reckonerFarmer's carry
Two heavy weights, one in each hand, and a walk. There is almost nothing to learn and almost no way to fake it, which is why it is in the library. The grip goes first for most people, and the upper back is not far behind.
Stand tall, ribs down, walk smooth.
- Pattern
- Carry
- Trains
- Forearms, traps, abs, upper back
- Kit
- Dumbbell or kettlebell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 holds of 30 to 60 seconds, on the fat loss plan. Reckoner does not prescribe this pattern for muscle or strength.
- Progression step
- 10 seconds on the hold
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Lower back, neck
Muscles worked
How to do it
Pick them up like a deadlift
Weights beside your feet, hinge at the hips with the back flat, take the handles and stand up by driving the floor away. Getting heavy weight off the floor badly is the likeliest way to get hurt doing this.
Stand tall before the first step
Shoulders back and down rather than rounded forward, ribs pulled toward the hips, chin level. Let the arms hang. The weights should not be pressed against your legs.
Walk with short, quiet steps
Small steps and a normal breathing rhythm. Long strides make the load swing, and a swinging load pulls you side to side, which is work you are not there to do.
Stop before your hands do
The set ends when your grip is genuinely about to fail or your shoulders start rounding forward. Put the weights down under control, hinging rather than dropping them, and log the time you held it properly.
What goes wrong
Rounding forward under the load
The shoulders roll in, the chest drops, and the walk continues. It is the position the weight wants you in, and holding the upper back against it is most of why this exercise is here.
Dropping the weights at the end
Fatigue arrives, the hands open, and two heavy dumbbells hit the floor beside your feet. Plan the last few steps so you finish somewhere you can set them down properly.
Using straps every time
Straps let you carry far more for far longer, which is useful occasionally and self-defeating as a habit. If the grip is the thing you want to train, it has to be the thing that fails.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 30 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 30 s at 30 kg | Longer hold 30 → 40 sYou carried the full time at RPE 7, so the carry gains ten seconds. Once it reaches 60 seconds the load goes up instead. |
| 2 | 4 x 40 s at 30 kg | Longer hold 40 → 50 sYou carried the full time at RPE 7, so the carry gains ten seconds. Once it reaches 60 seconds the load goes up instead. |
| 3 | 4 x 50 s at 30 kg | Longer hold 50 → 60 sYou carried the full time at RPE 7, so the carry gains ten seconds. Once it reaches 60 seconds the load goes up instead. |
| 4 | 4 x 60 s at 30 kg | Load up 30 kg → 32.5 kgYou carried the top of the window at RPE 7, so the load goes up 2.5 kg to 32.5 kg and the carry drops back to 30 seconds. Given the choice between heavier and longer, a loaded lift gets heavier. |
| 5 | 4 x 30 s at 32.5 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 30 s at 32.5 kg | Longer hold 30 → 40 sYou carried the full time at RPE 7, so the carry gains ten seconds. Once it reaches 60 seconds the load goes up instead. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Is grip strength really worth training?
It is worth being precise here. In nearly 140000 people across seventeen countries, every five kilogram drop in grip strength came with a 16 per cent higher hazard of death from any cause, and grip predicted death better than blood pressure did1. What that study did not do, and says so itself, is test whether improving your strength lowers the risk. Grip is a good marker of how strong somebody is overall. Treat it as a reason to be strong rather than as a promise about a dynamometer reading.
Farmer's carry or suitcase carry?
The farmer's is the balanced one, and it lets you carry far heavier for grip and upper back work. The one-handed version puts a large sideways load on the low back on purpose: measured, thirty kilograms in one hand produced more spine compression than thirty in each hand2. Reckoner treats them as alternatives, so alternating keeps your history in one line.
How is it progressed?
By time first and then load, because a carry is performed against a clock. The engine adds seconds to the walk and then moves the dumbbells up, the same way it adds weight to a bar.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Leong and colleagues, The Lancet, 2015. Prognostic value of grip strength: findings from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study 139691 people across seventeen countries followed for a median of four years, where every five kilogram drop in grip strength carried a 16 per cent higher hazard of death from any cause and grip predicted death better than systolic blood pressure, and where the authors state plainly that whether improving strength lowers the risk has not been tested
- McGill, Marshall and Andersen, Ergonomics, 2013. Low back loads while walking and carrying: comparing the load carried in one hand or in both hands six participants walking with buckets, where thirty kilograms carried in one hand pushed low back compression above 2800 newtons while the same total split between both hands brought it to 1570, a reduction of 44 per cent, and where doubling the total by carrying thirty kilograms in each hand still produced less spine compression than thirty in one