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YOU MIGHT BE underestimating the power of a walk. Walking has a long litany of benefits: it burns calories, improves recovery, supports bone health, boosts mental well-being, and builds serious endurance. And just like your strength training routine in the gym, you’ll need to progress to greater challenges to continue making gains. Most people do that by walking faster or farther. Another option is to add load. Enter rucking.
A form of military exercise made popular more recently on social media, rucking is essentially just a long walk with a weighted sack. It sounds simple, but rucking can be intense, and you shouldn’t just strap in and start walking without any prep.
We spoke with Men’s Health advisory board member David Otey, C.S.C.S., and Major Gary Helton, a doctor of physical therapy and the assistant chief of Sports Medicine at Moncrief Army Health Clinic at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to explain the need-to-know details behind rucking—and how you can best add it to your routine.
What Is Rucking?
Rucking is when you walk or hike while wearing a weighted backpack (called a rucksack or simply a ruck). Just like adding weight plates to a barbell to increase how much you’re lifting for a particular exercise, rucking is a way to overload your muscles to make walking harder. The added load increases your work capacity and can strengthen your muscles and bones. Advocates tout that the strain can be a mental conditioning tool, too.
Rucking began as a military conditioning tool. Soldiers train with heavy packs to build the strength and stamina needed to move under the weight of their gear packs. In 2008, Green Beret Jason McCarthy founded GoRuck, helping to bring the practice to civilian fitness culture. From there, rucking started showing up everywhere—from CrossFit events to the social feeds of manosphere icons like David Goggins, Cameron Hanes, and Jocko Willink to clubs that help to foster community connections.
The appeal lies in the fact that rucking is brutally simple, scalable to any fitness level, and inexpensive to get started. You just need a pack, some weight, and the willingness to move. Walking is an accessible form of cardio, and rucking is a sensible way to elevate it.
Why Rucking Works
Most people think about strength training as targeting individual muscles—bench press for chest, pullups for lats, curls for biceps. That’s a useful approach for building size and strength, but it doesn’t always translate to moving better in the real world. Yes, a bench press counts as “functional” because it’s a horizontal push pattern. But outside of the gym, how often are you pushing heavy objects (or people) away from your body? The bench press builds muscle that supports movement, but it doesn’t always prepare you for it.
Rucking, on the other hand, is a purer form of functional strength training—a term that’s been hijacked online by coaches who use it to sell circus-act programming. “Functional means ‘useful in everyday life,’” Otey explains. “Walking, carrying, and moving under load constantly. Rucking mimics real-life demands better than most gym movements, and it’s simple, practical, and transferable.”
And if there’s one physical task humans have always done, it’s carrying things. We haul backpacks, grocery bags (ideally in one trip), luggage, and kids. Rucking trains that exact ability: carrying weight while moving through space. It strengthens your legs, core, hips, and back in the same coordinated way you use them every day. Rucking doesn’t isolate your muscle groups; it trains them to systematically work together so you can move under load more efficiently and powerfully.
As Men’s Health contributor Michael Easter has written, rucking trains the “tactical chassis”. That is, “everything between the shoulders and knees—hamstrings, quads, hips, abs, obliques, back, etc.—and all that musculature is critical for combat, hunting, and mountain sports…carrying can even help prevent back pain, since it trains core endurance.”
What rucking won’t do for you is make you noticeably larger. You need to contract and stretch your muscles to do that. However, Otey does say that, in addition to full-body endurance, aesthetically, rucking will help lean out your mid-section and target the “posture muscles”, like the spinal erectors and upper back muscles.
The Benefits of Rucking
Improved Work Capacity
Walking is an uncomplicated, low-intensity way to burn more calories and improve your heart health. But its accessibility comes with a downside: If you only ever walk for cardio, you’re likely not pushing into Zone 2 training—one of five heart zones used to quantify cardio intensity—which is the sweet spot for improving your endurance and also burns more fat.
Rucking is much more likely to elevate your heart rate into Zone 2 (60 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate) as the added load increases, forcing your body (and your heart) to work harder overall. One small 2025 study found that young adults who walked with increasingly heavy weighted vests saw a linear increase in their heart rates. The heavier the weight, the harder their hearts were working. Adding 10 kilograms (or about 20 pounds) increased the subject’s heart rate by 10 beats per minute, which, for many people, is the difference between being in zone 1 vs. 2.
Strength and Muscular Endurance
Carrying an additional 10 to 20 percent of your bodyweight will make you more adept at, well, carrying more weight—but rucking isn’t going to make you stronger in ways that you’d directly apply in the weight room.
Your leg and core muscles will, however, learn to move under more weight, which should make you more efficient at walking and hiking when the weight comes off. Rucking with additional weight will also build up your muscular endurance—that is, your muscles’ ability to resist fatigue. Just make sure you’re continuing to find places to progress, either adding more weight or sticking with the same load and increasing the duration of your rucks (this is more likely to be your approach).
Higher Energy Expenditure
Rucking burns more calories than walking, as your body works harder to support the additional weight. But how many more calories? According to GoRuck’s rucking calorie calculator, one hour of rucking for a 200-pound person carrying 20 pounds and walking at a 15 miles per hour pace will burn 636 calories an hour. Compare that to standard walking at the same pace, and that 200-pound person will burn 474 calories per hour. (Read more about how many calories you burn per walking in this article.)
