I have encountered these two misconceptions of my wife with respect to everyday carrying of heavy loads by me (me being the person with the load-bearing Y chromosome in our outfit), and I would like to know: Have any of you also encountered these, or are they one of a kind?
1. Misconception: When carrying heavy loads, it is easier covering a given distance as slowly as possible.
My wife has urged me to walk as slowly as possible, once even stepped in my way to make me walk slowly.
My take: For the vast majority of heavy loads, it is keeping your grip and/or keeping an awkwardly shaped load* up that is fatiguing and limits the time you can carry the load. Leg strength and leg fatigue is never the limiting factor. Time is, not horizontal distance. So when carrying something heavy it is best to maintain the best walking speed where you are safe from tripping and falling.
2. Misconception: Carrying one moderately heavy suitcases (on level ground) is easier than carrying two.
My wife maintains that I should take it easier and carry one 20 kg suitcase at a time, as opposed to one in each hand.
My take: It is much easier to walk with two suitcases, except only when walking up narrow or steep stairs. You need to tense your abdominal muscles, though.
*) Example of awkwardly shaped loads: big old-style CRT TVs
I don’t have a “load-bearing y chromosome”. However:
This is true, though I’ll add “which you can comfortably walk at without getting out of breath” if you have to carry whatever it is for more than a few steps. Leg fatigue may or may not be the limiting factor for a particular individual; but heart and/or lung capacity may well be.
And it’s also easier to walk with a balanced load; therefore, with two suitcases, or five-gallon pails, or whatever – so long as the total weight isn’t more than you can readily handle. That is, it’s easier to move, say, 25 lbs in each of two buckets, one in each hand, than 50 lbs all in one bucket; but while I can move 50 lbs in one bucket if I have to, I can no longer carry two 50 lb buckets at once, though I could move them one at a time. So what she may be thinking is that both suitcases at once is too much total weight, because it may be too much total weight for her; but it’s not too much total weight for you.
All of which is to say: she should carry loads (I’m sure she sometimes carries something) in the way that best fits her; and you shouldn’t be telling her, for instance, that she should carry things two at a time which she finds easier to carry one at a time. Unless you have a history of hurting yourself by carrying things wrong, she should IMO also get out of your way while you carry loads in the way that best suits you.
When doing unfamiliar physical activity, there’s an innate tendency to hold your breath. Override that. Make a point of breathing when carrying a heavy load. Your muscles won’t buckle as easily and you will be able to move the object farther.
OSHA link: “Back injuries account for one in five workplace injuries, and 75% of workplace-related back injuries occur during a lifting task.” So our instincts might not be calibrated well.
These days the suitcase one hardly comes up, as they all have rollers; the only time they get lifted is in and out of the trunk. For us there’s also carrying them down the stairs to where they can get loaded into the car, but whether one or two I would still take them one at a time.
I have not come up against the first issue myself. I will ad with others that the difficult part is picking up the item and putting it down again, mostly not the walking with it. Big old TVs I would not attempt, way too much chance of back strain; I would try to balance it on a rolling chair or something.
As I’ve gotten older and more infirm, I have involuntarily learned the benefits of ergonomics. A few obvious takeaways are:
You can hold more weight than you can lift. Best way to lift something is to squat down, get a firm grip on it at chest level, then lift with the legs.
If something is unexpectedly heavier than you planned and you find yourself unbalanced, bend at the knees to let the weight move the center of gravity back.
Don’t be ashamed to have to carry heavy weights down stairs by backing down the stairs. If worst comes to worst you’ll drop the load onto the stair in front of you instead of all the way down (and/or pitching headfirst down the stairs).
If you regularly carry a heavy load, especially up or down stairs, invest in some way of carrying it on your back such as a backpack or shoulder straps.
The OP’s wife has some … novel … ideas about load carrying.
As @thorny_locust says though, what’s quite heavy for one person may be no big deal for another. To which I’ll add that someone whose load carrying capacity (or experience) is small may develop all sorts of paradoxical ideas.
The OP might have a very interesting convo with the spousal unit about all this stuff. Including calibrating both your eyes to what the other person thinks is “heavy”.
But also related to age…there are those damned knees.
Everything’s difficult.
Yeah. That’s just good common sense, raised in the school of experience. Yanking a fifty+ pound piece of whatever with one arm is (i) good way to dislocate something and (ii) in some cases not necessary if one can distribute the load more evenly (maybe not 50/50, but somewhere close to that).
And of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t make the obligatory workplace joke about “here comes a big load.” Well…“joke” is kind of an overstatement! But it has to be said, usually.
I suppose there’s an ideal speed for walking with a heavy load that minimizes total time and exertion while not being hard on the joints. It’s moderate speed, neither fast nor slow.
You can switch 1 heavy suitcase from one arm to the other as you go, but carrying two suitcases with the same combined weight at the same time will be no more effort and you’ll stay balanced the whole time. Doubling the weight with two suitcases is fine up to your comfortable carrying capacity, above that it will be much harder on you than two trips.
