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"It doesn't even feel like I am wearing a pack!"
Better Posture, Less Fatigue
Wearing an Aarn hiking backpack has been scientifically proven to improve your posture while hiking.
Yes, carrying a traditional heavy backpack can cause bad posture and back pain. We all tend to stoop while carrying a load on our backs to counteract the backward pull of the backpack. Consequently, your back, shoulders and neck are under more strain, resulting in sore muscles. However, Aarn hiking packs, sometimes called bodypacks, are designed differently, in order to reduce and even eliminate this unpleasant aspect of hiking by improving your posture and balancing the weight you carry.
The correct posture should be upright, even when wearing a backpack. One of the keys to a comfortable backpack system like ours is that it helps improve your body posture while backpacking. Thanks to a better load distribution system, our hiking backpacks and Balance Pockets reduce the leverage on your back and shoulders, so you will naturally walk in an upright position, and your shoulders, neck, and back won’t be sore anymore.
The pockets help distribute the weight towards the front of your pelvis, creating a balanced load distribution around the hips, which also eliminates strain on the lower back.
And as a bonus, you won’t need as much energy to move!
Aarn Balance Backpacks are the best to help you maintain an optimal posture while hiking, and here are four reasons why:
By choosing Balance Pockets with the largest available volume for your Aarn backpack model and packing your heaviest compact items in these Pockets and your light bulky gear in the backpack, you can achieve a naturally balanced load, where this load revolves around your centre of gravity. Now your posture is unaltered when you put the Balance Backpack on - there is no forward lean. With the weight balanced front and back, no leverages are on the spine. The forces on the body are only vertical, consisting of the weight alone, without the extra load on your spine.
Just as the pack wants to fall backwards away from your shoulders, the Balance Pockets want to fall forwards. The two forces cancel each other out so there is no rearward pull on the shoulders - any load on the shoulders is vertically down only. These forces can be reduced even more (by loosening the shoulder straps) so that more weight is put on the hips. Then the spine is no longer under compression and the shoulder straps act as load locators rather than load bearers.
The way the front Balance Pockets connect to the shoulder straps is sliding so that none of the weight in the Pockets goes onto the shoulders. The weight is transferred onto the front of your hips by the Pocket frames. This balances the load of the pack on the back of the hips, eliminating the rotating force on the pelvis. The pelvis stays level without muscle tension, eliminating strain in the lower back.
Balancing weight around the body's centre of gravity is the foundation for natural body movement, natural balance and load stability. For free and fluid movement to be possible under load, the harness of the Aarn Backpack and Balance Pockets must cooperate. Our patented flow motion systems interlink the harness parts allowing your torso to move and twist freely while the load remains centred and stable.
Yes, wearing an Aarn Balance Backpack and Balance Pocket is good for posture. We base our designs on the findings of Biomechanics and Ergonomics, which have real breakthroughs in load-carrying research.
“For over 25 years, I have been conducting international research on load carriage in military and leisure settings. This has involved a wide range of laboratory and field studies of many types of load carriage systems. Our research identified the principles of load carriage. As far as I am aware, Aarn Balance Packs are the first to really put the principles into practice.”
Professor Stephen Legg, Centre for Ergonomics, Occupational Safety and Health, Massey University, NZ
A load-carrying system should compliment the natural posture and movement of the body, not disrupt it. This is what makes a naturally balanced and body-friendly load-carrying. You only need a total load of more than 6kg to reach significant energy savings when using one of our Aarn Backpack and Balance Pocket Systems.
Add our U-Flow motion systems, and your body agility is not compromised. The result is that you now flow naturally balanced under load.
You should feel the weight of your backpack around your hips, and not on your shoulders. This is why having your centre of gravity aligned with the centre of gravity of the backpack makes a difference when you’re carrying a backpack.
Your posture under backpack load is determined by two factors; the horizontal distance between the centre of gravity of your pack load and the centre of gravity of your body.
If these two centres of gravity coincide horizontally, there are no leverages on your body and you stand perfectly upright. The only force on the body is the weight itself. The popularity of carrying a load on the head in Africa, Asia and South America is because the centre of gravity (of the load carried) and the body are aligned on the vertical axis, which means there are no leverages on the body.
However, if the two centres of gravity are not on the same vertical axis, the offset load creates leverages that increase the forces acting on the body above those caused by the weight alone. The greater the distance between the two centres of gravity, the greater the leverage on your body. These are concentrated and magnify the forces acting on the body. The load must be dispersed onto the skeletal structure in a balanced way around the vertical axis so that the loading on the body is only vertically downwards.
Aarn Backpacks and Balance Pockets solve the postural problems of traditional backpacks and result in a natural upright posture, explaining the Sports Science findings of greater energy efficiency and the reduction of body pain while using the Aarn System.
If you want to keep reading, take a look at this article written by Duncan Grant, a physiotherapist from Dunedin, New Zealand. He is the happy owner of an Aarn backpack and is giving us his professional opinion on how his pack can help with body strains and other injuries.