6 ways to maximize your calories burned rucking

It is perfectly reasonable to ask questions about the number of calories you’re burning on a regular basis while you are out rucking. After all, what are we all here for if not to get into better shape? For those who have embraced the rucking habit out of a desire to shed some pounds, the number of calories that are being burned during rucking workouts is one of the foremost concerns.

Fortunately, modifying your caloric burn is an unbelievably easy thing to do. In fact, it’s probably a whole lot easier than you think. The list below represents a set of some obvious ways that you can maximize the calories your body burns while you’re outside exercising with a backpack looped over your shoulders.

1. Speed things up.

The response to this entry is likely to be “Duhhhhh…” but if burning calories is your objective, then increasing the pace of your ruck is undeniably the simplest way for you to go about burning more calories.

Even though pace acceleration is an obvious solution to the question “How can I burn more calories?” that doesn’t mean the question can be asked without some trade offs to consider. If the goal of the ruck is to get in a little bit of exercise while spending a pleasant evening outdoors with your family and taking in some appealing scenery, you don’t want to spoil the spirit of the activity. Therefore, transforming the walk into a sprint is only going to anger the folks who now believe they have been baited and switched into a military-grade training experience.

However, if the true objective of your rucking is to burn more calories, learning to progressively complete your rucking distance at gradually faster rates of speed is a surefire way to increase your daily caloric burn by leaps and bounds over the course of just a few months.

2. Raise the stakes.

As everyone learned fairly early in life, walking down a flight of stairs is a whole lot easier than walking up one. Well, it just so happens that working against gravity forces your body to do more work in all situations, which makes uphill rucking a simple way to coax more effort out of yourself while you train.

Please keep in mind that what goes up must come down, so if you spend one mile rucking uphill and then turn around and ruck the exact same path in the opposite direction, gravity will assist you during the back end of your workout, and somewhat offset the accelerated caloric burn you achieved during the first mile. With this in mind, it might be best to ruck alongside a partner. That way, you can station one vehicle at the finish line, drive the other vehicle to your starting point, and then spend the entire length of your ruck completing a challenging, one-way, uphill workout.

Yes, seeking out hills takes a little more strategizing than working out on any of the level surfaces you commonly encounter, but the benefit of the added caloric burn and endurance-building muscle fatigue will be well worth the effort behind the search for an uphill rucking surface.

3. Mix things up.

If you’re a serious rucker, it will come as no shock to you that you don’t actually have to spend the duration of your ruck simply walking and running. Without question, if you are prepared to get creative, you can burn significantly more calories solely by making a few minor alterations in your stride style, or backpack position.

Removing your backpack and holding it to one side will force your body to work against the asymmetry and fight extra hard for stability. Automatically, this will make the exercise more challenging and cause your body to burn more calories. If you want to skip the asymmetry and go straight to moves that will draw more eyeballs to what you’re doing, carve out a few segments of your ruck and spend them doing lunges, or hold your backpack directly over your head and walk for as long as you can.

Realistically, anything you can do to vary your stride from a standard walking step, or to modify the position of your backpack so that it sits anywhere but on your back, is going to make your workout more challenging, and cause you to burn more calories per step.

4. Increase your weight.

The very thing ruckers are most naturally inclined to do to increase the challenge of their workouts is one of the most efficient means of burning more calories, but there’s more than one catch to it.

Research shows that the rate at which calories are burned while backpacking, in terms of calories burned per hour, is steepest when a person’s speed also increases. That means the greatest benefits to increasing the weight you are toting is enjoyed by those that don’t allow the additional weight to cause them to slow down. Otherwise, sacrificing speed for the sake of carrying more weight really doesn’t provide much of a benefit in the area of caloric burn, even if there is an obvious gain in terms of muscle activation.

Speaking of the health of your muscles and some of the other parts of your body, it’s worth mentioning one of the other trade offs involved with increasing backpack weight during rucks, and that’s the problem posed by posture. Specifically, ruckers are prone to yield to the temptation and sacrifice form for the sake of boasting to their friends about additional backpack weight. When that happens, injuries abound, because the pelvic tilt that follows an increase in backpack weight often leads to back and ankle injuries. Be careful, because nothing inhibits the loss of calories more than sitting around nursing an injury while your friends are out rucking without you.

5. Sweat it out.

Fun fact: If your body is performing one of its natural processes at a higher-than-usual rate, it is burning calories to do it. Naturally, this makes sense, because it takes way more calories to move than it does to remain motionless, and it burns more calories to do something than it does to do absolutely nothing. This means something as simple as sweating, if you can force your body to do more of it each minute than it otherwise would, will cause your body to burn more calories over the duration of your workout.

Clearly, working harder during your workout is one way to get your body to sweat more, but in that case, the cause of the increased sweat is a preceding increase in activity level. The only practical way to force your body to sweat profusely without it stemming from an escalation in physical activity is to seek out warmer-than-usual environments and force yourself to ruck in them.

Since rucking is predominantly an outdoor activity to begin with, there won’t be much you can do to alter the natural environment in which you live. However, this may mean not choosing to ruck early in the morning or late at night when the sun and the temperature are at their lowest, and instead opting to ruck when the heat is a bit less forgiving. It may seem minor, but forcing your body to sweat more on a per-workout basis is one of those little fitness hacks that can yield significant benefits over time.

6. Make things more pleasant.

This may seem counter intuitive, because almost all of the things people do to maximize the calories they burn rucking involve making themselves more uncomfortable. Hopefully, it will come as a pleasant surprise to realize this isn’t always the case, and that making yourself as comfortable as possible during your ruck is likely to add to your enjoyment and ultimately result in more calories burned. Doing things to make your ruck more pleasant will probably cause you to increase the length of time you spend rucking on a daily basis, and also to ensure that you increase the frequency with which you ruck because you look forward to it.

What are some things you can do to make rucking more pleasant? Converting some of your best friends into regular rucking partners is a good start. Let’s face it: You’re going to talk to these people anyway, so the wisest thing you can do is to turn your socializing time into a calorie-burning experience.

If you can’t secure a training partner, then secure a set of headphones and a training playlist filled with your favorite tunes. Rucking time may be the only time you’ll ever have during the day to listen to an hour-long string of your favorite musical hits without any sort of interruption, so if you view your rucking session as more of a jam session, you’ll be far more inclined to extend the duration of the moments you spend sweating to your favorite songs.

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