These are the top five benefits of
rucking vs running

Running is the most popular form of cardiovascular training. Many millions of people - from average Joes to professional athletes - have incorporated regular running into their daily routines in the hope of making some sort of measurable improvement to their lives, whether that improvement is physical, aesthetic or psychological. 

Can running be improved upon? Well, that all depends on what your goals are. The short answer is, “Yes, it can,” and rucking is one of the simplest ways to improve upon it. It also comes with some of the most easily measured benefits visible in the aftermath of training.

With the clear intent of attempting to convince you that rucking is superior to running for several reasons, here are the top five benefits of rucking when compared to running. Hopefully, this list will give you even more reasons to reach for your rucking backpack the next time you have an hour’s worth of spare time to exercise before work.

1. Rucking increases calories burned over the same distance

There are certainly a lot of factors involved when calculating the number of calories that a person burns when traveling a given distance. These include a person’s weight level, body composition and training intensity at a minimum, but for our purposes, we’re going to keep things very simple. Generally speaking, if two people cover the same distance in the same length of time, but one person weighs significantly more than the other person, the heavier person will burn more calories than the lighter person over the course of the workout. 

One reason for this is a simple matter of it taking more energy to move a large object than it takes to move a small object, and this is a fact you can exploit by rucking instead of running. If you can consistently maintain ten-minute miles during your runs, and you can add a rucking backpack to your back and still maintain ten-minute miles, you will simply be burning more calories while rucking instead of running as you are covering the same distance. This is only one of the benefits to running with added weight, but it’s a significant one.

2) Rucking improves balance, stability and body awareness

Some of the benefits of exercise are less obvious than others. The majority of people clearly think about training’s benefits in terms of aesthetic improvements, weight loss, strength gains and body composition optimization, because these are all visible to the naked eye. Secondary benefits like improvements to balance, stability and body awareness are often overlooked, despite being nearly as important as some of the popular training benefits. In fact, from an athletic performance standpoint, nearly all of these secondary benefits are undeniably more important than increased attractiveness. 

Applying weight to people’s shoulder blades is a common tactic to improve coordination and stability, because it helps the person carrying the weight to feel more grounded. The mind and muscles become instantly aware of the added weight’s presence, and sync together to accommodate it. In essence, the connectedness of the mind and body are being trained at the same time as the muscles are being challenged. Therefore, improved balance and body awareness are far more likely to be restored and reinforced during rucking training as opposed to weightless running.

3) Rucking prepares you for other sports

In many instances, running is practically a required form of cross training for other sports. This is because more than half of the sports in which people regularly compete incorporate running as a core component of the competition. Obviously, this includes sports like basketball, football, most track & field events, lacrosse and soccer, but it also includes sports that require short bursts of running, like volleyball, tennis, baseball, softball, and certain gymnastic events. And, from a conditioning standpoint, running provides great endurance training for combat sports, and also makes for a great alternative conditioning method for swimmers, skaters and others.

Now, of the sports we’ve mentioned, how many require the ability to run while wearing or holding additional gear or padding? Certainly football, hockey and lacrosse require this at a minimum, but many of the other sports on this list require moving or running through some sort of additional resistance that isn’t accounted for while running alone. If you opt to ruck instead of run, you are familiarizing your body with the concept of moving through space with additional resistance. Therefore, when you eventually don the football pads or hockey pads after you’ve been rucking for a while, the padding will feel very light when compared with the rucking backpack. Not only will you be more conditioned to manage the additional weight, but you’ll also feel more comfortable than many of your competitors.

4) Rucking prepares you for emergencies

When you think about many emergency scenarios, you probably think about sprinting away fro a dangerous environment and off to a safe location. This is reasonably accurate; an emergency-escape scenario is very likely to involve some sort of running on your part. Yet, there’s a reason that many people have checklists in their heads involving what they would grab and carry off with them if they needed to escape from a fire. Often, these lists include more than one item, and the more items you choose to bring with you, the heavier the load you are carrying will become. And if you’re a parent, the items you carry may include a child or two.

On the other hand, what about the people who run to emergencies? Firemen and EMTs regularly carry several pounds worth of lifesaving equipment in the direction of the people they are trying to aid, and every second is meaningful when lives are on the line. The key takeaway here is that many emergencies involve running while carrying weight, and therefore rucking is automatically a more beneficial training tool than running for emergency preparedness. 

5) Rucking increases lower body strength

Running is one of the most efficient ways to burn excess fat and condition your heart. While you run, you can easily control many variables of your workout at will, including your intensity level and the duration of your training intervals. As long as your knees hold up, there’s really nothing at all wrong with running. Realistically, the only way running can be improved upon is to tweak it slightly to make it more efficient at accomplishing specific goals, and the only way running can be considered flawed is to compare its benefits to those of activities that running really shouldn’t be compared with.

One example of a goal you might like to accomplish is to increase your lower-body strength. Usually, practical increases in lower-body strength are accomplished by weightlifting movements, or other training methods specifically designed to challenge the muscles of the lower extremities and build strength within them. Ultimately, running alone isn’t well-tailored to build lower-body power, but adding weight in the form of a rucking backpack is a rapid way to increase the challenge level and build a corresponding amount of muscle. It still won’t be as rapid or significant as the muscle growth that can be achieved through weight training, but if your time is limited and you can only train one way with two objectives in mind, rucking will help you achieve more muscle growth in your legs than running alone.

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