More calories burned means a faster rate of weight loss, assuming you ruck for the same intensity as your regular walks and your caloric intake stays the same. If you’re looking to burn fat, rucking can help you achieve your goal more quickly.
Improved Bone Density and Joint Health
“Your joints, especially in your lower body, have lots of soft tissues—like cartilage—that don’t get much primary blood flow, and they rely on movement and pressure changes to get nutrients in and push waste out,” explains Helton. “Think of these tissues like a sponge: when you put weight on them (like during rucking) waste gets removed, and when you take the weight off, the tissues soak up nutrients from the surrounding synovial fluid. This cycle helps keep your joints healthy and resilient.”
How to Ruck
Choosing the Right Gear
Most importantly, you’re going to need a bag. If just starting out, a standard backpack is fine. Rucksacks are sturdier, more comfortable under load, and better designed to hold weight close to your body. They’re also more expensive, so try rucking for a few weeks before you decide to invest in a solid rucksack.
Pro Weighted Vest
Weighted Vest
Tactical RUSH 24 2.0
Rucker 4.0
You’ll also need items to weigh down your rucksack. Ruck plates are an option, but really anything will do: water bottles, bags of rice, bricks, sandbags, etc. Just make sure you know exactly how much you’re carrying and pack the weight tightly against your back so it doesn’t bounce or shift.
Other items worth investing in:
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Supportive shoes with aggressive treads. (Read our list on the best shoes for rucking for Men’s Health-approved options.)
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Thick, comfortable socks to prevent blistering. (See our list of the best socks.)
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Breathable and reliable clothing that you know won’t chafe. (Our list of the best workout clothes is a good place to start your search.)
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Water. The longer your ruck session, the more water you should bring. (Check out our list of the best water bottles to throw in your rucksack.)
Rucking Technique and Form Tips
Anytime you load your body—with dumbbells, barbells, or a rucksack—you’re placing additional stress on your joints. Move poorly, and you’ll feel it fast. Rucking is no exception.
“When rucking, particularly with low load, most people naturally start to lean their trunk forward a bit more than they would if they were walking without load,” explains Helton. “So, even a small amount of added weight causes your joints, muscles, and connective tissues to adjust, and your back and neck especially work a bit differently to keep you upright and moving safely.”
To get the benefits without the back pain, pay attention to your posture and how you carry the load.
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Walk with an upright posture: That is, head facing forward, back straight, and your shoulders stacked over your hips. Fight the urge to hunch over and succumb to the weight.
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Ensure the weight is tight to your body. Otherwise, the pack will shift around, and this can throw you off balance or create undue stress on your shoulders and hips.
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Be tactical about load placement. Helton says that carrying the pack higher can be more energy efficient by helping you move forward more easily, which also takes stress off your lower back. However, a high pack can also throw off your balance, so Helton suggests carrying the pack lower while walking on tricky terrain.
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Use a hip belt for heavier and faster rucks. Hip belts attach to your rucksack and wrap around your waist to shift the load from your shoulders to your hips. It’s not a necessity, but once you start to increase the weight (above 30 pounds or so), a hip belt “takes a lot of the strain off your shoulders,” says Helton, “and gives you better control over how the pack moves, so your back and spine can move more naturally and comfortably.”
How to Warm Up for Rucking
Rucking isn’t walking. You need to prepare your body the same way you would for a weight-lifting session—because rucking is lifting weights.
“Any whole-body exercise such as rucking should include a comprehensive upper body, trunk, and lower body dynamic warm-up,” says Helton. “Also, you’ll spend a lot of time with your hips and lower back slightly flexed while rucking, so it helps to do some exercises that move your back in the opposite direction.”
To that end, Helton suggests dynamic warmups that target your shoulder and hip joints as well as spinal extension. Run through the routine below before any ruck to elevate your heart rate and prime your joints.
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Arm Circles: 10 reps forward, 10 reps backward
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Torso Twists: 20 reps (in each direction)
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Leg Swings: 10 reps (each leg) forward and backward, 10 reps (each leg) side to side
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Thread the Needle: 10 reps (each arm)
How to Plan Your Rucking Programming and Progression
First, you need to select a weight for your ruck: “For someone who’s been largely sedentary, they should start with simply walking while trying to maintain a 15-minute-per-mile pace [or 4 miles per hour],” he suggests for beginners. Once you can walk unweighted at that pace, Helton says to ruck with 15 percent of your body weight.
Assuming you’re a beginner, start with two days of rucking per week, covering one to two miles. Add a few pounds to your pack every week or every other until you’re carrying 25 percent of your body weight. Once you hit that milestone, ruck every seven to 10 days so your body can recover, Helton suggests. You can also maintain your weight and aim to increase your mileage and/or pace (though a 15-minute mile is considered fast).
There’s no single right answer for how to incorporate rucking into your strength training routine. Your back and legs are doing most of the work during a rucking session, so keep strengthening those muscles in the gym. Otey suggests no more than one to two rucks if you’re lifting three to four days per week, and to keep the ruck sessions at a low-to-moderate intensity so you’re not fatigued before compound lifts like deadlifts and back squats. If your priority is lifting, plan rucks one or two days after strength training. If improving your ruck performance is the goal, ruck first, then lift a day or two later.
Helton also recommends paying attention to your recovery metrics, like heart rate variability (HRV)—which many of the best fitness trackers monitor—and your rate of perceived exertion (RPE), which is more based on how you feel. If you wake up and your legs are 10-out-of-10 sore, squatting probably isn’t in the cards for you that day.
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