Torso length, hip belt placement, load lifters at 45 degrees, and the sternum strap. How to fit a Camino backpack so your hips carry the weight.
There's a moment on about day three of every Camino where you see it. Someone ahead of you on the trail, pack riding high up between their shoulder blades, hip belt flapping loose somewhere around their belly button, walking with that slight forward lean that says their shoulders have been carrying seven kilos for eleven kilometres and are starting to file a complaint.
I've been that person. On my first Frances I bought a pack because it was on sale and the colour was fine, and I spent the first week convinced I'd simply chosen badly. I hadn't. The pack was fine. I just had no idea it was adjustable in ways that actually mattered, and I'd been wearing it roughly the way you wear a school bag.
What took me embarrassingly long to work out is that a backpack isn't a bag you put on your back. It's a piece of equipment that transfers weight onto your skeleton, and if it's transferring that weight to the wrong bit of skeleton, no amount of "breaking it in" will fix it. Fitting one properly takes about ten minutes and it's the single highest-return thing you can do before you leave.
This is how I do it now, in order, because the order matters more than any individual step.
Torso length is the distance between two bony landmarks. The top one is your C7 vertebra: tilt your head forward and run your fingers down the back of your neck until you hit the knobbly bump where your neck meets your shoulders. The bottom one is your iliac crest, which is the top ridge of your hip bones. Put your hands on your hips properly, index fingers pointing forward along the front of the bone and thumbs pointing back, then draw an imaginary line across your lower back between your thumbs.
Measure from the C7 bump down to that line, following the curve of your spine rather than pulling the tape straight. You need someone else to do this, or a mirror and a lot of patience. A soft sewing tape measure works far better than a rigid builder's tape.
Most adults land somewhere between 15 and 22 inches. Roughly speaking, under 15.5 inches is extra small, 16 to 17.5 is small, 18 to 19.5 is medium, and 20 and up is large. Manufacturers vary, so check the chart for the actual pack you're buying rather than assuming your size carries across brands.
Why does this matter so much? Because torso length is what determines whether the hip belt can physically land on your hip bones when the shoulder straps are where they need to be. If you can't get the belt to sit on the bone, you've got the wrong size, and there's nothing you can do about that with the straps. Many packs have an adjustable back panel with a ladder or velcro system, which gives you a couple of inches of play. Most ultralight packs don't. Get the size right first.
Whilst you're measuring, measure the circumference around your hip bones too, not your trouser waist. Hip belts come in sizes as well, and a belt that runs out of adjustment before it's snug is just as useless as one you can't tighten enough.
Put something close to your real Camino weight in there. If you don't know your real weight yet, aim for what you're planning to carry, which for most pilgrims lands somewhere between 6 and 9 kilos before water. Books, bags of rice, whatever's heavy and to hand. Get the heavy stuff sitting high and close to your spine, roughly between your shoulder blades, because that's where it'll live on the trail and it changes how the pack pulls on you.
Then loosen every single strap. All of them. Shoulder straps, load lifters, hip belt, sternum strap, the little stabiliser straps on the sides of the hip belt. You're building the fit from scratch, not tweaking whatever the last person left it on.
Then buckle it and pull it snug. Snug, not strangling. Pull the two ends forward and out, evenly, until the belt is gripping the bone rather than resting on it. You should feel the pack settle downward onto your hips as it tightens.
This belt is doing most of the work. Something in the region of 70 to 80 percent of the pack's weight should be sitting on your hips, and your legs are more than strong enough for that. Your shoulders aren't. That's the whole game, and every other adjustment exists to support it.
If your pack has stabiliser straps on either side of the hip belt, leave them for now. They come at the end.
The tension here is the part everyone overdoes. You want the pack held close to your back, not pinned against it. There should be a small amount of space between the pack body and your shoulder blades, enough that air can move and the pack isn't grinding on you with every step. But the pack shouldn't be hanging back off you either. If it's swinging away from your back when you lean forward, it's too loose.
