8 ms·

How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

111 points by 1659447091 9mo ago

james_conner123 9mo ago
[flagged]
helterskelter 9mo ago
I once carried a log that weighed about double my body weight and carried it 100ft. My back has never been the same, I really don't recommend it unless you know what you're doing.
- sundvor 9mo ago
  The idea discussed in the article was one of progressive overload; slowly make your body adapt to an ever increasing workload. Don't go straight for the 200kg deadlift when you are new to the gym, in other words.
- downboots 9mo ago
  I concur. A lapse in training and one careless fess-up is all that's needed for a lifetime injury.
- gadders 9mo ago
  I managed to carry my bodyweight in each hand for a strength event (100kg). I guess the total distance was 20m? I was OK afterwards, and I'm no freak of strength.
  - a_better_world 9mo ago
    if you have the grip strength to hold that, you have solid core strength already. And you are carrying in your hands, not balanced on your head-- which totally alters the stress on the spine. So yes, cograts on your feat, that is a pretty cool level to hit, but it doesn't counter the basic advice of "grow into it" instead of "max from day one" Also, you did this "once". If the accident rate is 1:100, doing it once without getting hurt is not very surprising.
    - gadders 9mo ago
      Yes, I trained for it and did it maybe a couple of times in training and then at the event. If you want to do XXX kg every day, you need to make your max XXX+[20%+?].
missingdays 9mo ago
No, I don't think I will
c7b 9mo ago
One thing I always found a bit of a puzzle: it's widely understood, and scientifically backed up afaik, that strength training is healthy and good for longevity. Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies (age 50+) are in worse condition than the average population (who's not in great shape already), and far worse than people with sedentary jobs who do fitness training. I get that there can be too much of a good thing etc, but I still find it curious. If it's generally said to be good for you, shouldn't the effects be a bit more robust than that?
- ookblah 9mo ago
  imo they don't get a chance to recover. i don't think you can compare a whole day of back breaking work where you have to push thru any minor issues vs like a 1-2 hr workout session every day at your discretion.
- q-base 9mo ago
  There is use and there is overuse. What you are also seeing is lifestyle and socioeconomic influences. Construction workers are not necessarily in the highest income bracket, may not have the same access to healthcare or have the mental, physical or economical bandwidth to take extra good care of their body.
- chrystalkey 9mo ago
  Well the answer here is: other factors. Safe, supervised strength training is great, but construction workers do not have that luxury, but instead heavy stuff to carry in (unhealthy)positions dictated by the task itself rather than your training regimen. Then there are toxic chemicals on site they are exposed to, which attack lung, skin, bones, muscles. Then there is dust everywhere all the time, wood dust, stone dust, plastic particles, metal particles. All not great for your lungs, skin an eyes. So the strength training alone would be great, and many construction workers do have a lot of muscle mass, but the rest ist just poisoned.
- chistev 9mo ago
  > Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies are in worse condition than the average population (who's not in great shape already), and far worse than people with sedentary jobs who do fitness training. Really? That's not my observation.
soanvig 9mo ago
Reminds me of slovakian mountain carriers https://regiontatry.sk/en/mountain-load-bearers/ https://regiontatry.sk/en/mountain-load-bearers/
- wazoox 9mo ago
  This is awesome, now I really want to try it and be rewarded with a mug of warm tea :D
- Markoff 9mo ago
  hopefully in both Slovakia and Vietnam these will be replaced by cargo drones, after all Vietnamese farmers are already using them extensively, I saw great use of them in videos of saving people during the floods
  - kakacik 9mo ago
    Nah thats also part of historical tradition (in Slovakia). Folks doing that could earn way more working regular jobs down in city (even say Poprad, closest one). Its their passion, hobby, and there is a lot of respect in community for them. Even normal hikers can take some smaller load up, its encouraged and appreciated. It doesn't have to be 2 full 50l alluminium barrels of beer or similar 120-150kg loads. In alps for example all this is done by choppers these days, a tradition lost.
  - Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
    I'm sure some application will be found for cargo drones, but they're limited in range, flight time, weather conditions, etc compared to people carrying stuff.
- bwv848 9mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMxk-_kezxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMxk-_kezxw
- lstolcman 9mo ago
