I am by no means strong and never was. When I was married I weighed 120 lbs. Some time during the first two years of our marriage (because we were still living in Boston) both my wife and I gave blood one day. Later that afternoon at the grocery store she fainted and I carried her to the car. She was within ten pounds of my weight. There may have been an adrenaline rush, I’m not sure there wasn’t really any crisis
This was a cradle carry.
There was no direct link from the German site to the English one, presumably because the German wiki has one page for the person Rautek and one for the grip, while the English wiki combines both.
Aruqvans link has a good picture description (though the text is in German). Basically, you put the unconscious person’s back onto your upper leg, put one of his arms across his chest, grip through the armpits (in a monkey grip), and slowly walk backwards.
Two interesting things that the wikipedia articles mention is that both methods have disadvantages:
The fireman’s carry is no longer used by firemen themselves, because heat and smoke are worse higher up and could thus damage the injured person; and it requires some effort to get the person up in the first place (the description in the english wiki link sounds to me as if would work only with injured, not with unconscious person, since it talks about “locking the knees” and so on - would that work with an unconscious person who is heavier with all muscles relaxed?) And there’s an upper limit to how much more weight than yourself you can carry that way.
The Rautek grip (and since it’s named after its inventor, there is probably not a much better translation other than rescue grip, which is ambigous though), has the potential of causing broken bones in elderly people with osteoporis (shoulders , arms etc.), however, because the upper leg muscles are the strongest muscles, you can drag persons heavier than yourself that way.
The other disadvantage of Rautek is that it’s slow because you’re walking backwards while dragging so for getting outside a burning building or a battle, the firemen’s grip is probably better - and soldiers and firemen are fitter and stronger than the average office worker. To get an accident victim away from a chemical spill or a burning car, the Rautek grip would work, though.
Of course, the basic rule for all grips is that you don’t move an injured person unless you have to, obviously, because of serious danger, in which case, a couple of broken bones are preferable to death. (Like CPR can easily lead to broken ribs, which are still preferable to being dead).
Oh, my friend said that when he was working at the water rescue of the Red Cross (Wasserwacht), they didn’t learn Rautek, because the typical swimming victim would be barefoot and you would tear his heels; instead, they learned the carry-over-one-shoulder method. But getting somebody out of a lake onto your shoulder is easier than picking up a person lying on the office floor, as Nava said.
But that’s rather the whole point, isn’t it? It’s far easier to carry a big weight of over 100 pounds over your shoulders, back, hips or upper legs than on your arms only, thats why it’s so stupid and looks unreal when movie heroes do this.
I think it was Princess Bride where the trivia in IMDB mentioned that although Andre the Giant was strong, his back was bad (from all the weight) so he couldn’t catch the princess during the last scene, they had to use wires to gently lower her.
Well Andre was near death at that point as result of the effects of acromegaly. When he was younger he could have caught the princess in his hand.
Aside from that, the Wiki article shows the two shoulder type of carry, which is an improvement over the one shoulder version described in the OP. Both would be better than the cradle method. I carried someone who blacked out from diabetic shock that way once, and it is very tiring on the arms. Luckily in the movies, stunt doubles usually do that anyway. Nobody wants to see the real life version which might involve a lot of grunting and staggering, and a lower rate of travel. Well that’s the reason there. You can’t outrun an explosion when carrying someone in a real fireman’s carry. You have to use the cradle or one shoulder method to run faster than the speed of sound.
More for the interesting discussion than because it’s relevant, another way they teach us to move an injured person out of harm’s way in the military is to get them on their back, grab them by the back of their vest, and drag them off one-handed, like some sort of human sled.
Of course, if the person isn’t wearing some kind of vest or load-bearing equipment, I’m not sure if dragging them by the shirt collar would work as well. Might depend on the kind of shirt he’s wearing as to whether you’d just end up scraping his back to three kinds of hell and tearing the collar of his shirt off.
Best bet? Find someone else nearby, have the stronger one get the shoulders, the weaker one the legs, and two-man carry him that way (if the victim is conscious and cooperating, the two of you can criss-cross your wrists to make a seat for them to sit in while they steady themselves on your shoulders too. Really, everything gets a lot easier if the injured person is helping, and if there’s another guy to help. Of course, you and your wife or whomever might not keep a guy around just in case there’s heavy lifting to be done, I know I don’t.)
I’m partial to the Estonian carry, although that may require a conscious participant. Note that both of the carrier’s arms are free.