The test I use: pull them until the pack feels connected to me, then back off a click or two. Snug enough to stop it moving, loose enough that they're not digging in.
Pull them until they sit at roughly a 45 degree angle between your shoulder and the pack. Not 90 degrees, not lying flat. About 45. Their job is to pull the top of the pack in towards you so the load isn't levering backwards off your shoulders, and they only need a small amount of tension to do it.
Here's the test that tells you whether the whole system is working, and it's the best five seconds you'll spend on a fitting. With everything set, slide your flat hand under a shoulder strap at the top of your shoulder. If it slips in easily, and the pack doesn't drop or shift when you do it, your hips are carrying the load and the shoulder straps are just steering. That's what you're after.
If you can't get your hand in there, or the pack lurches when you try, the weight is on your shoulders. Go back, loosen the shoulder straps, and re-set the hip belt higher and tighter. Nine times out of ten the belt has slipped down off the bone.
Don't be tempted to crank the load lifters hard because it feels good for the first thirty seconds. Over-tightened load lifters pull the shoulder straps into the front of your shoulder joint, and after two hours that turns into a specific, nagging ache right at the top of your arms.
What you're solving here is lateral movement. Without it the straps drift out towards your arms and the pack rolls side to side as you walk. With it too tight you'll restrict your breathing, which you'll notice about four hours into a climb and not before. It should feel like it's barely there.
Last thing: if your hip belt has stabiliser straps, give them a gentle pull to draw the bottom of the pack in against your lower back. Gentle. These are fine-tuning, not structure.
If that's your pack, everything else still applies and the hip belt matters more, not less. Get the torso size right, get the belt on the bone, and accept that a frameless pack is less forgiving of a badly packed interior. With no frame, your gear is the frame. A sleeping bag or a folded mat down the back panel gives the pack a spine, and if you skip that it'll slump and sag no matter how well you've adjusted the straps.
Packs like the Osprey Exos 48, or its women's counterpart the Osprey Eja 48, sit in a nice middle ground for the Camino: light enough that you're not carrying the pack itself as a penance, but with a real frame and functioning load lifters. Both come in multiple torso sizes, which is exactly what you want.
If you've got a short torso and a narrow waist, which is a common combination, it's worth looking at brands that let you mix and match. Several manufacturers sell interchangeable hip belts so you can pair a small frame with a belt that actually tightens far enough.
Go in knowing that a men's pack on a woman's frame usually fails in one specific way: the belt won't sit on the bone because the torso is too long, so the weight migrates to the shoulders and the straps chafe. If a pack feels wrong and you can't work out why, that's the first thing I'd check.
I re-adjust constantly, and I'd suggest you do too. On long descents I'll loosen the hip belt slightly. On climbs I'll pull the load lifters in a bit more. Every hour or so I'll shrug the whole thing up and reseat the belt on the bone, because belts creep downward as you walk, especially once you've sweated through your shirt.
There's an old trick worth knowing: loosen the shoulder straps almost completely for a few minutes so every bit of weight is on your hips, then re-tighten. It gives your traps a genuine rest without stopping, and after twenty kilometres that's worth more than it sounds.
It's also worth actually weighing the thing before you go, because most of us are wildly optimistic about what we're carrying. A small digital luggage scale costs about the same as two coffees and will tell you the truth. The best fitting job in the world can't save you from a pack that's too heavy, and the general rule of keeping it to around 10 percent of your body weight exists for good reasons.
Sore, burning muscles across the tops of your shoulders means the hip belt isn't taking the load. Numb or tingling hands usually means the shoulder straps are compressing nerves, either from being over-tightened or from the pack being too long for your torso. Bruising on your hip bones normally means the belt is sitting directly on the bone rather than cupping just above it, or it's cranked far too tight. A nagging ache in your lower back often means the pack is hanging too far back, so pull the load lifters in and check that the heavy gear is packed high and against your spine.
