Live data from Hacker News

How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

bbc.com

91–100 of 112 posts

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#91

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.…

Altitude can be a huge limiting factor. I biked from Texas to Oregon, and the first days in the Rockies were brutal. It seemed I could barely travel 50 feet up hill without taking a break. I even considered turning around because it just felt impossible.

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#92
post #45
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth per se has nothing to do with longevity, as a minute's thought will make plain. What wealth does do is enable certain things that help with longevity, such as better medical care. If you're using wealth as a measure, you need to realize that it's only a proxy, and you'll get better data by looking at the actual behaviors that it's a proxy for.

> such as better medical care Better food, comes first

Thing is, better food is available to the poor as well, you just have to be willing to put in the work for it. Buy vegetables and make salads instead of spending the same amount of money at McDonald's, for example. The price of fresh vegetables at Walmart has never been out of reach even for someone working 40 hours for minimum wage. Housing might be ridiculously expensive, and medical care if you don't have insurance? Good luck. But basic vegetables? Rice and beans? (Which make for a complete set of amino acids, BTW: there's a reason rice and beans is such a popular dish in Central America). Those have stayed affordable even when the price of other things has gone up.

Now, I'll grant that there are plenty of poor people who are drinking soda and eating junk food. Not going to deny that. But I have always been able to go to Walmart and buy lettuce and tomatoes for my salads, and I've never seen the price of those basics skyrocket like the price of eggs (at one point) or meat have. So the poor people who are drinking soda instead of water, and eating chips instead of salads? They're choosing those foods, not being forced into them by poverty.

There are plenty of areas where rich people have a big advantage over poor people in terms of access to things that provide longevity. But food, at least in America (the only country whose food prices I'm familiar enough with to talk intelligently about), just isn't one of them.

Now, you could argue that poor people didn't grow up with parents who taught them how to cook healthy food on a tight budget. Yes, that's true for many (not all) of the poor (again, at least in America, I don't know enough about other countries here). But there, it's not being poor that's keeping them from eating healthy, it's not being taught. Money isn't the limiting factor there.

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a huge difference having a loaded barbell which can move in every dimension on your shoulders versus a calf raise machine which is fixed in place and cannot move around! I’ve squatted barbells since roughly 2006 and the feeling of having more than 100kg on your shoulders is very intense, even if you’ve trained up to it. It feels like it’s crushing your whole body and even breathing is hard. The idea that an untr…

The OP didn't say they could move around... they said "unrack and stand there".

They wouldn't be able to unrack and stand there either. Just standing with a very heavy barbell is extremely difficult (assuming an untrained person).

Seriously, go and try it, load up 100KG or roughly 225lbs on a barbell and just stand there with it. If you're already a big/heavy/trained guy, put 180KG or 400lbs.

It will probably be quite a surprising experience for you.

And I will say, that even when I was training for heavy squatting, standing there with a very heavy barbell on your back isn't fun at all, you have to have a very tight core, tensed muscles, breathing is much harder. i.e. just standing there is hard work and you want to get your 5 squats done asap. Also, it just plain hurts your back as the metal bar on your spine is painful!

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#94
post #6

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),…

Although it has been a couple decades since I've worked on construction sites, the underlying factor is that of the culture - this was northern Alberta - you had to be 'tough' and that meant eating steak, drinking hard and ignoring basic safety protocols like dust protection masks, eye guards, etc. I was in my early 20's and worked with guys only a few years older than me that were already bordering on obese. The phy…

They weren’t obese from the steak. It’s the beer and simple carbs.

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#95
post #6

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),…

Look at it this way. Construction workers aren't strength training they are wearing themselves out via hard work that requires strength. Not the same thing.

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#96
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 wi…

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%+?].

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#98

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.…

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 an…

I was hiking in Nepal a couple years ago. I regularly saw porters carrying 85kg (187 lbs) of wood on there backs up the mountain trails (pic I took: https://imgur.com/a/ahJhoi9). I asked my Nepali guide how much he can carry, and he said "I can carry you!" I'm 195cm (6'5"), and weighed about 120kg (264 lbs) at the time, and this guy was maybe half my size. I told him to prove it, so he asked me to get on his back, which I did, and then he picked me up and started running. Crazy strong.

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#99
post #6

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),…

I worked construction during the summers in college. There's quite a bit of sedentary work on a job site. In my experience, the guys who worked on their feet and did hours of physical labor were in pretty good shape. They burned a lot of calories and consumed a lot of calories: fast food, sweet tea, gatorade, beer at night. The more senior folks often ran heavy equipment like track hoes and bulldozers. Those guys wer…

It depends - construction workers in the US especially look like shit, given the crap that they eat - fast food, sodas and then beers after the job.

Go look at construction workers elsewhere, especially Asia, they're ripped. Because the food they eat is most likely home cooked and not the fast food garbage we get here. Even the food at kiosks is pretty good, since it's freshly cooked.

Re: How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)

#100
post #43
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

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.
Post reply on HN