“Easier” is a kind of nebulous quality to identify but it certainly takes more overall muscular effort to keep a heavy load raised the longer you go, and at some point the glycogen stores in muscle will be sufficiently depleted or lactic acid will build up causing muscles to cramp or fail. (There is also the possibility of cardiac stress if you have heart problems, but then, you should be mindful of carrying any heavy loads or high exertions.) The more persuasive reason to moderate your speed when carrying a heavy load is because you may misjudge your ability to stop or turn (because of additional inertia), or you may miss a step and stumble, possibly injuring yourself because of the additional weight.
It is definitely easier to carry a balanced load in each hand than a single heavy load in one hand. Most people, even those into ‘fitness’, neglect to really train and strengthen obliques (the stabilizing size muscles in the torso), which can result in strain and poor form when having to put those muscles to purpose infrequently. This is why a major part of kettlebell conditioning is doing ‘suitcase carries’ (pick up and carry a kettlebell on one side) and ‘Turkish get-ups (going from a supine position to an overhead press and back with a kettlebell) to help strengthen those muscles and learn body positioning with offset loads. Carrying loads in both hands centers the load on the latissimus dorsi and the intrinsic back muscles, and also prevents you from a ‘wobbling’ stride where you might come down awkwardly on the loaded side foot. Assuming you can manage the weight of both suitcases, it is certainly easier to carry both of them.
Or, if there are concerns about carrry that amount of weight, just get a folding cart. I keep one in my truck for moving luggage and other loads because even if they aren’t heavy they can be awkward, so anything that doesn’t fit in a backpack or have its own wheels goes on the cart.
I read somewhere that someone did a study of porters in Nepal, I think, who would carry very heavy loads on their backs for large distances, day in and day out. The researchers found out that the porters would get up early in the morning and just start walking very, very slowly until their reached their destination, and no matter what, they would never walk any faster than their regular turtle-like pace. So maybe the OP’s wife has a point.
Also, I haven’t seen a suitcase without wheels and a handle for decades. It’s one of those cases where a new technology was introduced in my lifetime that completely erased its predecessors.
Because in the ‘before times’ people didn’t try to carry on full sized suitcases packed with 20 kg of ‘necessities’, and airplane porters with their own carts were plentiful at the terminal, where you could park your car and leave it for minutes without being hassled to move or be towed. Also, if you recall the original wheeled luggage—where they just stuck tiny wheels onto conventional suitcases with a vinyl strap to tow it behind you—it kind of sucked because the damn thing would fall over at the slightest provocation, and you had to pick it up to go across any door sill or on an elevator.
The idea of ‘wheely bags’ actually came from their use on hard boxes that were too large and heavy to carry, and then someone figured what if we make a soft-side bag in that shape with wheels and a telescoping handle. Which I hate, because like parents with strollers, people are always rolling these damn things across your foot, or backing up into your knee, et cetera. And now we have stupid crap like this taking up overhead bin space and clobbering you in the head when pulled out at the end of the flight.
These days, anything I need either fits in a backpack, goes in a large Pelican box that gets checked, or gets shipped via UPS.
I know shouldn’t be, but I’m still constantly surprised by the fact that no matter how much a new invention is self-evidently superior and clearly makes the world a better place, there’s always going to be someone who hates it and says the old ways were better.
I may be turning a (possibly rough) correlation in time into causation, but ISTM that roller blades appeared at about the same time that wheels on luggage (the two-wheel type) started becoming popular. Which led me to theorize that perhaps the former led to the latter; that is, luggage makers saw roller blade wheels and decided to try putting them on bags. Perhaps it hadn’t been tried before because earlier types of casters weren’t durable or smooth enough to work in that application, but roller blade wheels were.
Which reminds me, I have no idea why the four-wheel bags have become so much more popular than the two-wheel type. It’s perfectly obvious to me that the volume the wheels take up is just lost space – equivalent to at least one day’s change of clothes – compared to a two-wheel bag. The only advantage is that you don’t have to support the fractional weight of the bag when you’re pulling it, but really, how much harder is that? And the other big disadvantage is that the wheels are far more likely to be broken off through rough handling. But when you look around the airports these days, I’d guess that 80-90% of wheeled bags have four.
I just bought a duplicate replacement for a two-wheel Victorinox roller board I had bought more than 20 years ago, after one of the seams started giving way. When I went to the Victorinox website, all it offered were four-wheel types. It turns out they still had the two-wheelers, but they were deep in the site and didn’t come up in an ordinary search.
Here’s an interesting article that suggests that the long delay between the invention of suitcases and the invention of wheeled suitcases was partly due to gender stereotypes. It was expected that real men would carry a heavy suitcase themselves without any sissy wheels to help them, and that women would always be traveling with a man to carry their bags for them.
Sadow, the “official” inventor, described how difficult it was to get any US department store chains to sell it: “At this time, there was this macho feeling. Men used to carry luggage for their wives. It was … the natural thing to do, I guess.”
I think they’re easier to maneuver in narrow spaces - like on a train - and require less strength to use. My guess is that small wheels are tougher these days and don’t break as easily as they did.
