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Ruck Fit: Build Strength and Endurance by Walking with Weight
Add weight to your pack and hit the gym or trail to help build strength, lose weight, and boost your resilience.
Carrying weight over distance can benefit almost everyone, at almost every fitness level. A first–of–its–kind guide, Ruck Fit helps explain how to harness the power of rucking—the hot, new health trend—and highlights the physical benefits, such as improved strength, bone density, and body composition, as well as the psychological perks, that can follow. It helps readers understand how to get started, with basic guidelines for beginners, answers to common questions, safety tips, and more advanced strategies to help maximize fitness goals. It surveys gear and gadgets, including packs, plates, footwear, and more, and offers sample training plans designed to put readers on the road to better mobility, greater aerobic fitness, strength, and even competitive challenges. Examples of nutrition protocols help optimize performance with practical meal–planning guidance. The book also helps with goal setting, tracking progress, and other tips for improving your fitness—one step at a time.
Carrying weight over distance can benefit almost everyone, at almost every fitness level. A first–of–its–kind guide, Ruck Fit helps explain how to harness the power of rucking—the hot, new health trend—and highlights the physical benefits, such as improved strength, bone density, and body composition, as well as the psychological perks, that can follow. It helps readers understand how to get started, with basic guidelines for beginners, answers to common questions, safety tips, and more advanced strategies to help maximize fitness goals. It surveys gear and gadgets, including packs, plates, footwear, and more, and offers sample training plans designed to put readers on the road to better mobility, greater aerobic fitness, strength, and even competitive challenges. Examples of nutrition protocols help optimize performance with practical meal–planning guidance. The book also helps with goal setting, tracking progress, and other tips for improving your fitness—one step at a time.
216 pages, Paperback
Published January 6, 2026
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1793 people want to read
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December 28, 2025This book is for my sons who have a dream of hiking the Appalachian trail together. First Tommy then Donald.
December 11, 2025
Full stop. This is one of the books I wish I had when I started my fitness journey and rucking.
It includes everything you would need to know to start rucking, and understand the relationship between goal-setting for mobility fitness and nutrition. It made my heart sing to read "You can't out-ruck a bad diet" in it, for example. To put my feedback into perspective, I started doing warrior workouts about 2 years ago (put together by swam-around-the-isle-of-Britain-athlete Ross Edgley), running 5ks, and training for/playing hockey so much I wore out a brand new pair of wheels for my rollerblades in about 3.5 months. Then this Spring I biked 40km, and in the fall I ran 10km every day for 30 days in a row, finishing on a 12km run. It took a lot of figuring out how to make nutrition, pacing, specific training plans, and motivation to make it all work. Granted, my goals are a little weird (I'm considering a 132km run next summer for example), but I share all of this to say that the things I looked up disparately over several years or learned by a lot of trial and error, are basically all in this handy, and probably unassuming fitness book. Start somewhere en route to your goals, but make sure that when you do, you have expertise like Girgen's alongside you.
I am a big fan of low cost entry points to fitness that allow people to start wherever they are. It's one of the strengths of Girgen's book, particularly where, despite demonstrating that you can use fancier rucking gear, all you really need to start to get a feel for the method is a backpack and some books, or even cans of beans. I went to a military surplus store and got a rucksack, a thrift store for a cutting board, and duct taped a patio paver to it to get started (something I had to look up on YouTube, and read a few articles about the mechanics of, while also taking pictures of me with a ruck to understand the mechanics of load on my posture to ensure I was doing it effectively). I wondered whether it would be effective, but as it turns out, it's exactly what Girgen recommends to get started. Reading this book would've saved me a bit of impostor syndrome and self-deprecation on the road to confidence. She also features an entire workout routine with lower impact exercises (i.e.: great for everyone) that can be turned up a notch or two, based around the ruck as the weight being lifted. The workouts and stretches featured are some of what I was doing before reading this book, but that took me a lot of research to understand as being key to developing, strengthening and tending to the muscles that are central to my ability to run, play hockey, hike, and bike without pain. I'm hoping to integrate the ones I didn't have in my fitness toolkit before! Even if high intensity sports aren't part of your fitness "why", Girgen's take on the mental health benefits are worth the read, too. Save yourself the hours poring over way too many books- just read Ruck Fit!
