How to Adjust a Hiking Backpack

Video Transcript

"So there's some key things to knowing how to adjust your backpacking backpack to make it fit as comfortably as possible for just a positive experience in the back country. After you have your backpack packed, the first thing you want to do is make sure you've gone around and loosened up all of your straps so that when you put them on you'll be able to tighten them down to where you want them. So loosen up all these guys and then you're going to load your backpack onto yourself and we want to have the majority of the weight of our backpack on our hips because that's the strongest part of our body. And so we're going to pull that hip belt as tight as we can right around our iliac crest or our hip bones that stick out. We're going to tighten that baby down as tight as possible. So it's really tight around here. Then I'm going to make adjustments on my shoulder straps, I want my shoulder straps to come right down nicely around my shoulders here so I'm going to pull on these straps to pull those down nice and tight around my shoulders. I don't want any big air spots here in between. And then I'm going to take my load lifters, which are these guys, and pull them down nice and tight and that's going to bring that whole load into my back. And then the last thing I'm going to do is going take my sternum strap and tighten that just to give some more support. That will be all your adjustments that you're making and it should be nice and tight against your back and it should feel really comfortable because again, all that weight is on your hops and not just pulling down on your upper body. The other last strap you're going to tighten are these bottom load lifters that come out from your hips and you want to just make sure you're pulling these tight to pull that load into your hips again because we want the hips carrying all the weight."