Hip pain/injury from rucking

[North]

Last season I prepped for my first mountain hunt (I’m in Wisconsin) by adding regular rucking sessions to my normal workouts (which consist of free weight training and treadmill). I hiked the steepest hills I could find with 60ish lbs in either a weight vest or pack.

About 6 weeks before season my hips totally locked up, very limited range of motion. Not really painful when not active but 0 flexibility and painful when exercising. I was forced to lay off all hiking and lower body work to relieve the tightness and although I did fine in the mountains the pain/tightness lasted for months afterwards.

This season I added a bunch of preventative hip work with bands and focused on unweighted hiking and treadmill for my cardio. 0 hip issues, but once I started hunting I had a lot of soreness in the weird oddball leg/calf muscles that don’t really get worked unless you’re actually climbing up mountains with weight on your back due to my lack of training with weight on my back.

I picked up a new Stone Glacier frame while I was in Montana, so when I got back home I went out to see if maybe this new frame would relieve the hip issues. I did one very mild and flat hike with only 50 pounds and low and behold, the familiar tightness returned in one of my hips. After only a mile or so! This frustrates me to no end because this is AFTER I did an entire summer worth of hip prehab work and just spent 2 weeks hunting hard in the mountains with 0 hip issues.

Obviously, the easy answer is “don’t do any heavy rucking” but outside of the hip issues I have 0 problems with the cardio or endurance components of the rucking workouts. I’m in pretty good shape. I have fractures in both my shins so I can’t do much distance running, so adding resistance on my hikes works better for me as far as cardio work goes.

Has anyone experienced this, and if so, is this something that could be addressed through different pack choice or adjustment, or am I just a total failure at life with a garbage body?

 

[307]

I doubt any pack or change in fit will solve your issue in the hips. The pack frame is designed to spare the spine, the hips are still in the kinetic chain "line of fire" when pack weight goes up.

There may be a joint limitation you're going to have to live with, but just hunted hard in the mountains for 2 weeks and didn't have any troubles, it doesn't sound all that limiting.

Push/pull a sled to train the lower leg if that's a priority for you but it sounds like the uneven terrain was more of a limiting factor. Maybe add some BAPS board work for ankle stability to condition the "other" lower leg muscles.

 

[North]

I doubt any pack or change in fit will solve your issue in the hips. The pack frame is designed to spare the spine, the hips are still in the kinetic chain "line of fire" when pack weight goes up.

There may be a joint limitation you're going to have to live with, but just hunted hard in the mountains for 2 weeks and didn't have any troubles, it doesn't sound all that limiting.

Push/pull a sled to train the lower leg if that's a priority for you but it sounds like the uneven terrain was more of a limiting factor. Maybe add some BAPS board work for ankle stability to condition the "other" lower leg muscles.

thanks for the reply. I just picked up a harness and hardware to rig a tire to pull and I’m going to try to gradually increase the weight on my hikes and see at one point the hip pain starts.

 

[TBHasler]

Some don't like the thought of seeing a chiropractor, but there is a pretty strong case to be made that many physically active folks can benefit significantly from this therapy. When I hit 48 i started going to deal with hip joint pain. I never "locked up" but I was in pain with anything more than #35 on workouts. Stretching and weight training to strengthen the area helped some, but I didn't become PAIN free until I got adjusted to re-align what I had going on. I went 2X a week for 4 weeks, 1X week for 4 weeks, then (and now) 1X month or as needed. I was a skeptic for years, but if you push your body, especially as we age, there are things that get out of whack that prohibit us from functioning efficiently or sometimes, function at all. Just an added thought in addition to what you're doing - which sounds completely logical. Best of luck

 

[Poser]

From my experience, the source of pain is seldom the actual problem. I suspect this may be an IT band issue or possibly a problem or weakness with your spinal erectors as your hips themselves include the largest and most powerful muscles in the body, but you could possibly have a structural problem such as severe pelvis tilt. Can you perform full ROM squats (with weight) and deadlifts without the same hip pain? If so, I highly doubt that the issue lies within the hips themselves.

When you start the process of elimination, start with the simplest solutions first. PTs and chiropractors tend to think in isolation vs. how the body actually performs functions in a series of compound movements. I would first try and address this by Strengthing the entire body and see what a considerably stronger posterior chain does for this issue.

 

[snowplow]

This sounds stupid but paying attention to how your walking can make a big difference. I was a bit toed out. You want to he outside edge of your foot roughly straight ahead. Most and l have the inside pointing straight. YouTube biomechanics of walking. Solved my hip knee and ankle pain on my left side.

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[North]

This sounds stupid but paying attention to how your walking can make a big difference. I was a bit toed out. You want to he outside edge of your foot roughly straight ahead. Most and l have the inside pointing straight. YouTube biomechanics of walking. Solved my hip knee and ankle pain on my left side.

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That doesn’t sound stupid at all. I also have had painful stress fractures in my shins for many years which get worse from running, so I wouldn’t doubt I need to relearn how to walk and run correctly. Thanks for all the suggestions!

 

[North]

To follow up, I discovered I have a pretty bad duck walk. Feel kind of stupid for never noticing. May be responsible for the right hips and shin fractures. Sounds like it usually comes from either the hips or shins, and mine is coming from the hips. The cure is supposed to be rolling out the piriformis and learning to walk correctly

 

[Deadfall]

Stretch. Religiously. Dont see much mention of the hip flexor. It controls most lower body stuff. Stretch religiously!