Girgen's expertise in both nutrition and fitness inform her work in the best way, and lends further credibility beyond "trust me, I've done this before and here's how". Another really great part about this book is it focuses on fitness as mobility, not weight loss. Sure, weight loss can happen as a byproduct, but it doesn't showcase a "body beautiful" approach as a goal or motivator. It's easy to look at the advocates of rucking, like the former Navy Seals and Green Berets, and deem it out of reach. Girgen ensures readers know that this is a sport and fitness method that is for anyone. Rucking was popularized by the military but, if we look at the loads that parents often carry (especially new parents carrying toddlers in a different kind of ruck or even pregnant people), it's easy to see that caregiving and parenting are the real badass origin story of rucks and rucking. Girgen doesn't say it in so many words, but certainly shows that it's accessible to all. There are no recipes in the book, but it does review nutrition principles like macronutrients and hydration that give readers a flexibility in their own approach to diet.
After about 2 years of figuring out and slogging through some of these things on my own, I recommend this book as a huge time saver. It features principles, best practices, and guidance that turn it into a true fitness companion. Thank you to the publisher on NetGalley for the advance reader copy to review.
It includes everything you would need to know to start rucking, and understand the relationship between goal-setting for mobility fitness and nutrition. It made my heart sing to read "You can't out-ruck a bad diet" in it, for example. To put my feedback into perspective, I started doing warrior workouts about 2 years ago (put together by swam-around-the-isle-of-Britain-athlete Ross Edgley), running 5ks, and training for/playing hockey so much I wore out a brand new pair of wheels for my rollerblades in about 3.5 months. Then this Spring I biked 40km, and in the fall I ran 10km every day for 30 days in a row, finishing on a 12km run. It took a lot of figuring out how to make nutrition, pacing, specific training plans, and motivation to make it all work. Granted, my goals are a little weird (I'm considering a 132km run next summer for example), but I share all of this to say that the things I looked up disparately over several years or learned by a lot of trial and error, are basically all in this handy, and probably unassuming fitness book. Start somewhere en route to your goals, but make sure that when you do, you have expertise like Girgen's alongside you.
I am a big fan of low cost entry points to fitness that allow people to start wherever they are. It's one of the strengths of Girgen's book, particularly where, despite demonstrating that you can use fancier rucking gear, all you really need to start to get a feel for the method is a backpack and some books, or even cans of beans. I went to a military surplus store and got a rucksack, a thrift store for a cutting board, and duct taped a patio paver to it to get started (something I had to look up on YouTube, and read a few articles about the mechanics of, while also taking pictures of me with a ruck to understand the mechanics of load on my posture to ensure I was doing it effectively). I wondered whether it would be effective, but as it turns out, it's exactly what Girgen recommends to get started. Reading this book would've saved me a bit of impostor syndrome and self-deprecation on the road to confidence. She also features an entire workout routine with lower impact exercises (i.e.: great for everyone) that can be turned up a notch or two, based around the ruck as the weight being lifted. The workouts and stretches featured are some of what I was doing before reading this book, but that took me a lot of research to understand as being key to developing, strengthening and tending to the muscles that are central to my ability to run, play hockey, hike, and bike without pain. I'm hoping to integrate the ones I didn't have in my fitness toolkit before! Even if high intensity sports aren't part of your fitness "why", Girgen's take on the mental health benefits are worth the read, too. Save yourself the hours poring over way too many books- just read Ruck Fit!
Girgen's expertise in both nutrition and fitness inform her work in the best way, and lends further credibility beyond "trust me, I've done this before and here's how". Another really great part about this book is it focuses on fitness as mobility, not weight loss. Sure, weight loss can happen as a byproduct, but it doesn't showcase a "body beautiful" approach as a goal or motivator. It's easy to look at the advocates of rucking, like the former Navy Seals and Green Berets, and deem it out of reach. Girgen ensures readers know that this is a sport and fitness method that is for anyone. Rucking was popularized by the military but, if we look at the loads that parents often carry (especially new parents carrying toddlers in a different kind of ruck or even pregnant people), it's easy to see that caregiving and parenting are the real badass origin story of rucks and rucking. Girgen doesn't say it in so many words, but certainly shows that it's accessible to all. There are no recipes in the book, but it does review nutrition principles like macronutrients and hydration that give readers a flexibility in their own approach to diet.
After about 2 years of figuring out and slogging through some of these things on my own, I recommend this book as a huge time saver. It features principles, best practices, and guidance that turn it into a true fitness companion. Thank you to the publisher on NetGalley for the advance reader copy to review.
March 21, 2026
Blog post not a book
Most everything in this book is obvious and 80% is common knowledge about health, diet, and exercise you’ve read 1,000 times.
Most everything in this book is obvious and 80% is common knowledge about health, diet, and exercise you’ve read 1,000 times.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews