From Fergus Walk to Farmer Carries: A Short History of Moving Weight

The farmers walk is now a staple of strongman contests and strength training programmes. Two heavy handles. A short distance. Grip, posture, lungs, and will tested all at once. As a formal event, it entered the public imagination in 1983 when Worlds Strongest Man introduced the Fergus Walk, named after Scottish strongman Fergus McCann. The spectacle of elite athletes racing down a track with loaded frames helped turn carrying weight into a recognisable test of modern strength.

Yet the movement itself is far older than any television contest. Carrying heavy loads across space has long functioned as a way of displaying strength, training bodies for combat and labour, and proving worth within local cultures of physical prowess. The farmers walk gave a name and format to something that had been practiced in many guises for centuries.

The ancient world and the problem of moving weight

In the ancient Mediterranean world, strength was rarely imagined as something performed in place. Athletics emerged from military and labour contexts in which bodies moved under load. Our sources do not describe farmers walks as such, but they repeatedly emphasise locomotion under resistance as part of athletic preparation.

Lucian, writing in the 2nd century, described athletes training in deep sand rather than firm ground. The palaestrae of the eastern Mediterranean were often sandy spaces bounded by stone colonnades and open to the heat. Training in sand made every step harder. Lucian also noted that athletes sometimes trained while holding lead weights, turning simple movement into a form of resistance work. The image is concrete. Young men moving across a yielding surface with weight in hand, feet slipping, lungs burning, learning to maintain posture under fatigue.

Philostratus, writing in the 3rd century, described training practices that mixed endurance running, wrestling, and heavy work. Some athletes, he noted, trained by carrying heavy loads, others by pulling wagons or bending thick iron bars. The emphasis was on moving strength through space. The body was not simply something that lifted. It was something that carried, dragged, and transported weight in preparation for confrontation. In gymnasia that functioned as civic training grounds, the capacity to move under burden mattered because war and labour demanded it.

The most famous example of carrying in antiquity remains the story of Milo of Croton. According to later writers, Milo trained by carrying a calf each day as it grew into a bull. Historians rightly treat this as tradition rather than a training log. Yet the persistence of the story matters. It reveals how later audiences imagined strength development as progressive burden bearing. Strength was built by moving weight repeatedly over time, not by isolated feats of static force.

Across the ancient world, then, we see a recurring logic. Strength training involved locomotion under load. Carrying was not a specialised event. It was part of a broader understanding of what a capable body should be able to do.

From physical culture to 1983

By the 19th century, strength display had become spectacle. Physical culture blended labour traditions, folk strength tests, and theatrical performance. Carrying heavy objects across space became a way to dramatise power for paying audiences.

Donald Dinnie, the Scottish strongman active in the mid 19th century, provides one of the clearest precedents for modern loaded carries. In 1860, Dinnie carried the two stones that now bear his name across the Potarch Bridge in Aberdeenshire. The stones weighed roughly 144 kilograms and 188 kilograms and were fitted with iron rings. The distance was only a few metres, but the task combined grip, balance, and locomotion under uneven load. The feat has been repeatedly attempted in the modern era and remains a benchmark of functional strength.

In Iceland, the Húsafell stone functioned as a local test of labour capacity and manhood. The irregular stone, weighing just under 190 kilograms, was traditionally carried around a sheep pen by those seeking the title of full strength. The carry mattered more than the lift. Being able to move the stone around the enclosure demonstrated not just raw power but endurance and control under awkward load within a working landscape.

Circus and vaudeville performers also used carries to dramatise strength. Louis Cyr, active in the late 19th century, performed in packed theatres across Quebec and the northeastern United States. Contemporary accounts describe Cyr carrying heavy barrels and moving loaded platforms across the stage in front of seated audiences who were accustomed to seeing weight hoisted overhead. The drama came from motion. Weight in the hands, steps taken across the boards, the strain visible in posture and breath.