  The slovak version of an article contains different photos, and a video [0]. Also, check out the interview with nosič from poland [1] - he mentioned working there 18 years. Surely, surviving this long means that certain techniques are needed ;) When asked about back pain: "My back hurts when I sit at the computer" [0]: https://regiontatry.sk/moje-tatry/tatranski-nosici-svetovy-unikat/ https://regiontatry.sk/moje-tatry/tatranski-nosici-svetovy-u... [1]: https://magazynnaszczycie.pl/artykul/chleb-uratowal-mi-zycie-n1602397 https://magazynnaszczycie.pl/artykul/chleb-uratowal-mi-zycie...
zkmon 9mo ago
This is very common in Indian villages too. As small kids we used to carry 30-40 kgs of green grass bundles on our heads in the mornings. Girls definitely carried more than their body weight. People carried a stack of pots on their heads with full of water. Carrying two equal weights hung from the two ends of a bamboo bar (kaavidi) on your shoulder is extremely common. There was even a folk story of a boy who carried his two parents on a kaavidi wherever he went. But none of that farm work was seen as something special. It's just a routine thing. Media and academic research makes things look special and interesting. Samething goes for romanticism, mystery, fiction as well.
- MrCurryCasino 9mo ago
  [flagged]
- balamatom 9mo ago
  >kaavidi This is an interesting word. Halfway across the Alpo-Himalayan backbone the word for this tool is "kobilitsa", cognate to "kobila" (female horse) and I always figured it was a metaphor for the arched form of the bar (and probably referring to how women were stuck with the task of fetching water with it). But now it seems the word "kaavidi" has reached our ancestral lifestyle all the way from the Indian lands! And the transformation it underwent was more due to how people "normalize" foreign words; same linguistic churn that gives us backronyms and false etymologies (see also "eggcorn"). Whoa I presume linguists have already studied the naming of household implements when deriving Proto-Indo-European. I've never encountered much literature on the subject, nonetheless I find the subject rather fascinating.
olalonde 9mo ago
This reminds me of a trip to Guilin when I was an athletic 22-year-old. We'd booked a hotel on top of a mountain that was only reachable by hiking up a trail. At the trailhead, a five-foot-tall grandma offered to carry my luggage to the top. I thought it was funny — and a bit insulting — so I refused. About a quarter of the way up, I gave up and let her take it. She carried it all the way up without breaking a sweat. It was more a feat of endurance than pure strength, but still incredibly impressive.
- luqtas 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - thih9 9mo ago
    You can be both athletic and unable to carry weight during long uphill walks. E.g. upper body dominant sports, or activities not focused on endurance would not be as advantageous here.
    - mixmastamyk 9mo ago
      Only epakai has mentioned altitude so far. I’m athletic and once took a cable car up to 5000m. At the top I started walking on the flat trail and was out of breath in a minute or two and had to stop.
- alistairSH 9mo ago
  Related, it's wild what the porters on the Inca Trail carry. Both the weight and the pace they move. We'd get up and start hiking after breakfast, the porters pack up camp, start hiking 30-60 min after us, fly-by us mid-morning, and have a cooked lunch ready by the time we get to the lunch spot. Repeat again for dinner/night. The trail itself isn't technically challenging, just lots of elevation gain/loss each day and at a high enough altitude to make unacclimatized people feel pretty bad.
  - MikeNotThePope 9mo ago
bwv848 9mo ago
Here's how to actually train for it. https://uphillathlete.com/aerobic-training/vertical-beast-mode-what-is-muscular-endurance-why-it-is-important-for-any-alpinist-or-mountaineer-and-how-do-you-train-it/ https://uphillathlete.com/aerobic-training/vertical-beast-mo...
- kakacik 9mo ago
  Its not even something hard to come up with if you are active, understand you body and generally how workouts work on you. I've trained in similar fashion for my trip to Aconcagua or Nepal, and never researched for that nor discussed with anybody. You carry big backpacks up there a lot, or smaller backpacks for 10-12h each day, every day in places where lack of oxygen makes you lose breath in 5-10 steps easily when walking uphill. It figures that when training for strength-endurance there needs to be a lot of repetitions with some added weight. I just took some weights into backpack at building I was living back then, hiked those 8 floors on stairs, took elevator down, rinse and repeat many times. Or elliptic trainer with same backpack. Or other movements/machines (just don't run with that).
  - Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
    Why the elevator down though? One needs to train going down as much as going up, possibly even more (given my limited experiences hiking up / down some touristy mountains in the UK). I'd even argue going down is harder because you have to stop your own momentum all the time, vs up where maintaining it is beneficial.
    - nottorp 9mo ago
      Up is hard on the muscles, down on the knees.
      - Fricken 9mo ago
