The Grocery Stocker Workout

Got this interested questions in from Timothy last week and felt I’d share it with you.

Hello Logan, I just recently purchased your ebook Mental Muscle. It’s very good, I haven’t finished it yet. My question for you is what type of exercises should I do to prepare to be a grocery stocker? I work for a major chain, the requirements are:
A. To lift 70 to 75 lbs continually for 8 hrs
B. To be able to pull a ton out of a delivery truck
C. To be flexible enough to bend and extend to reach shelves, top and bottom
D. To be fast enough to throw 60 cases an hour, in other words a case a minute
E. To be fast and strong enough to pass shopping carts into the store and go back to stocking the shelves.
F. To be fast and flexible to straighten the items in a store within 4 to 5 hrs
G. To withstand cold temperature to straighten items in cooler 40 and below.
H. To process sort out product at 275 to 300 cases an hour, in other words to unmixed goods for each aisle or department.

I’ve never received this question before!

Unknown to most people I use to work as a stocker (not to be confused with stalker) in a grocery store for a number of years before I transitioned to the fitness world.

But based on what Tim laid out, my stocking wasn’t nearly as physical.

First of all, this is a great job in that it will keep you moving and strong.

A fun thing to do while working can be to think of it as a workout and thus milk even more benefit from doing it.

Slim the Hammerman built his legendary strength by swinging hammers and breaking rock for 8+ hours a day for years.

I recall have to move cases of juice, with each case holding 12 glass bottles. Sometimes these were stacked ten high and I had to move hundreds of them. That can be made a good workout.

But beyond that, more precisely your question was how do you prepare for this sort of work?

If I had to choose one exercise…

Stone lifting

Well, really any odd object would be a good fit, but stones are extra fun.

Pick them up.

Put them overhead.

And probably most importantly for this, carry them around in various different positions.

While building absolute strength is just about always useful, you’ll also want to do extended sessions of this sort of lifting.

Carry a stone for a mile, no matter how many times you gotta pick it up and set it down. That sort of thing.

By doing it in some different ways you’ll hit on every point you laid out.

And of course this sort of training is good for just about anyone…not just grocery stockers.

A good resource if you want more training ideas along these lines is Deceptive Strength were you can become crazy strong, with tons of endurance, without becoming huge.