 

[Wedes]

From my experience, the source of pain is seldom the actual problem. I suspect this may be an IT band issue or possibly a problem or weakness with your spinal erectors as your hips themselves include the largest and most powerful muscles in the body, but you could possibly have a structural problem such as severe pelvis tilt. Can you perform full ROM squats (with weight) and deadlifts without the same hip pain? If so, I highly doubt that the issue lies within the hips themselves.

When you start the process of elimination, start with the simplest solutions first. PTs and chiropractors tend to think in isolation vs. how the body actually performs functions in a series of compound movements. I would first try and address this by Strengthing the entire body and see what a considerably stronger posterior chain does for this issue.

This.

My wife is a doctor of physical therapy and this is generally her biggest struggle with her patients. “But it’s my lower back/knee/insert whatever actually hurts” that is the result of something else


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[*zap*]

You want your feet to land flat or closer to the front of your foot not landing on your heels. Slightly bent knee (soft knee), engaged hips and a shorter stride. Chest up and shoulders back. Proper walking with a ruck is covered in this video @15:45.

 

[*zap*]

Thank you for this video! This really helped minimize my hip pain while hiking. This forum has really helped me. I appreciate it big time.

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Your welcome, good form is essential in exercise imo, even if your just walking.

 

[*zap*]

If your having issues with heel strike it will be apparent if you look at your footwear soles. To help transition to a better foot strike when walking/rucking you can use a treadmill with some elevation, that will help minimize the issue.

 

[V2Pnutrition]

That video @*zap* posted is gold. In fact, the entire Guide on rucking by Mike Prevost is gold and available online free of charge.

 

[*zap*]

Mike Prevost: Ruck Training Programs - PART 1 - On Target Publications

Interested in the potential offered by ruck training? Because of its history as a means of military conveyance, there’s plenty of information out there on rucking. Mike Prevost sorts through it with you to help get you started.

www.otpbooks.com

Mike Prevost: Ruck Training Programs - PART 2 - On Target Publications

Interested in the potential offered by ruck training? In Part One, Mike Prevost covered the research. Here he puts it all together in two programs to get you rucking.

www.otpbooks.com

 

[qwerksc]

Stretch and Hacky sack.

 

[Riplip]

Lots of good info from posts above.

Good article below about pack training. I happen to agree that many people use too heavy of weight when training and end up placing unnecessary wear and tear on their joints trying to mimic mountain hunting. While it may work well for some people, many will have issues consistently rucking with heavy loads. Sounds like you are doing a lot of cross training and other work in addition, which is obviously beneficial.

- Journal of Mountain Hunting

Whether you’re cruising ridges for high-country whitetails, or humping mountains for elk, some smart packing prep will have you in great condition to handle whatever situation the hunt throws at ...

journalofmountainhunting.com

 

[Hoodie]

For what it's worth, I think rucking is overrated for getting better at rucking.

The thing that cut my 12 mile ruck time down the most back when I was paid to carry heavy things long distances was learning how to deadlift correctly, getting my deadlift numbers up, and doing lower impact cardio to build/maintain an aerobic base. If you look at studies that correlate rucking performance with other metrics, you'll see that it's correlated much more with strength than it is with running performance. This totally matches my personal experience.

Rucking is a minimum effective dose sort of deal. Performance under a pack can be maintained on one session every two weeks.

I don't even do any serious rucking for training anymore and I didn't have any trouble packing my elk this year. Get your hips and back strong and healthy with correctly performed basic barbell lifts, stay in good cardiovascular condition, and let the mountain beat you up. Don't try to beat it to the punch.

I had some pretty gnarly recurrent hip flexor tendonitis when I was in the military from overdoing the rucking. I put too much stock in the SAID principle, and figured if I wanted to ruck faster, I needed to ruck more. Learning how to squat and deadlift correctly was a God-send. Check out Starting Strength. Couldn't recommend that book enough.

 

[*zap*]

I think that long duration & frequent steady state cardio maintaining a low heart rate is one of the best things you can do for handling the woods and fields well. I also believe it is very overlooked by lots of people. If you can drop your average heart rate for a certain thing 10-20 beats a minute your going to be way ahead of the game. All it takes is dedicating time on a daily basis for a year and you will be astounded by how trainable it is. I would think that once you get the results you can drop away from daily to some less frequent very long duration sessions. This lower heart rate training does not debilitate you very much at all as you adapt to the duration and frequency. I also believe that training this low gear system will also increase you high gear system, I have noticed a drop in peak heart rates when lifting since I started doing this type of training, I started late March and now doing 1 hr daily or longer if I hike. Results have been awesome. Also doing 3 1hr strength sessions a week and plan to increase that over time, I had to drop the # of hours of strength when I went to daily 1 hr minimum aerobic capacity. As I acclimate I will gradually go back to 5 hrs a week strength.

After that posterior chain strength gained by 100% correct form for hip hinge/squat and other human movement pattern exercises is very important. Both are necessary and will also help you age much more gracefully.

Heavier weighted carries for core also help a great deal.

 

[Dhamar]

Great information. I plan on perfecting the basic lifts this year. I bought into the belief as I aged that squats and deadlift would lead to injury, but I’m learning they can be good for prevention of you perform them well and develop a strong base.