To reduce your backpack weight, simply making a list of essentials is not enough: you need a proper method to counteract our deep-seated tendency to always add more. This article therefore aims to give you, in 6 points, the ultimate method for properly optimising your load and reducing your backpack weight!
Take a smaller hiking bag!
It may seem obvious, but we need to recognise our tendencies: the more space there is, the more we fill it. Limiting the size of your bag already limits the maximum load of your backpack. That said, size must clearly be dictated by the type of hiking you're doing: you don't set off with the same bag for a day hike as you do for 7 days in the high mountains.
But this first principle should be understood as follows: discipline yourself to choose a backpack that is just a little smaller than what your instinct tells you — if your first thought is "70 liters, that'll do", then choose a 60-liter backpack.
By choosing a smaller backpack, you take a first essential step towards reducing your backpack weight. You force yourself to think carefully about what you pack and to optimise it — and to do without anything that might be superfluous or unnecessary.
Sort to reduce your backpack weight
This is perhaps the hardest exercise, but fundamentally it is the most methodical to apply — and in a strict manner. In my view, there are 3 categories of items.
- The Essentials: what is necessary for safety and for completing the hiking trip under basic conditions. Removing such an item can cause problems. Underwear, for example, is an "essential".
- The Useful: items needed under normal conditions of use. Hiking poles are "useful" but not "essential" — you can walk without them.
- The Superfluous: items that contribute nothing to survival or safety under normal conditions of use. An mp3 player is "superfluous", for example. At this stage, there is no question of systematically eliminating everything "superfluous" — but categorising things in this way will help you make choices if and when you need to. Reducing your backpack weight is, above all, about prioritising!
Weigh each item and log it in a table
Create a table in your favourite spreadsheet 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% for essentials, 40% for useful, and only 10% "superfluous" — though this is not a fixed rule. However, if you find a 40% proportion of superfluous items, you'll need to cut and trim the fat quickly.
A table of figures will never give you an absolute truth, but it will serve as a guide and reference point, helping you to optimise your choices. So don't torture yourself over a "superfluous" item that weighs 15g… Keep it! Weighing each item is also educational: it makes you truly aware of how heavy certain things are. Very often we have absolutely no idea of their weight, or can't even estimate it. It is fundamental — though it comes with experience — to know, or at least be aware of, the weight of what you'll be carrying with you over long days of walking. The "weight" reflex must become automatic: when you're in a shop choosing new hiking equipment, weight must be one of your selection criteria and should rank quite high on that list. That's how reducing the weight of your backpack becomes a true philosophy!
Make a first cut
Go through your table and review each item, deciding whether or not you need to keep it in your bag. If your first sort was done correctly and honestly, you shouldn't need to touch the "essentials" — only adjust the "useful" and "superfluous" categories.
This first cut should save you at least 10% of the total weight and bring you closer to the ideal configuration mentioned above.
Test your backpack
At this stage, try to fill your bag with what remains on the list. Normally your bag should not feel packed to the brim: there should be just a little give, estimated at around 5% of the total volume. In plain terms, your bag must absolutely not be hard to close. This is a fundamental point: over the course of a long-distance hiking trip spanning several days, your load will be unpacked, repacked and rearranged multiple times. And on the trail, you may not have as much time as you did during your test phase at home to pack everything perfectly. This 5% margin achieved during the test phase is therefore essential to protect you from unpleasant 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 giant teddy bear is not in the "essentials"!) and make another cut.
After a hike, debrief your kit list
After a hike, it's useful to take stock of the gear you brought and see what you actually used. It's then essential to ask yourself some common-sense questions.
Was this item actually useful to me?
Does this item serve a dual purpose with that one?
Were there items I ultimately found superfluous, even though I had classified them as useful?
Were there things I didn't use, and why?
This debrief should be useful, enrich your experience and help you refine your judgement for future outings.
Top tips for reducing your backpack weight
When setting off as a group, it's useful to compare lists and tables to optimise things. If there are 4 of you, an item classified as essential may only need to be present once, not four times across all four bags. I've been able to calculate that equipment optimisation for a group of 3 or more people falls between 10 and 20% of the total load — which is not insignificant.
When fine and drastic optimisation is needed, you absolutely must think about reducing the individual weight and bulk of items: you could, for example, cut two thirds of the handle off your toothbrush, or take only the exact amount of body soap you need… And so on. These small adjustments should only be made at the very end of the process and should be treated as last-resort solutions.
Of course, this method is hard to apply for 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 for refining your judgement about what to carry. Try the exercise on short weekend hikes, for example, and you'll be surprised. Simply categorising things and weighing them makes you aware of the unnecessary load you might be 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 his 27 kg load, 11 kg were "essential", 7 were "useful" and 9 were "superfluous"!!! The choices to reduce the total weight were therefore quickly made, and I can assure you he was no beginner — far from it.
It is always worth opening your eyes to what you carry and equipping yourself with a methodology that makes it easy to optimise your load. Your comfort clearly depends on carrying less on your shoulders. Over the course of days on a long-distance hiking trip, this makes an enormous difference in recovery time, reduced fatigue, and also, potentially, in injuries and strains avoided. Reducing your backpack weight is not difficult in itself — it takes a little rigour and method, and above all a good dose of objectivity! Try to adopt this method, refine it, adapt it to your own preferences, and you'll ultimately find a welcome difference for your aching back!
