When the fitness company Peloton added weighted-vest classes to its streaming exercise offerings in May 2025, its members rejoiced, says instructor Rebecca Kennedy. “They were like, ‘Finally! You answered my prayers’!” she laughs. “The appetite has been really wild.”
Strapping extra weight to your body while working out is nothing new; the practice of “rucking”—walking with a weighted backpack—has roots in military training and has been shown to help improve endurance and build muscle power and stamina.
But wearing a weighted vest to exercise has surged in popularity over the last few years, with the global market for weighted vests predicted to grow from $199 million in 2024 to $313 million by 2031.
Adding mechanical load onto your skeleton means your muscles have to work harder for support, Kennedy says. “Our metabolic output naturally increases, because the load is heavier. We’re getting higher use of oxygen, we’re burning more calories, we have more strain over our entire body, and especially because it’s on our trunk, our postural muscles are working quite a bit more.”
Put simply, wearing a weighted vest is a “great way to, at the very core element of it, increase the difficulty of whichever exercise you’re doing,” says Mathias Sorensen, an exercise physiologist at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Human Performance Center.
When to wear a weighted vest
Adding a weighted vest to walking, hiking, or mat-based cardiovascular activities like aerobics allows you to reap the benefits of low-impact exercise while ramping up the intensity, Kennedy says. “A lot of us are limited with our time and maybe are loving cardio, but know that we also need to optimize and include strength in it, and this is a great entry point.”
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Mike Hayes, a certified personal trainer at Crunch Fitness in New York, wears his vest during strength training, for moves like push-ups, pull-ups, jump squats, and lunges. “I do it to make my body-weight exercises a little bit harder, so I’m required to exert a lot more power and force,” he says. From an ergonomic perspective, explains Sorensen, “it’s a lot easier to put on a weighted vest than it is to have somebody put a giant plate on your back to create the same effect.”
But there are some activities that aren’t suited to weighted vests, Kennedy says, like Pilates, yoga, any sort of inverted movements, and anything with rapid twisting, like pickleball or tennis. And make sure you take it off for your cool-down stretch, too. “Anytime you’re trying to load a stretch, it should be through exhale and time, versus adding a weight to it,” she says.
How to get started
As with any change to your exercise routine, go slow. If you roll out of bed “and you go buy the 30-pound weighted vest on Amazon and start doing 30 squats a day, there’s an irrefutable likelihood that an injury is going to happen,” Sorensen says.
The general rule of thumb, Kennedy explains, is to choose a vest that’s 5-10% of your body weight. Wear it for 10 minutes the first time to see how your body responds, then increase your usage gradually. “I might wear it two or three days in week one,” she says.
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As for whether to buy a fixed weight or adjustable vest, decide whether you’ll use it more for cardio or strength training, Kennedy advises. A fixed weight vest will fit more snugly and jostle around less as you move, while an adjustable one allows you to progressively increase the resistance as you get stronger.
Though weighted vests are generally safe for the majority of people, Kennedy says, seek clearance from your doctor if you have issues with balance, or neck, shoulder, or back injuries; placing additional stress on the spine can exacerbate conditions like degenerative disc disease. Pregnant women, particularly in the second and third trimester, should avoid adding more load to their trunk.
Weighted vests and bone health
As we get older, we begin to lose bone mass or density; women are more likely to develop osteoporosis than men, because estrogen, which plays a crucial role in protecting bones, decreases sharply in menopause.
While it’s well-established that exercise can help strengthen our bones as we age, the research on weighted vests and bone health is scant. Most studies have been small with varying or unclear results, and even the recent 12-month INVEST in Bone Health trial, which followed 150 older adults, found that daily weighted vest use did not prevent weight loss-associated bone loss at the hip.
“There’s a lot of buzz around the weighted vest, that it’s this bone-density hack,” says Michele Bird, a board-certified orthopedic clinical specialist and assistant professor of applied exercise science at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology. “I just don’t think that the evidence has supported that at this time.”
Still, she says, “if that vest is getting someone to be more active, I think that’s great.”
Upcoming research
As more people strap in for the first time, research into the potential effectiveness of weighted vests continues to come down the pike.
Kristen Beavers, an associate professor in the department of health and exercise science at Wake Forest University and one of the researchers in the INVEST trial, says the team is currently working on other studies related to weighted vests, including the impact on muscle and the difference in outcomes between men and women.
In March, they published a small pilot study suggesting that wearing a weighted vest during active weight loss may help people maintain that loss over the long term.
“I don’t think the story is done,” she says.