        The cartilage in your knees is a living tissue. Like muscle, it responds and adapts to stimulus. If descending stairs gives you knee pain that isn't from some past injury being aggravated, then train them. You get people who go skiing or running for the first time in a while and they complain "Oh, my knees hurt, I'm too old for this". Nope. You're just out of condition. Use it or lose it.
bob1029 9mo ago
Carrying things on your head/shoulders is surprisingly efficient. Many people can unrack a barbell with double their body weight and just stand there for a bit without having done any strength training at all. The trouble is getting the load into that convenient orientation. Taking something from the ground and putting it over your own head is where all the bad stuff happens. Once it's up there it's not as big a deal. You can make yourself bulletproof to most forms of hard physical labor by practicing the clean & jerk. This movement is entirely about "get heavy thing off ground and above head" as efficiently and safely as possible. There are advanced movements that can be even more efficient but you trade some injury risk for screwing up. That is to say, the actual amount of wear on your body is even lower if you really know what you're doing.
- gear54rus 9mo ago
  I don't think you can unrack a 180kg barbell with your head and just stand there like that as a 90kg male, much less untrained. That is a humongous amount of weight.
  - bob1029 9mo ago
    Not your head. Your shoulders. As if you were going to do a barbell squat.
    - somenameforme 9mo ago
      I definitely don't think this is the case. For somebody who hasn't trained - they're not holding 180kg on their shoulders. I think two big reasons would be that they're not going to have core strength/training to support it, and they wouldn't even have the traps to support the bar on their upper back, it'd dig into them and cause immense pain and probably just roll as well.
      - mnw21cam 9mo ago
        For me, it actually seems fairly plausible. I was a fairly untrained 70kg forty-something when I went to the gym and very quickly found that as I did a bit of hiking, I could max out the standing calf raise machine at 155kg. This involves having a very padded 155kg on your shoulders while in a standing position. It felt to me like that was the most my shoulders and back could cope with, and it's more than double body weight.
roschdal 9mo ago
Invent the wheel.
- Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
  Good luck using a wheel in uneven terrain. Why would you even leave a comment like this?
  - moi2388 9mo ago
    It works wonders downhill tbh
- balamatom 9mo ago
  And be stuck only ever going where someone else has invented the road for you. Big same. Now need big wheel.
- simianhords 9mo ago
  [dead]
- AngryData 9mo ago
  Have you ever tried to pull or push a wheeled cart up a large hill? Wheels are not super useful on steep terrain or unbroken ground and are often a liability without a bullet proof brake to stop it from trying to roll away when you stop. If the land isn't super rough or steep then wheels are great, but when it is you are going to have to work twice as hard.
PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
>But jumping straight into lifting heavy weights is not recommended. Instead, experts recommend focusing on technique and starting with loads that can be comfortably lifted before progressively increasing the training. I'm not sure if its because I'm in the 'advanced' category of lifting, but I have recently been going against this common advice. I recommend people get to heavy weights as quick as possible. Adding a minimum of 5lbs each time they lift, but more often 10+. At some point the weight becomes too heavy and you compensate with bad form. Wait wait wait before you downvote, I have a rational here: Your auxiliary muscles that allowed you to do bad form are tired now. Lower the weight and 'clean them up' with good form. I'm not alone in this mindset, but it goes against conventional wisdom. People forget that muscles are being used even when we do bad form. Just don't get injured. Pain = stop right away.
thot_experiment 9mo ago
> How to carry more than your own bodyweight. Stand up and pick up literally any object or don't be naked. Simple.
nchmy 9mo ago
I was reading up on head-carrying the other day. Here's some fantastic articles on the topic, and especially about the use of "tumplines" (strap on top of head with ropes that go around the thing being carried) https://archive.ph/NtSSz https://archive.ph/NtSSz (article from The Atlantic) https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/snow-sports/dead-weight/ https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/snow-sports/... https://www.patagonia.com/stories/culture/design/on-tumplines/story-18753.html https://www.patagonia.com/stories/culture/design/on-tumpline... https://movementum.co.uk/journal/head-loading https://movementum.co.uk/journal/head-loading I started training with one and a 33lb bundle of firewood the other day, and my back and neck haven't felt this good in a long time. I'm going to continue increasing weight, and might also try carrying things directly on top of my head without the tumpline.