And if it hurts everywhere, in a fairly democratic way, it's probably just too heavy. I say that with affection, having carried an absurd amount of unnecessary gear across northern Spain more than once.
Go in knowing that even a perfectly fitted pack is still a pack, and your shoulders will notice it at the end of a long day. The goal isn't for it to be invisible. The goal is for it to be unremarkable, so that by week two you stop thinking about it and start noticing where you are instead. That's a real thing, and it happens, but only if the weight is where it belongs.
---
Try asking My Camino Guide:
- How heavy should my Camino backpack be?
- What should I pack for the Camino?
- Help me plan a training walk before my Camino
If you're still working out which route you're walking and how many kilos you'll be carrying over which mountains, come and plan it with me. Happy to talk through anything.
I've been that person. On my first Frances I bought a pack because it was on sale and the colour was fine, and I spent the first week convinced I'd simply chosen badly. I hadn't. The pack was fine. I just had no idea it was adjustable in ways that actually mattered, and I'd been wearing it roughly the way you wear a school bag.
What took me embarrassingly long to work out is that a backpack isn't a bag you put on your back. It's a piece of equipment that transfers weight onto your skeleton, and if it's transferring that weight to the wrong bit of skeleton, no amount of "breaking it in" will fix it. Fitting one properly takes about ten minutes and it's the single highest-return thing you can do before you leave.
This is how I do it now, in order, because the order matters more than any individual step.
It starts with your back, not the pack
Backpack sizing has almost nothing to do with your height. It's based on torso length, and two people who are both 175cm can easily need different sized packs depending on whether they've got long legs and a short back or the other way round. I've seen tall people fitted into large packs by well-meaning shop staff who never measured anything, and then wondered why the hip belt sat above their hip bones.Torso length is the distance between two bony landmarks. The top one is your C7 vertebra: tilt your head forward and run your fingers down the back of your neck until you hit the knobbly bump where your neck meets your shoulders. The bottom one is your iliac crest, which is the top ridge of your hip bones. Put your hands on your hips properly, index fingers pointing forward along the front of the bone and thumbs pointing back, then draw an imaginary line across your lower back between your thumbs.
Measure from the C7 bump down to that line, following the curve of your spine rather than pulling the tape straight. You need someone else to do this, or a mirror and a lot of patience. A soft sewing tape measure works far better than a rigid builder's tape.
Most adults land somewhere between 15 and 22 inches. Roughly speaking, under 15.5 inches is extra small, 16 to 17.5 is small, 18 to 19.5 is medium, and 20 and up is large. Manufacturers vary, so check the chart for the actual pack you're buying rather than assuming your size carries across brands.
Why does this matter so much? Because torso length is what determines whether the hip belt can physically land on your hip bones when the shoulder straps are where they need to be. If you can't get the belt to sit on the bone, you've got the wrong size, and there's nothing you can do about that with the straps. Many packs have an adjustable back panel with a ladder or velcro system, which gives you a couple of inches of play. Most ultralight packs don't. Get the size right first.
Whilst you're measuring, measure the circumference around your hip bones too, not your trouser waist. Hip belts come in sizes as well, and a belt that runs out of adjustment before it's snug is just as useless as one you can't tighten enough.
Load it before you fit it
An empty pack tells you nothing. It'll sit beautifully on your back, the straps will feel great, and the moment you put eight kilos in it every one of those settings becomes wrong.Put something close to your real Camino weight in there. If you don't know your real weight yet, aim for what you're planning to carry, which for most pilgrims lands somewhere between 6 and 9 kilos before water. Books, bags of rice, whatever's heavy and to hand. Get the heavy stuff sitting high and close to your spine, roughly between your shoulder blades, because that's where it'll live on the trail and it changes how the pack pulls on you.
Then loosen every single strap. All of them. Shoulder straps, load lifters, hip belt, sternum strap, the little stabiliser straps on the sides of the hip belt. You're building the fit from scratch, not tweaking whatever the last person left it on.
The hip belt goes on the bone
Swing the pack up, and before you touch anything else, position the hip belt so the padded section cups the top of your hip bones. Not on your waist, which is higher and softer, and not down on your hips where your jeans sit, which is lower. The padding should straddle the iliac crest, with the top edge of the belt about a centimetre or two above the bone.Then buckle it and pull it snug. Snug, not strangling. Pull the two ends forward and out, evenly, until the belt is gripping the bone rather than resting on it. You should feel the pack settle downward onto your hips as it tightens.
This belt is doing most of the work. Something in the region of 70 to 80 percent of the pack's weight should be sitting on your hips, and your legs are more than strong enough for that. Your shoulders aren't. That's the whole game, and every other adjustment exists to support it.
If your pack has stabiliser straps on either side of the hip belt, leave them for now. They come at the end.
Shoulder straps: close, but not carrying
Now pull the shoulder straps down and back until the harness follows the shape of your shoulders. What you want is the straps wrapping the top and front of your shoulder without a gap, and the anchor points where the straps join the pack body sitting roughly 2 to 4 centimetres below the top of your shoulders.The tension here is the part everyone overdoes. You want the pack held close to your back, not pinned against it. There should be a small amount of space between the pack body and your shoulder blades, enough that air can move and the pack isn't grinding on you with every step. But the pack shouldn't be hanging back off you either. If it's swinging away from your back when you lean forward, it's too loose.
The test I use: pull them until the pack feels connected to me, then back off a click or two. Snug enough to stop it moving, loose enough that they're not digging in.
Load lifters, and the hand test
Load lifters are the two thin straps running from the top of the shoulder straps back to the top of the pack frame. They're the most misunderstood straps on any backpack, and half the pilgrims I meet have theirs either bar-tight or completely slack.Pull them until they sit at roughly a 45 degree angle between your shoulder and the pack. Not 90 degrees, not lying flat. About 45. Their job is to pull the top of the pack in towards you so the load isn't levering backwards off your shoulders, and they only need a small amount of tension to do it.
Here's the test that tells you whether the whole system is working, and it's the best five seconds you'll spend on a fitting. With everything set, slide your flat hand under a shoulder strap at the top of your shoulder. If it slips in easily, and the pack doesn't drop or shift when you do it, your hips are carrying the load and the shoulder straps are just steering. That's what you're after.
If you can't get your hand in there, or the pack lurches when you try, the weight is on your shoulders. Go back, loosen the shoulder straps, and re-set the hip belt higher and tighter. Nine times out of ten the belt has slipped down off the bone.
Don't be tempted to crank the load lifters hard because it feels good for the first thirty seconds. Over-tightened load lifters pull the shoulder straps into the front of your shoulder joint, and after two hours that turns into a specific, nagging ache right at the top of your arms.
The sternum strap goes last
The sternum strap is the little clip across your chest, and it's the finishing touch rather than a load-bearing part. Slide it up or down until it sits about an inch below your collarbones, then buckle it and take up just enough tension to stop the shoulder straps splaying outward.What you're solving here is lateral movement. Without it the straps drift out towards your arms and the pack rolls side to side as you walk. With it too tight you'll restrict your breathing, which you'll notice about four hours into a climb and not before. It should feel like it's barely there.
Last thing: if your hip belt has stabiliser straps, give them a gentle pull to draw the bottom of the pack in against your lower back. Gentle. These are fine-tuning, not structure.
When your pack doesn't have load lifters
A lot of the packs pilgrims are buying now, especially the sub-one-kilo ultralight ones, either have token load lifters or none at all. That's not a defect. Below about 9 or 10 kilos there simply isn't enough leverage for them to matter much, and the designers have left them off to save weight.If that's your pack, everything else still applies and the hip belt matters more, not less. Get the torso size right, get the belt on the bone, and accept that a frameless pack is less forgiving of a badly packed interior. With no frame, your gear is the frame. A sleeping bag or a folded mat down the back panel gives the pack a spine, and if you skip that it'll slump and sag no matter how well you've adjusted the straps.
