How Should a Hiking Backpack Fit?

Video Transcript

"In order to have a good experience hiking on a trail, it's important to have a backpack that fits well so we'll talk a little bit about how your hiking pack should fit. Depending on the size of your pack, there are normally a few different straps, shoulder straps and some sort of hip strap is normally what's most common these days with hiking packs. So, you want to just put that on your back and you want to tighten down that hip strap first, nice and well across where your hip bones going up at your waist level. You might tight it down nice and tight. That's what's going to hold most of your weight. And then after that you can actually tighten down your shoulder straps so that it's nice and snug against your back and your shoulder straps come down right over your shoulders. If your pack also has a sternum strap, you can tighten that clothes right on the sternum, now that hold most of that weight off your shoulders. It's really important that your backpack fits snuggly against your back and it's not flopping around everywhere and that again most of that weight is carried by your hip straps and not your shoulder straps. If you have a bigger backpack more of a longer day hike there's a good way to load your backpack on your back so you actually don't injure yourself and you can pull up your backpack on your knee there and then swing it around and that will help especially if you have a big backpacking pack that you have tons of weight in, that'll help and then again our principles of putting our hip strap on first, tighten that up real snug, pullin' our shoulder straps tight to make that backpack snug around on our back and then tightening up that sternum strap. Again, the fit of your backpack also has to do with how you pack your pack, putting most of the weight in the bottom and not having too many things hanging off and slapping the back of your legs when you're hiking. You want to kind of have a nice slicks felt backpack and that will help the fit of your pack."