111 points by 1659447091 9mo ago

[flagged]

I once carried a log that weighed about double my body weight and carried it 100ft. My back has never been the same, I really don't recommend it unless you know what you're doing.

sundvor 9mo ago
The idea discussed in the article was one of progressive overload; slowly make your body adapt to an ever increasing workload. Don't go straight for the 200kg deadlift when you are new to the gym, in other words.
downboots 9mo ago
I concur. A lapse in training and one careless fess-up is all that's needed for a lifetime injury.
gadders 9mo ago
I managed to carry my bodyweight in each hand for a strength event (100kg). I guess the total distance was 20m? I was OK afterwards, and I'm no freak of strength.
- a_better_world 9mo ago
  if you have the grip strength to hold that, you have solid core strength already. And you are carrying in your hands, not balanced on your head-- which totally alters the stress on the spine. So yes, cograts on your feat, that is a pretty cool level to hit, but it doesn't counter the basic advice of "grow into it" instead of "max from day one" Also, you did this "once". If the accident rate is 1:100, doing it once without getting hurt is not very surprising.
  - gadders 9mo ago
    Yes, I trained for it and did it maybe a couple of times in training and then at the event. If you want to do XXX kg every day, you need to make your max XXX+[20%+?].

missingdays 9mo ago

No, I don't think I will

c7b 9mo ago

One thing I always found a bit of a puzzle: it's widely understood, and scientifically backed up afaik, that strength training is healthy and good for longevity. Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies (age 50+) are in worse condition than the average population (who's not in great shape already), and far worse than people with sedentary jobs who do fitness training. I get that there can be too much of a good thing etc, but I still find it curious. If it's generally said to be good for you, shouldn't the effects be a bit more robust than that?

ookblah 9mo ago
imo they don't get a chance to recover. i don't think you can compare a whole day of back breaking work where you have to push thru any minor issues vs like a 1-2 hr workout session every day at your discretion.
q-base 9mo ago
There is use and there is overuse. What you are also seeing is lifestyle and socioeconomic influences. Construction workers are not necessarily in the highest income bracket, may not have the same access to healthcare or have the mental, physical or economical bandwidth to take extra good care of their body.
chrystalkey 9mo ago
Well the answer here is: other factors. Safe, supervised strength training is great, but construction workers do not have that luxury, but instead heavy stuff to carry in (unhealthy)positions dictated by the task itself rather than your training regimen. Then there are toxic chemicals on site they are exposed to, which attack lung, skin, bones, muscles. Then there is dust everywhere all the time, wood dust, stone dust, plastic particles, metal particles. All not great for your lungs, skin an eyes. So the strength training alone would be great, and many construction workers do have a lot of muscle mass, but the rest ist just poisoned.
chistev 9mo ago
> Yet, if you look at people whose everyday jobs look a lot like functional strength training, eg construction workers, my general impression is that their bodies are in worse condition than the average population (who's not in great shape already), and far worse than people with sedentary jobs who do fitness training. Really? That's not my observation.

soanvig 9mo ago

Reminds me of slovakian mountain carriers https://regiontatry.sk/en/mountain-load-bearers/ https://regiontatry.sk/en/mountain-load-bearers/

wazoox 9mo ago
This is awesome, now I really want to try it and be rewarded with a mug of warm tea :D
Markoff 9mo ago
hopefully in both Slovakia and Vietnam these will be replaced by cargo drones, after all Vietnamese farmers are already using them extensively, I saw great use of them in videos of saving people during the floods
- kakacik 9mo ago
  Nah thats also part of historical tradition (in Slovakia). Folks doing that could earn way more working regular jobs down in city (even say Poprad, closest one). Its their passion, hobby, and there is a lot of respect in community for them. Even normal hikers can take some smaller load up, its encouraged and appreciated. It doesn't have to be 2 full 50l alluminium barrels of beer or similar 120-150kg loads. In alps for example all this is done by choppers these days, a tradition lost.
- Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
  I'm sure some application will be found for cargo drones, but they're limited in range, flight time, weather conditions, etc compared to people carrying stuff.
bwv848 9mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMxk-_kezxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMxk-_kezxw
lstolcman 9mo ago
The slovak version of an article contains different photos, and a video [0]. Also, check out the interview with nosič from poland [1] - he mentioned working there 18 years. Surely, surviving this long means that certain techniques are needed ;) When asked about back pain: "My back hurts when I sit at the computer" [0]: https://regiontatry.sk/moje-tatry/tatranski-nosici-svetovy-unikat/ https://regiontatry.sk/moje-tatry/tatranski-nosici-svetovy-u... [1]: https://magazynnaszczycie.pl/artykul/chleb-uratowal-mi-zycie-n1602397 https://magazynnaszczycie.pl/artykul/chleb-uratowal-mi-zycie...

