“The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” – Author Unknown
I knew making a larger backpack was going to involve taking the principles I learned from my first pack (here, here, and here) and the concepts from the lumbar pack (here and here), and putting everything together to make a 40–50L bag with a hip belt, load lifters, and all the features I’d want in a pack of this style — all while avoiding a pack that could potentially injure me.
In 2022, during a trip to Oregon, I had to make an emergency purchase of a hip pack because my body could not tolerate even the slightest compression on my trapezius muscle. I would get instant muscle spasms and a terrible tension headache that left me incapacitated. That’s what motivated me to make my first pack in March of 2023. The wider straps that sat more toward my acromioclavicular (AC) joint mostly solved the tension headaches and pain. However, by that point my blood was already clotting too much, something I wouldn’t find out about until February 2024. I made the hip packs in March of 2025 as a reward for the hard year of work it took to be able to hike again after my clot diagnosis. Not wanting to put any pressure on my major veins, I stuck with the lumbar pack. Now that I’m definitely able to hike again and want to take on longer, harder trails, I need a pack that can keep up with me and my adventures.
The outline for my blog posts is as follows. This post is all about fit. I’ll follow up with posts about the hip belt, straps, frame, and finally the bag as a whole. It’ll probably take me all summer to write these posts, so hopefully your inbox won’t feel overwhelmed with backpack content!
Scientific Study of Backpack Fitting
There’s a researcher, Nenta Wako, who has done rigorous study into how heavy packs fit and how to avoid injury. I appreciate being able to learn from their work on YouTube, and I’m grateful that translation apps exist, since much of it is written in Japanese. Full disclosure: most of this post is a resynthesis of Nenta Wako’s work as I viewed it on YouTube.
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