I don’t think hanging head down holding onto with your feet is a good way to transport injured people…
Yes, for mountaineering/ hiking, we were told to use piggy-back (one person) and linked-hands (two carriers), but there, the assumption was that the person was injured, concious, not serious, not capable of walking. If somebody has a heart attack or internal injury in the streets of a city where an ambulance will arrive in 10 min., then you have a chance; out in the mountains where it takes 3 hrs. plus to get to a phone*to get help, not much chance.
So for all the special professions - fire fighters, water rescue, soldiers, engineers in factories - you expect a typical sort of accident and equipment (army vest) and apply your carry type accordingly.
My first aid courses, in contrast, were aimed at the general population for all kinds of accidents: at home falling down, heart attack in the office, sun stroke in the summer, and traffic accidents (since the course is required before applying for a drivers license). So an all-purpose grip for unconscious people is taught instead of a more specialised one.
- This was before cell phones everywhere; and even when most people carried phones, reception in the mountains was very bad. I think it was the EU that put some special antennas there to increase coverage.
LOL.
Do we really want to be saving everyone?
What say we help Mr. Darwin a bit, and only rescue those up to, say, 118 or so?
If we perservere, we’ll eventually select out the Lane Bryant crowd, and it’ll just be skinny babes as far as the eye can see!
It’s win-win!
Just a modest proposal.
Or we could instead choose to help cull out the undernourished waifs, and instead rescue the people of a normal, healthy weight.
Yeah, I hate it when injured people insist on cracking jokes.
My judo sensei was big on showing people that they could do more than they thought. He told us to pair up at random and jog around the gym carrying our partner in our arms. I, at about 125 pounds, ended up with a guy who probably weighed 170. It turned out that it was a bit of a struggle to get the guy’s legs up, but after that, it really wasn’t too hard to stagger around the gym a few times. It must have looked ridiculous, though. What I could not have done is gotten a guy of that size off the floor. Dragging would be my only option. I recently tried picking up a 110 pound person. It turned out to be downright easy, to the extent that I could move uphill at a good pace. If you don’t have to significantly raise a person’s center of gravity, it’s mostly just a matter of what your knees can take.
Keeping your back straight makes a big difference too. Hence the key to picking up chicks: “Lift with the knees, not with the back.”
I prefer it. Well played.
There is a big difference between a wet sack of sand and someone that you can put on your back and help hold on.
I’ll often help my Wife get into her wetsuit by grabbing the suit in two big handfuls at the waist or hips and lifting. And then at the shoulders. She is 120lbs and I’m 210. It’s pretty easy for me to lift her off the ground. But then, all I have to do is lean back.
Ehh. I don’t do this in a rocking boat for SCUBA, this is for tri-races, on the beach. This helps stretch out the suit a bit before the swim.
I can carry my boyfriend, who outweighs me by 70 lbs, in my arms pretty comfortably. Could probably carry more than than over my shoulders. I couldn’t easily get him up off the floor if he was unconscious, though. I’m strong but I only weigh around 100 lbs so there are a lot of people out there that would be too big for me to help in any sort of timely fashion. Even if I was just 20 lbs heavier I would have a lot more total power (also if I lifted more weights, even if I didn’t gain lbs- but I haven’t gotten around to it yet).
The average person I know is the type that calls my 10-lb laptop ‘so heavy’ - weak for their size IMO. But we’re all capable of moving heavy loads if we just know the proper techniques.
I’ve never been called on to carry anyone, and it looks very difficult to me. At the same time, from my days of working out in gyms, I can recall that the amount of strength and technique needed to lift a bar over your head, arms completely extended, is a lot greater than that needed merely to lift it to shoulder level (called “cleaning” the weight, if memory serves). A person who has to carry someone isn’t going to be asked to hold them up overhead, unless they’re in the circus or something.
So I can readily imagine that carrying someone might not be as hard as it looks, especially if you know what you’re doing.
Doesn’t matter how strong anyone is, I’d say 10# is super-heavy for a laptop, unless (a) it’s one of thoses super-ruggedized models, or (b) it’s really the weight of the entire laptop bag, perhaps heavily loaded with papers and books, etc.
You remind me of another good point which the folks who sell you gym memberships or workout regimens don’t want to tell you, which is that a lot of this is genetics. I worked out like a maniac for years, but at my most buff there was no way I could carried 170% of my bodyweight, which would have been about 260, in my arms. ON the other hand, I did injure myself doing squats one time, to the point where I had to avoid the gym completely for about a month, and after that I was never willing to get serious with squats or deadlifts, about the only exercises that really contribute to person-lifting capabilities, in my opnion.