A few years ago, a friend of mine took me up on a challenge and raced a Spartan obstacle race wearing a weighted vest. It’s not an exaggeration to say that doing so made an already intense race a million times harder. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but you get my point.
After the race, he said that he “literally felt like he was dragging an entire extra body around the racecourse.” After looking at the data from his wrist-worn activity tracker during a debriefing later that day, we could see that his heart rate shot up, his lungs and muscles were burning, and his body temperature went through the roof. The next day he was so sore and fatigued that his walking gait reminded me of a zombie in an old horror film.
Weighted vests are a potent tool for enhancing the difficulty of an aerobic workout, building extra strength and muscle, and turning up the intensity of bodyweight exercise.
While I certainly don’t think you need to do an obstacle race in a weighted vest, this piece of fitness gear can come in quite handy as a potent tool for enhancing the difficulty of an aerobic workout, building extra strength and muscle, and turning up the intensity of bodyweight exercise.
What is a weighted vest?
A weighted vest is simply a vest that is either made from a heavy material or equipped with small pockets that can be filled with tiny sandbags, custom-sized steel bars, or a variety of other weighted objects. The general purpose of a weighted vest is to add extra weight for bodyweight exercises, walking, distance running, or speed, agility and quickness drills.
When it comes to performance, research has shown that using this type of extra load during sprinting or speedwork requires your lower-body muscles to generate more force against the ground. This can lead to improvements in strength, power, and acceleration during running, as well as increased strength and efficiency during speed, power, and agility drills.
Simply doing your daily activities with a bit of extra weight can significantly increase the metabolic cost (or how much fuel you use).
But even if you’re not a professional athlete, another study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research has shown that you can still benefit from using a weighted vest. In fact, simply doing your daily activities with a bit of extra weight can significantly increase the metabolic cost (or how much fuel you use). It can also increase the intensity of an...
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