How much should you carry in a farmer carry? The standards, and the research gap behind them

Attia’s farmer carry standard comes from his own writing on the centenarian decathlon, where he sets out field tests for the things he wants to be able to do late in life (Attia). The carry he describes is on a trap bar, and the markers are in time rather than distance: body weight for one minute is “good” for a man in his 40s, two minutes is “very good”, and 75% of body weight is “excellent” for a woman. He discounts the target about 10% for each decade after 40.

These are targets, not norms. They say what a well-trained person could aim for. They do not say what the median 45-year-old can do, because nobody has measured that.

A search of the farmer’s walk literature turns up two things: biomechanics and strongman competition. Better performers in those studies took longer, faster strides with shorter ground contact (farmer’s walk research). That is useful for a coach and silent on the questions this site cares about: there is no study linking how far or how heavy you can carry to how long you live, or to whether you stay independent.

The same gap exists for the dead hang, and for the same reason: these are gym tests, and the cohort studies that follow tens of thousands of people for decades used grip dynamometers and chair rises, not loaded carries (dead hang claims borrow grip research).

A carry ends when your hands open. The best-studied measure of that is grip strength, and there the evidence is deep: a meta-analysis of 42 cohorts and about 3 million people found about 16% higher all-cause mortality for each 5 kg of lower grip, linear up to 56 kg and not different by sex (Lopez-Jaramillo 2022). In the Honolulu Heart Program, men in the lowest grip third in midlife had 2.87 times the odds of walking very slowly 25 years later (Rantanen 1999).

So a carry is partly a grip test with the body weight added, and partly a test of whether your trunk and hips can hold a load while you walk. That second part is the reason to keep it: it is close to carrying shopping, luggage and grandchildren, which is what the decathlon is for. Just do not read a carry distance as if it were a grip centile.

The app fixes the load so that quarters compare: half your body weight in total for men, 40% for women, split across two hands and rounded to an even number of kilograms. With your body weight in the app, the protocol screen shows the exact figure, for example “40 kg in total, 20 kg in each hand”. You walk 20-metre lengths at a steady pace and stop when either weight touches the ground, capped at 200 m.

The result is a distance at a fixed share of body weight, not a time at full body weight, so it is deliberately not Attia’s test. The app’s distance bands are its own provisional estimates, reduced after 45, and the screen says so. There is no percentile, because there is no table to take one from. What the app can show honestly is your own change: the same load, the same lengths, every 13 weeks.

If you have a back or shoulder problem, set the weights down under control and stop when your back hurts. This is not medical advice.