How To Do the Farmer's Carry

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The farmer's carry is picking up something heavy in each hand and walking. That is the entire exercise, and it is the closest thing in a gym to a task a human being might actually have to do.

It trains grip, trunk, shoulders, and the ability to keep an upright posture under load, all at once, with almost no technical barrier to entry.

What the research below adds is precision about two things: why carrying evenly matters, and what the grip demand is actually worth.

Symmetric versus one-sided, measured

This is the study that separates a farmer's carry from a suitcase carry.

Thirty male participants aged 23 to 28 performed walking tests under four load conditions: symmetric and asymmetric carriage, each at 10 percent and 20 percent of body weight. Fifteen of the participants had chronic low back pain and fifteen did not.

Bilateral surface electromyography measured activation from seven trunk muscles, including rectus abdominis, both obliques, latissimus dorsi, lumbar erector spinae and multifidus, plus the thoracolumbar fascia region, all normalised to maximum voluntary isometric contractions. Force plates recorded vertical ground reaction forces synchronised to heel strike, and estimated lumbar spine compression was calculated. A repeated-measures analysis of variance with Bonferroni corrections analysed load configuration and magnitude.

Asymmetric loading at 20 percent of body weight caused significantly higher peak vertical ground reaction forces compared with symmetric loading.

So at a genuinely heavy load, carrying it on one side put more force through the ground per step than carrying the same relative load split between two hands.

That is the mechanical case for two-handed carries as your default. Suitcase carries have their own place as a deliberate anti-lateral-flexion challenge, but they are a different exercise with a different cost, not a convenience substitute.

Thirty men aged 23 to 28, half of them with chronic low back pain, walking overground rather than performing loaded carries as training. This is biomechanics under load, not a training study, and nothing here is guidance for anybody managing back pain, which is a matter for a qualified professional.

The setup

Pick your implement. Dedicated farmer's handles are best because the load hangs below your hand. Dumbbells and kettlebells work. Trap bar works and lets you go heaviest.

Deadlift the weight up properly. Hips back, chest up, neutral spine. Most people who get hurt on carries get hurt picking the weight up or putting it down, not walking.

Stand tall once you have it. Chest up, shoulders back and down, ribs stacked over your pelvis. The load will try to pull you into a slouch and resisting that is a large part of the exercise.

Brace your midsection as if you were about to be pushed sideways, and hold that brace.

Same weight in each hand. Even a small difference becomes an asymmetric carry, which the section above shows is not the same exercise.

Standard coaching practice rather than findings from the sources cited here.

The walk

Take controlled, moderate steps. This is not a race and it is not a shuffle.

Keep your eyes forward and your head neutral. Looking down pulls your whole upper body into flexion.

Do not let the weights swing. If they are pendulum-ing off your legs, you are walking too fast or the load is controlling you.

Breathe. People hold their breath for the entire walk and then have to stop for that reason rather than because anything gave out.

Set the weight down deliberately at the end, with the same hip hinge you used to pick it up. Dropping heavy implements is how equipment and feet get damaged.

For programming, distance or time both work. Something in the range of 20 to 40 metres, or 30 to 60 seconds, for three to five sets, is a sensible starting structure.

Also standard coaching practice, included because a guide that skipped it would be useless.

The carry technique question, tested under fatigue

There is a study that looked at how carrying technique interacts with load when people are already tired.

One hundred and twenty-six professional healthy male firefighters performed 30-metre rescue sprints under simulated fatigue, in a three-by-three design combining three external load magnitudes, 10, 20 and 30 kilograms, with three carrying techniques: shoulder carry, bosom carry and hand carry.

The outcome was margin of stability, a measure of how close somebody is to losing balance, assessed separately in the side-to-side and front-to-back directions.

External load magnitude had no significant effect on the side-to-side margin of stability.

But the front-to-back margin of stability was significantly lower under the 10 kilogram tasks compared with the 20 and 30 kilogram loads.

Read that again, because it is counterintuitive. The lightest load produced the smallest front-to-back stability margin, not the heaviest.

The plausible reading is that heavier loads make people move more deliberately, while a light load lets them move fast and loose. That interpretation is mine and the study does not state it.

The practical carry-over: do not assume a lighter carry is automatically a safer one. Attention and control matter as much as the number on the handle.

One hundred and twenty-six firefighters performing loaded sprints under fatigue, which is a far more aggressive task than a gym carry, and the three techniques tested were not the two-handed farmer's carry. This article reports the stability findings above rather than the study's technique recommendations.

What the grip work is worth

The farmer's carry is usually limited by your hands, and grip training has been reviewed properly.

A systematic review and meta-analysis searched PubMed, Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, Web of Science and Cochrane CENTRAL up to July 2025 for randomised controlled trials of hand-focused strength and proprioceptive training in healthy adults aged 18 and over, excluding clinical populations, single-session interventions and studies without pre-post data. Risk of bias was assessed with the Cochrane RoB 2 tool, and random-effects meta-analyses pooled change scores using Hedges' g.

Twenty-two randomised controlled trials met inclusion, totalling 1,017 participants aged 19 to 78, with outcomes covering grip strength, pinch strength, manual dexterity, maximum voluntary contraction, joint position sense and force sense.

The review reports that strength and proprioceptive training produced improvements across those outcomes.

Twenty-two randomised trials and over a thousand participants is a solid evidence base by the standards of most things in this article series.

What that means for the carry: your grip is trainable, and if it is the thing that ends your sets before your legs or trunk do, that is a fixable limitation rather than a permanent ceiling.

That review covered hand-focused training protocols rather than loaded carries, so it establishes that grip responds to training, not that carries are the best way to train it. This article does not report its pooled effect sizes.

Why any of this is worth your time

The carry is the rare exercise with no technique to learn and nowhere to hide. You either hold the weight and walk upright or you do not.

What the evidence supports: symmetry matters, since asymmetric loading at 20 percent of body weight produced significantly higher peak ground reaction forces than symmetric loading at the same relative load. Lighter is not automatically more controlled, since the lightest load in the firefighter study produced the smallest front-to-back stability margin. And grip is trainable, backed by 22 randomised trials in over a thousand people.

What that leaves you: equal weight in both hands, deadlift it up properly, stand tall, brace, walk deliberately, breathe, and set it down with the same care you picked it up.

This is a training article, not medical advice. Back pain under load is a matter for a qualified professional, not something to walk off.