Katie Sandwina offered a similar spectacle in the early 20th century. Performing with major circuses and appearing in large urban venues including Madison Square Garden, Sandwina walked heavy objects across the ring as part of her act. The setting mattered. A brightly lit arena, a central ring, thousands watching as she moved weight through space. Carrying was not a novelty. It was central to how her strength was framed for the public. The visual of a woman transporting heavy loads challenged prevailing assumptions about female fragility and tied strength to mobility rather than static display.

Alongside these performers, carrying remained embedded in sporting and training cultures. Wrestling traditions placed value on moving bodies under load. Training rooms routinely included partner carries and resisted locomotion to build grip, trunk stability, and fatigue tolerance for clinch and takedown work. In track and field, particularly among throwers, general strength preparation long included loaded walking and carrying tasks. These practices were rarely formalised as events. They functioned as means to an end, part of building bodies capable of transferring force through movement.

By the mid 20th century, however, the visual culture of strength was changing. Commercial gyms increasingly centred on fixed stations and selectorised machines. Strength became something performed in place, often seated or braced against steel frames. Carrying weight remained present in labour and sport, but it receded from mainstream gym culture and public spectacle.

From the Fergus Walk to the training canon

The reappearance of loaded carries as a named test in 1983 marked a shift in how strength was staged for television audiences. The Fergus Walk at Worlds Strongest Man turned the act of carrying into a race. Athletes moved heavy frames over a set distance, combining grip endurance, trunk stability, and speed. The format was simple and visually compelling. It translated easily to viewers who understood the logic of carrying heavy things quickly.

From there, farmers walks became a recurring strongman event. The implements changed. The distances varied. The core logic remained. Strength was something you carried.

What changed in the late 1990s and early 2000s was the migration of carries from spectacle into everyday training. This shift owed much to coaches and researchers who reframed loaded carries as foundational rather than ornamental.

Stuart McGill, working within biomechanics and spine health research, highlighted the value of asymmetrical and loaded gait for trunk stability. Carrying heavy loads while walking placed demands on the torso that static lifts did not replicate. It trained the body to resist collapse under movement and fatigue.

Dan John made a complementary case within coaching culture. In a widely circulated article from the early 2000s, he argued that loaded carries were the missing piece in many strength programmes. Athletes could squat, press, and pull impressive weights, yet struggle to move their own strength through space. Carries, he suggested, tied strength to posture, breathing, and mental resilience in ways that conventional gym lifts often neglected. His framing helped normalise farmers walks and related carries as core components of training rather than exotic strongman novelties.

This period also matters for the diffusion of carries through underground gym culture. Ken Leistner, writing from the late 1970s onward and training athletes at Iron Island Gym in New York, consistently pushed heavy, simple loading work as an antidote to machine culture. Leistner advocated carrying awkward objects such as barrels, sandbags, and heavy implements as part of conditioning and strength preparation. He did not invent the farmers walk as a named exercise, but his writing helped legitimise the idea that walking with heavy loads belonged in serious training.

Kim Wood, who moved through strength coaching and grip culture networks in the same period, further transmitted these ideas. Grip training circles in the 1980s and early 1990s experimented with thick handled carries, heavy dumbbell walks, and suitcase style loads. The important historical point is not that Leistner or Wood created the farmers carry, but that they helped translate the strongman spectacle of moving weight into everyday gym practice at a moment when commercial fitness culture had largely abandoned such movements.

The popularity of carries today is not simply a rediscovery of a useful exercise. It reflects a broader shift in how strength is imagined. For much of the 20th century, gym culture trained bodies to express force in place. Carries reassert an older idea of strength as something mobile, awkward, and inseparable from posture, gait, and fatigue. They fell out of mainstream gym culture during the machine era because machines rewarded stationary force production. They returned in the 1990s because coaches and athletes were looking for ways to reconnect strength with movement. The farmers walk feels new because it had been absent from mainstream gym floors for decades. It feels familiar because, historically, strength has always involved moving weight from one place to another.