Sometime I think relatively recently, many of the ‘functional fitness’ people out there have ‘discovered’ ruck marching. Some of these guys may have been in the service in which case they at least came by the idea honestly. Others, I’m not so sure about. There’s not much new under the sun. I guess I really don’t care unless someone is trying to sell you something you don’t need. Even then it’s more or less a free country I suppose.
So, the idea here is pretty simple. You don’t need to be a rocket surgeon. Get a backpack, or rucksack as they are known in many parts of this old world (hence the name Ruck), load it up with some weight and walk around. Who woulda thunk it?
Walking is a pretty basic human function that you should be able to do, and do well.
Now if you can throw in some hills, rough terrain or some obstacles then all the better. If you are in the military, (or ‘operator’ as they are fond of being called these days) or are a climber then you will most assuredly be intimately familiar with ruck marching… it’s what you do. In the military you don’t have much choice in the matter. If you are a climber however, you typically try to avoid it like the plague. Why? Because it’s not any fun and it hurts, that’s why! You will come up with all sorts of tactics and strategies from the sublime to the ridiculous in order to limit your exposure to it. You will try to find devious and sneaky approaches. You will bash your car up overgrown logging roads and across trackless desert just to save any kilometers that you have to walk with a pack. You will trespass under penalty of law. You will invest incredible sums of cash into the lightest gear known to man, and then modify that gear even further to pare away a few precious grams. (If you have ever cut the borders off your maps you will know what I mean) You will leave the ‘ten essentials’ at home. Everything in your pack will have a dual or maybe even triple purpose. You will even eschew some climbs altogether just to avoid carrying a pack. So distasteful is load carrying you would rather get up a half an hour before you go to bed and climb through the night just to avoid stretching the climb into an affair where you need to carry the added weight of overnight gear.
The overall mantra of pretty much all climbing is ‘light is right’.
Training is supposed to be functional right? Least in my book it is. You should be training for something. It should be outcome based. In the spirit of training for climbing using this ruck business, there are some things to ponder. Old school wisdom might say that if you are doing a big climb where you will have to carry a 10kg pack for example, that you should maybe train carrying a 20kg pack. After all if you can go hard with 20 then you should be able to fly carrying half that load. And yes there is some logic to that; but I think there is more at play here and it goes a bit deeper. Look at fighting sports like MMA/UFC. A UFC contest only goes three rounds; five if it is for a championship. Does training a fighter to last ten rounds really have any merit if all they would ever possibly need to last is five? Not really. You should train to give it all you have in those three or five rounds. Leave nothing for the swim back…
Current thinking seems to be trending to getting training to be a lot more specific to your event. Obviously an athlete needs some entry level fitness or General Physical Preparation (GPP), like the roadwork the old time boxers used to do. Depending upon you sport or activity that could be a lot or a little. But after that is taken care of, for optimal performance the training should mimic the needs of the event as closely as possible.
Back to climbing and packs. If you are training by ruck marching up a hill with 20kg’s or more strapped to your sorry carcass you will be moving slowly; I can pretty much guarantee this. So with this in mind, you are actually training yourself to go uphill slowly. Your body is adapting to this. Engrams, and neural connections and muscle memory and all of that stuff. But in reality from a climbing perspective, you probably want to go uphill fast, not slowly. Also in reality the climb you are training for may only require you to carry 10kg’s. So for gosh sakes… do yourself a big favour and train with a 10kg pack. If you want extra training load, use speed, or steepness as your variable, not load. That being said… there is probably some merit in packing on a bit extra weight as a buffer, but I certainly wouldn’t overdo it. I can remember in my youth loading padding and concrete blocks into a pack and tramping up and down hills all over town. It probably wasn’t too relevant to anything. At best it was probably character building.
In the examples discussed above however I would estimate 12 or 13kg’s would be ample if you are expected to carry 10 into battle. That being said if your proposed climb is going to entail you humping in a load of 40 kilos, then you had best get use to that early. Now if you are ruck marching for GPP or other reasons then the approach might be different. You may want to go heavy
These folks know a thing or two about ruck marching….