This is the planning day of my Rucking Challenge as I have literally just decided to add rucking (Walking with a weighted Vest) as my morning walk to see if it will kickstart my weight loss as I seem to be in a stalled pattern again with my training! For the past month I have been 106 kgs and apart from one day when I dropped to 105.8kgs I have not been able to drop any more weight even though I have been consistently walking more than 10000 steps as day all year!
I have read online that Rucking increases calorie burn by about 200 calories an hour over normal walking so I want to see if it will make my morning walks more efficient at losing weight! I plan to wake up every morning and walk with my 10kg weight vest for an hour before work then any further steps that I need I will get without the vest as normal so the only change from my training will be adding the weight to the morning walk and thats it!
At the moment I am walking in the morning, riding the bike at lunch time then getting in any other steps that I need to in the evening so literally the only change to my routine will be adding weight to the morning walk! I also plan to more consistently walk in the morning first thing as I have not been doing that quite as often as I would like BUT I have been walking well over 10000 steps a day all year:
As you can see I have consistently walked 10000 or more steps a day other than a few days when I was sick or injured! In fact this year I have averaged 14532 steps a day so far which is pretty good! Even with that consistent effort I have only lost 0.2 kgs from my weight of 106.7 kgs on 01/10/2024! I am also injured so I can not train for BMX racing as I had planned so I needed a new challenge to keep me motivated to keep my consistent walking going so I have switched my focus to trying to lose 21.7 kgs by the end of the year so that I weigh 85kgs by 31/12/2024 or lose 21.5 kgs in the next 10 months! This means that I need to lose 2.15 kgs a month for the next 10 months to reach my goal!
I think that rucking will really help me reach my goal weight as well as strengthen my body and it is also known to improve balance and posture too so its a win, win, win 🙂
My idea at least for the first couple of months is to ruck every morning from 5:30-6:30 then take the weight vest off and get on with my day! At the moment I do not know how many steps I can do in that time carrying 10kgs so I will have to find out tomorrow morning first thing! To reduce the overload a bit while I get used to the weight I will tray to walk on as flat a terrain as possible then after a month or so I will slowly introduce hills until I am walking as many hills as possible to burn the maximum number of caloris in that hour!
I am really lucky that where I live (Bath) you can walk as far as you want on the flat or make a few turns and you are going up hills as well and the hills vary a lot too so you can add as much resistance from hills as you like depending on the way that you walk. So I should have no problems slowly adding hills to my walks 🙂
I was going to only walk Tue-Saturday but I am thinking that I will make walking my main form of weight loss exercise again so I will change my planned regime to walk every day again. For now I will only aim for 1 hour rucking and then the rest of my 10000 steps unweighted but I may add more rucking in the afternoon/ evening depending on how I enjoy it and how quickly the weight drops off etc. I read someone’s account of dropping from my weight to 79 kgs in 3 months when they started working as a mail carrier and walking with a weighted bag so I am hoping that I can drop weight that quickly but I don’t expect the weight loss to be that fast but if I can get near the 2kgs a month fat loss goal I will be super happy!
Even though I have not lost a lot of weight this year my body composition has defiantly changed and people have been commenting about how much weight I have lost as I am looking much thinner than I was at the start of the year! I have also noticed that my trousers are starting to feel loose and fall down so I think my body composition has been changing even if my weight has not dropped significantly! My shoulders, arms and legs and face and neck are all more defined and thinner now! Also the lack of weight loss has not been a big deal as I am way fitter than I was before I started my walking journey in November last year and my asthma and sleep are so much better for it too 🙂
All I need now is to start to get rid of my stomach and love handles and I will be happy 🙂 Hopefully Rucking is the missing ingredient to get the weight off and get my body percentage down to a healthy level by the end of the year!
At the moment my BMI is really unhealthy and I am classed as Obese:
I know that BMI isn’t the most accurate measurement of health or body composition as it doesn’t take into account muscle mass and is designed for the average person not trained athletes so I may not be Obese compared to the average obese person but I am definitely really over weight and I desperately need to lose fat urgently to get to a more healthy level and be much lighter as well 🙂
When I was at university I was just over 10% body fat and weighed 70kgs so I think that my 85kg goal will be a healthy weight/ body fat percentage to start racing at a high level again next season when my current plethora of injuries have healed!
Also losing a bunch of weight will also significantly positively affect my power to weight ratio so should result in me being a bunch faster our of the gate 🙂
Tomorrow morning I plan to get up at 5am, do a weigh-in to get my starting weight then get showered and go for my first Ruck to see how it goes and assess if I need to lower the weight a bit or not. And then from there onwards its just be consistent until I start seeing results 🙂