To reduce the weight of your backpack, a simple list of essentials is not enough: you need a solid method to counter our deep-seated tendency to keep adding more. This article aims to give you, in 6 points, the ultimate method to properly optimise your load and reduce the weight of your backpack!
Go for a smaller hiking bag!
It may seem obvious, but it's worth recognising our tendencies: the more space there is, the more we fill it. Limiting the size of your bag is already limiting the maximum load of your backpack. That said, the size must clearly match the type of hiking you're doing: you wouldn't set off with the same bag for a day hike as for 7 days in the high mountains.
But this first principle should be understood as follows: push yourself to choose a backpack just a little smaller than your natural instinct suggests. If your first instinct is to think "70 liters is fine", then choose a 60-liter bag.
By choosing a smaller backpack, you take a crucial first step towards reducing its weight. You force yourself to think carefully about what you pack and optimise it, as well as to do without anything superfluous or unnecessary.
Sorting to reduce the weight of your backpack
This is perhaps the hardest exercise, but it is fundamentally the most methodical to apply — and to apply strictly. In my view, there are 3 categories of items.
- Essentials: items necessary for safety and for completing the hike under basic conditions. Removing this item could cause a problem. Base layers are an example of "essentials".
- Useful items: things needed under normal conditions of use. Hiking poles are "useful" but not "essential": you can walk without them, after all.
- Superfluous items: things that contribute nothing to survival or safety under normal conditions of use. An MP3 player is "superfluous", for example. At this stage, there is absolutely no question of systematically eliminating everything "superfluous" — but categorising things this way will help you make choices if needed. Reducing the weight of your backpack is, above all, about prioritising!
Weigh each item and log it in a table
Create a spreadsheet in your preferred app with 3 columns corresponding to the categories listed above. Then, line by line, enter the weight of each item, placing it in the appropriate column, and calculate the totals. The ideal breakdown should be 50% essentials, 40% useful items and only 10% "superfluous" — though this is not a hard and fast rule. However, if you spot a 40% superfluous proportion, you'll need to start cutting back fast.
A table of figures will never give you an absolute truth, but it will serve as a guide and reference to help you optimise your choices. So don't agonise over a "superfluous" item that weighs 15g — keep it! Weighing each item is also educational: it makes you genuinely aware of how heavy certain things are. Very often we have no idea of their weight, or can't even estimate it. It is fundamental — and it comes with experience — to know or at least be aware of the weight of what you'll be carrying over long days of walking. The "weight reflex" must become automatic: when you're browsing a shop and choosing new hiking gear, weight must be one of your selection criteria — and a fairly high one at that. That's how reducing the weight of your backpack becomes a true philosophy.
Do a first elimination round
Go back through your table item by item and decide whether or not to keep each one in your bag. If your initial sort was done correctly and honestly, you shouldn't need to touch the "essentials" — only adjust the "useful" and "superfluous" categories.
This first elimination should help you shed at least 10% of the total weight and bring you closer to the ideal configuration described above.
Test your backpack
At this stage, try to fill your bag with what remains on the list. Normally your bag should not look completely stuffed: there should be just a little slack — roughly 5% of the total volume. In plain terms, your bag should absolutely not be hard to close. This is a fundamental point: over the course of a long hiking trip spanning several days, your load will be unpacked, repacked and adjusted multiple times. On the trail, you may not have as much time as during your test phase at home to pack it perfectly. This 5% margin, achieved during the test phase, is therefore essential to protect you from nasty surprises during your hike.
If that's the case (or worse, if everything doesn't fit), you absolutely must redo the sorting step (no, your large teddy bear is not in the "essentials" category!) and do another elimination round.
After a hike, debrief your kit list
After a hike, it's useful to review the gear you took and assess what you actually used. It's then essential to ask yourself some common-sense questions.
Did this item come in useful?
Does this item serve a dual purpose with that one?
Were there any items I ended up finding superfluous, even though I had classed them as useful?
Were there things I didn't use, and why?
This debrief should be useful, enriching your experience and helping you sharpen your judgement for future outings.
Tips for reducing the weight of your backpack
When heading out as a group, it's useful to compare lists and tables to optimise things. If there are 4 of you, an item classed as essential may only be needed once, not four times across four bags. I've calculated that gear optimisation within a group of 3 or more can reduce the load by 10 to 20% — nothing to be sniffed at.
When fine and drastic optimisation is needed, you must think carefully about reducing the individual weight and bulk of items: for example, cutting two-thirds of the handle off a toothbrush, or taking only the exact amount of body soap you need… and so on. These small fits should only be made at the very end of your planning and should be treated as last-resort solutions only.
Of course, this method is hard to apply on a day outing and will be more useful on a multi-day expedition or trek — but it gives you a framework for thinking and a methodology to sharpen your judgement about what to carry. Try the exercise occasionally on short weekend hikes, for example, and you'll be surprised. Simply categorising and weighing items makes you genuinely aware of the unnecessary load you can end up carrying. One last example: I helped a friend pack his bag for a 6-day trip in the Vercors. He categorised his items himself and we weighed everything together, filling in the table. To his great surprise, out of 27 kg of gear, 11 kg were "essential", 7 were "useful" and 9 were "superfluous"!!! The choices were quickly made to reduce the total weight — and trust me, he was no beginner, far from it.
It is always useful to take stock of what you carry and to adopt a methodology that lets you easily optimise your load. Your comfort clearly depends on carrying less on your shoulders. Over the course of several days on a long hiking trip, this makes an enormous difference in recovery time, reduced fatigue and, potentially, injuries and strains avoided. Reducing the weight of your backpack is not difficult in itself — it requires a little rigour and method, and above all a healthy dose of objectivity! Try adopting this method, refine it, adapt it to your own style, and you'll ultimately find a welcome difference for your aching back!
