a bear hug for one long set
- Suitcase Carry with a heavy kettlebell up an incline for one long set
How Much Weight Do I Start With?
Pick the carry you’d like to try first. I’d suggest the farmer’s carry or suitcase carry.
- Start light and just pick the weight up and simply stand and hold for 30 seconds.
- Do this a few times with both hands and with one hand, rest a bit and add weight, then note how you feel.
- Next choose your goal metric, time or distance.
- Start with half as much as you think you can do and focus on your posture/form.
- Add a bit of weight over the next 3 or 4 sets and you’ll find a nice place to start.
How Many Sets and Reps?
This depends on the load, and the key formula is more sets of less time, or fewer sets of more time. A good way to start is to progress with the same weight by doing more sets of shorter time/distance, then consolidate into fewer sets of longer duration.
Time frames for the heaviest loads run 20 seconds to a minute. Moderate loads for endurance and conditioning run 2 to 5 minutes (plus).
So with that in mind:
For the Heaviest Loads
- Start with 3 sets of 20 seconds
- Then go to 2 sets of 30 seconds
- Then 1 set of 45 seconds and 1 set of 15 seconds
- And then finally to 1 set of 60 seconds
This is one example of a progression. You could do this or anything in between. For lighter loads and longer durations, the concept is the same: do 5 sets of 1 minute, then progress to 3 sets of 90 seconds, and eventually 1 long set of 5 minutes. Be creative.
Should I Do Weighted Locomotion?
We talked earlier about how locomotion and loaded carries both emphasize that full body connection and take advantage of automatic core activation. It doesn’t follow that loading your locomotion work is an even better idea.
It might be useful if you’re already moving very well in your locomotion practice. But I’d suggest working on the quality of your movement even further (you can always improve that) rather than strapping weight to it. Save the added weight for your weight training and your loaded carries.
Pick Something Up and Get Walking
Over the years, Ryan, Andy, and I have all used carries as part of our training. Carrying is simple, flexible, and extremely scalable to your needs and circumstances.
Give the exercises in this tutorial a try and let us know how you like them.
Loaded carries are a great example of integrated strength development: full body strength that positively affects how you move and use your body.
Use Skill-Based Training to Build Practical Strength
Integral Strength is a skill-based strength program that builds practical strength that carries over into the activities you care about.
We don’t have a program built around carries, and you don’t need one. They slot right into the Push portion of your sessions using our 5P protocol, and the curriculum overview shows how the whole path fits together.
Hi, I'm Jarlo Ilano PT, DPT 👋
Jarlo Ilano, PT, DPT, OCS has been a Physical Therapist since 1998. He earned his Doctorate of Physical Therapy in Musculoskeletal Management from Evidence In Motion, was board certified as an Orthopedic Clinical Specialist with the American Board of Physical Therapy Specialties, and is a certified Therapeutic Pain Specialist through EIM/Purdue University.
In addition to cofounding GMB, Jarlo has been teaching martial arts for over 30 years, with a primary focus on Filipino Martial Arts. He designed our Train Without Pain guide and our knee and shoulder restoration programs.
