Walking Around with Weight

When you bring a bag of groceries from your car into your house, what are you doing? If you have a young kid, what are you doing when you are bringing him/her anywhere with you in your arms? When you're throwing out trash, cleaning out the garage, or moving furniture, what are you doing? The answer is you're moving around with weight in your hands. Whether it's hanging at your sides, above your head, or at chest level, humans move objects from place to place pretty often.

What's my point? Well, walking around holding weight is actually an awesome workout and taxes your entire body. At the Underground Strength Gym we often have our athletes walk with kettlebells as part of their warm up, as part of the training session itself, or as extra-credit the athletes can choose to do on their off days or at the end of sessions. The variations are immense. For example, you could walk with a weight locked out overhead with one arm or two arms; you could walk with weight at chest level with one arm or two arms; and you could walk with a weight hanging at your side with either one or two arms.

Choosing to use only one arm in any of these variations will rock all of the muscles around your midsection, including your abs, lower back, and obliques. With the weight overhead, shoulder stability is increased, as is shoulder and triceps strength. Holding weight(s) at chest level or at your sides will require strong abs and will jack up your upper back and traps.

We often use kettlebells for these walks, but any implement can be substituted. Examples include dumbbells, farmer walk handles, a barbell, sandbags, a slosh keg/pipe(this is when a keg or PVC pipe is filled half way with water so that it moves around while you are moving. CRAZY effective for abdominal stability), stones, or any other object that can be picked up and moved somewhere else. Not only will these movements help to bulletproof your abs, lower back, and shoulders, they're also great for conditioning. Try picking a weight and walking with it at various positions for a set time. See how far of a distance you can go in that time and then next time try to get more laps or a farther distance, or a heavier weight. You might be shocked by how unstable your body is, but after a few weeks your core will be much stronger and your risk of injury will have decreased significantly. Just make sure that you stand up tall with your perfect posture at all times.

These movements have a great carry-over to sports since athletes are often not in a position of balance and symmetry. However, performing these movements will also make everyday tasks for the non-athlete seem much easier and will very very greatly decrease the chance that you will get hurt moving something in your house or at work. So try them out and don't be surprised if you're humbled at first. Start light and work your way up. Stay STRONG!