Loading in and out will always take more time than you want it to. It will always be at least somewhat fatiguing. You might think that the key to reducing those consequences is reducing the weight of everything you have. That’s only partially correct, in my estimation.

What I’ve found over the years is that what really makes the loading cycle take forever (and tire you out) isn’t necessarily the mass of the gear. Not directly. Rather, the number of trips you have to take, the gear jostling required, and the amount of climbing you have to do constitute the real factors.

Indeed, if it was just down to mass, it would seem that everything would shake out to be roughly the same. If you have two shows, both involving 1000 lbs of gear and a 200 ft walk from the transport to the staging point, then it looks to be the same amount of total expended energy if a trip involves 75 lbs of gear at a time or 150 lbs of gear. There’s a problem with accepting that logic, though: That simple numeric representation misses the other factors entirely.

First, each loading trip involves getting the gear off the vehicle and arranged for the move. In many cases (THAT’S A BIT OF A STEALTH PUN, BY THE WAY!) the heavier load-per-trip situation involves gear that’s ready to roll off the transport, and a transport where rolling that load involves very little additional effort – say, a trailer with a ramp. In the lighter situation, that gear might be on a van with a deck you have to climb up and down from each time. Since the equipment can’t be packed in a rollable state, it has to be pulled off the van and stacked on a dolly to be moved. After it gets to where it’s going, it has to be unstacked. The result is that a ton of effort is expended on “finagling” that the heavier loads don’t need.

The next issue is the time involved. The finagling that I just mentioned adds time to each trip, on top of the time required to push the gear over the physical distance. Thirteen trips multiplied by 45 seconds of walking and an additional minute of wrestling gear on and off the dolly is almost 23 minutes. The heavier setup is about 7 trips, and might require no wrangling at all for the loads at the basic level. That’s only 5 – 6 minutes of “push” time if everything runs perfectly. Even if problems arise and the difference is only half, it’s still a huge savings.

I also mentioned climbing. Let’s look at that in a little more detail. Working your own body weight against gravity is a big strain. Now, add a bunch of gear to the equation. Consider doing that 13 times…and now consider doing it only the equivalent of 1 – 2 times with a better cargo setup. You’re far less tired, right?

All of this is just one more restatement of the idea that “Guess what? Logistics really matter in this business.” Big shows with good logistics aren’t any more tiring than smaller shows with imperfect orchestration. They can even be easier under certain circumstances.