Ruck!

I don't have the capability to carry.

Twenty two years ago, I went to climb Mt. Whitney with several friends and each of us carried tents, pots and pans etc., but I struggled and gave up the summit climb. For Machu Picchu or Kilimanjaro hikes, I hired porters. For the Aconcagua hike, I hired a porter to carry my gear. What's more, I also put all my clothes in their sack. Walking without enough layers, I caught the wind, developed altitude sickness and had to be helicoptered out.

Needless to say, I have not benefited by shying away from carrying. On my recent 12-day hike on the Kokoda trail in Papua New Guinea, two hikers in the group had 40+ pound backpacks and that was very impressive to me. Thereafter, I heard the book The Comfort Crisis on audible, then discovered Rucking and the GoRuck website.

I decided to splurge and ordered the 20-liter Rucker 4.0 bag with 30-pound ruck plate. It was delivered by FedEx in 4 days, and I was ready for the rucking experience. The ruck plate goes inside the bag in its own separate pocket. There are two pockets in the bag for carrying the plates and theoretically one could carry up to 75 pounds of weights in these two pockets. Besides the weights, there is space for carrying a computer or other things. With my computer, cables, and the plate, my sack weighed 40 pounds. The sack is designed to handle the heavy weight with sturdy stitching.

I planned to train myself to be able to carry 40 pounds easily over a period of three of four months. I figured, the Pacific crest trail, Appalachian trail and Camino de Santiago would be great backpacking hikes to go on once I can master the carrying of a rucksack consistently over a daily 10-mile distance.

I started on a Monday to carry the rucksack on the 4-mile route which includes 500 feet climb that I do daily in 2 parts. Each segment roughly takes 40 minutes and burns 540 calories. On the first day of walking with the rucksack, the calorie burn remained almost similar, but the time increased by 10%. For the rest of the week, the same pattern repeated.

I also read that the rucksack improves posture, develops back muscles and strengthens the core.

I observed that my shoulder blade hurt while walking, but it stopped hurting each time I walked with head held high and looking forward.

On day three and four, I had a feeling that my whole body hurt, and I was more lethargic but continued the routine.

To determine the effect of the carry on muscles, I bought the Omron Body Composition Monitor with Scale. It sports 7 Fitness Indicators & a 90-Day Memory. I was quite impressed with its features. However, I was disappointed that I would have to manually key in these measurements daily into my smartphone. More search yielded the BCM-500 by Omron, which measures body weight, body fat percentage, visceral fat, skeletal muscle percentage, resting metabolism and BMI as well as sends it via Bluetooth to the phone.

I decided to perform and track weekly measurement for a month to see if the rucking was indeed increasing my muscles. I plan for this blog will be updated weekly with the measurements.

Measured	BMI	Body Fat	Muscle	Resting Calories	Visceral Fat
Day 7	25.2	20.5 %	37.5 %	1519	9
Day 12 (using new scale)	24.4	19.5%	33.5 %	1381	9