zkmon 9mo ago

This is very common in Indian villages too. As small kids we used to carry 30-40 kgs of green grass bundles on our heads in the mornings. Girls definitely carried more than their body weight. People carried a stack of pots on their heads with full of water. Carrying two equal weights hung from the two ends of a bamboo bar (kaavidi) on your shoulder is extremely common. There was even a folk story of a boy who carried his two parents on a kaavidi wherever he went. But none of that farm work was seen as something special. It's just a routine thing. Media and academic research makes things look special and interesting. Samething goes for romanticism, mystery, fiction as well.

MrCurryCasino 9mo ago
[flagged]
balamatom 9mo ago
>kaavidi This is an interesting word. Halfway across the Alpo-Himalayan backbone the word for this tool is "kobilitsa", cognate to "kobila" (female horse) and I always figured it was a metaphor for the arched form of the bar (and probably referring to how women were stuck with the task of fetching water with it). But now it seems the word "kaavidi" has reached our ancestral lifestyle all the way from the Indian lands! And the transformation it underwent was more due to how people "normalize" foreign words; same linguistic churn that gives us backronyms and false etymologies (see also "eggcorn"). Whoa I presume linguists have already studied the naming of household implements when deriving Proto-Indo-European. I've never encountered much literature on the subject, nonetheless I find the subject rather fascinating.

olalonde 9mo ago

This reminds me of a trip to Guilin when I was an athletic 22-year-old. We'd booked a hotel on top of a mountain that was only reachable by hiking up a trail. At the trailhead, a five-foot-tall grandma offered to carry my luggage to the top. I thought it was funny — and a bit insulting — so I refused. About a quarter of the way up, I gave up and let her take it. She carried it all the way up without breaking a sweat. It was more a feat of endurance than pure strength, but still incredibly impressive.

luqtas 9mo ago
[flagged]
- thih9 9mo ago
  You can be both athletic and unable to carry weight during long uphill walks. E.g. upper body dominant sports, or activities not focused on endurance would not be as advantageous here.
  - mixmastamyk 9mo ago
    Only epakai has mentioned altitude so far. I’m athletic and once took a cable car up to 5000m. At the top I started walking on the flat trail and was out of breath in a minute or two and had to stop.
alistairSH 9mo ago
Related, it's wild what the porters on the Inca Trail carry. Both the weight and the pace they move. We'd get up and start hiking after breakfast, the porters pack up camp, start hiking 30-60 min after us, fly-by us mid-morning, and have a cooked lunch ready by the time we get to the lunch spot. Repeat again for dinner/night. The trail itself isn't technically challenging, just lots of elevation gain/loss each day and at a high enough altitude to make unacclimatized people feel pretty bad.
- MikeNotThePope 9mo ago

bwv848 9mo ago

Here's how to actually train for it. https://uphillathlete.com/aerobic-training/vertical-beast-mode-what-is-muscular-endurance-why-it-is-important-for-any-alpinist-or-mountaineer-and-how-do-you-train-it/ https://uphillathlete.com/aerobic-training/vertical-beast-mo...

kakacik 9mo ago
Its not even something hard to come up with if you are active, understand you body and generally how workouts work on you. I've trained in similar fashion for my trip to Aconcagua or Nepal, and never researched for that nor discussed with anybody. You carry big backpacks up there a lot, or smaller backpacks for 10-12h each day, every day in places where lack of oxygen makes you lose breath in 5-10 steps easily when walking uphill. It figures that when training for strength-endurance there needs to be a lot of repetitions with some added weight. I just took some weights into backpack at building I was living back then, hiked those 8 floors on stairs, took elevator down, rinse and repeat many times. Or elliptic trainer with same backpack. Or other movements/machines (just don't run with that).
- Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
  Why the elevator down though? One needs to train going down as much as going up, possibly even more (given my limited experiences hiking up / down some touristy mountains in the UK). I'd even argue going down is harder because you have to stop your own momentum all the time, vs up where maintaining it is beneficial.
  - nottorp 9mo ago
    Up is hard on the muscles, down on the knees.
    - Fricken 9mo ago
      The cartilage in your knees is a living tissue. Like muscle, it responds and adapts to stimulus. If descending stairs gives you knee pain that isn't from some past injury being aggravated, then train them. You get people who go skiing or running for the first time in a while and they complain "Oh, my knees hurt, I'm too old for this". Nope. You're just out of condition. Use it or lose it.