Packs like the Osprey Exos 48, or its women's counterpart the Osprey Eja 48, sit in a nice middle ground for the Camino: light enough that you're not carrying the pack itself as a penance, but with a real frame and functioning load lifters. Both come in multiple torso sizes, which is exactly what you want.
Women's fit isn't a marketing exercise
I've heard people dismiss women's specific packs as the same bag in a different colour, and it's just not true. The differences are structural. The shoulder straps sit closer together at the neck and curve outward in an S shape so they clear the chest rather than compressing it, the hip belt is angled and flared to match a different pelvic shape, and the torso sizes run shorter across the range.If you've got a short torso and a narrow waist, which is a common combination, it's worth looking at brands that let you mix and match. Several manufacturers sell interchangeable hip belts so you can pair a small frame with a belt that actually tightens far enough.
Go in knowing that a men's pack on a woman's frame usually fails in one specific way: the belt won't sit on the bone because the torso is too long, so the weight migrates to the shoulders and the straps chafe. If a pack feels wrong and you can't work out why, that's the first thing I'd check.
The fit isn't a one-time thing
Your pack changes weight all day. You start the morning with two litres of water and finish with none, you buy bread and cheese in the afternoon, and things settle and shift as you walk. A fit that was perfect at 7am in the albergue courtyard won't be perfect at 2pm.I re-adjust constantly, and I'd suggest you do too. On long descents I'll loosen the hip belt slightly. On climbs I'll pull the load lifters in a bit more. Every hour or so I'll shrug the whole thing up and reseat the belt on the bone, because belts creep downward as you walk, especially once you've sweated through your shirt.
There's an old trick worth knowing: loosen the shoulder straps almost completely for a few minutes so every bit of weight is on your hips, then re-tighten. It gives your traps a genuine rest without stopping, and after twenty kilometres that's worth more than it sounds.
It's also worth actually weighing the thing before you go, because most of us are wildly optimistic about what we're carrying. A small digital luggage scale costs about the same as two coffees and will tell you the truth. The best fitting job in the world can't save you from a pack that's too heavy, and the general rule of keeping it to around 10 percent of your body weight exists for good reasons.
What getting it wrong feels like
Pain is diagnostic, so it's worth knowing what your body is telling you.Sore, burning muscles across the tops of your shoulders means the hip belt isn't taking the load. Numb or tingling hands usually means the shoulder straps are compressing nerves, either from being over-tightened or from the pack being too long for your torso. Bruising on your hip bones normally means the belt is sitting directly on the bone rather than cupping just above it, or it's cranked far too tight. A nagging ache in your lower back often means the pack is hanging too far back, so pull the load lifters in and check that the heavy gear is packed high and against your spine.
And if it hurts everywhere, in a fairly democratic way, it's probably just too heavy. I say that with affection, having carried an absurd amount of unnecessary gear across northern Spain more than once.
Ten minutes now, or 800 kilometres of regret
I would highly suggest doing this properly at home, with weight in the pack, before you fly anywhere. Then do it again after a couple of training walks, because your first attempt will be slightly wrong and you won't know how until you've walked in it.Go in knowing that even a perfectly fitted pack is still a pack, and your shoulders will notice it at the end of a long day. The goal isn't for it to be invisible. The goal is for it to be unremarkable, so that by week two you stop thinking about it and start noticing where you are instead. That's a real thing, and it happens, but only if the weight is where it belongs.
---
Try asking My Camino Guide:
- How heavy should my Camino backpack be?
- What should I pack for the Camino?
- Help me plan a training walk before my Camino
If you're still working out which route you're walking and how many kilos you'll be carrying over which mountains, come and plan it with me. Happy to talk through anything.