bob1029 9mo ago

Carrying things on your head/shoulders is surprisingly efficient. Many people can unrack a barbell with double their body weight and just stand there for a bit without having done any strength training at all. The trouble is getting the load into that convenient orientation. Taking something from the ground and putting it over your own head is where all the bad stuff happens. Once it's up there it's not as big a deal. You can make yourself bulletproof to most forms of hard physical labor by practicing the clean & jerk. This movement is entirely about "get heavy thing off ground and above head" as efficiently and safely as possible. There are advanced movements that can be even more efficient but you trade some injury risk for screwing up. That is to say, the actual amount of wear on your body is even lower if you really know what you're doing.

gear54rus 9mo ago
I don't think you can unrack a 180kg barbell with your head and just stand there like that as a 90kg male, much less untrained. That is a humongous amount of weight.
- bob1029 9mo ago
  Not your head. Your shoulders. As if you were going to do a barbell squat.
  - somenameforme 9mo ago
    I definitely don't think this is the case. For somebody who hasn't trained - they're not holding 180kg on their shoulders. I think two big reasons would be that they're not going to have core strength/training to support it, and they wouldn't even have the traps to support the bar on their upper back, it'd dig into them and cause immense pain and probably just roll as well.
    - mnw21cam 9mo ago
      For me, it actually seems fairly plausible. I was a fairly untrained 70kg forty-something when I went to the gym and very quickly found that as I did a bit of hiking, I could max out the standing calf raise machine at 155kg. This involves having a very padded 155kg on your shoulders while in a standing position. It felt to me like that was the most my shoulders and back could cope with, and it's more than double body weight.

roschdal 9mo ago

Invent the wheel.

Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
Good luck using a wheel in uneven terrain. Why would you even leave a comment like this?
- moi2388 9mo ago
  It works wonders downhill tbh
balamatom 9mo ago
And be stuck only ever going where someone else has invented the road for you. Big same. Now need big wheel.
simianhords 9mo ago
[dead]
AngryData 9mo ago
Have you ever tried to pull or push a wheeled cart up a large hill? Wheels are not super useful on steep terrain or unbroken ground and are often a liability without a bullet proof brake to stop it from trying to roll away when you stop. If the land isn't super rough or steep then wheels are great, but when it is you are going to have to work twice as hard.

PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago

>But jumping straight into lifting heavy weights is not recommended. Instead, experts recommend focusing on technique and starting with loads that can be comfortably lifted before progressively increasing the training. I'm not sure if its because I'm in the 'advanced' category of lifting, but I have recently been going against this common advice. I recommend people get to heavy weights as quick as possible. Adding a minimum of 5lbs each time they lift, but more often 10+. At some point the weight becomes too heavy and you compensate with bad form. Wait wait wait before you downvote, I have a rational here: Your auxiliary muscles that allowed you to do bad form are tired now. Lower the weight and 'clean them up' with good form. I'm not alone in this mindset, but it goes against conventional wisdom. People forget that muscles are being used even when we do bad form. Just don't get injured. Pain = stop right away.

thot_experiment 9mo ago

> How to carry more than your own bodyweight. Stand up and pick up literally any object or don't be naked. Simple.

nchmy 9mo ago

I was reading up on head-carrying the other day. Here's some fantastic articles on the topic, and especially about the use of "tumplines" (strap on top of head with ropes that go around the thing being carried) https://archive.ph/NtSSz https://archive.ph/NtSSz (article from The Atlantic) https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/snow-sports/dead-weight/ https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/snow-sports/... https://www.patagonia.com/stories/culture/design/on-tumplines/story-18753.html https://www.patagonia.com/stories/culture/design/on-tumpline... https://movementum.co.uk/journal/head-loading https://movementum.co.uk/journal/head-loading I started training with one and a 33lb bundle of firewood the other day, and my back and neck haven't felt this good in a long time. I'm going to continue increasing weight, and might also try carrying things directly on top of my head without the tumpline.