Posture

ELIMINATING THE BACKPACK STOOP 
 

Aarn Backpacks and Balance Pockets are the most efficient, comfortable, stable and practical way to carry a load on the human body. They challenge traditional thinking on pack design and increase your comfort and decrease fatigue. Aarn Backpacks and Balance Pockets reduce the energy you expend daily on the trails. How? Our packs use patented technology and designs to minimise the force and load leveraged on your back.    

An Aarn Backpack and Balance Pockets require less energy as they evenly distribute the weight in your pack around your centre of gravity. 

You only need a total load of more than 6kg (including all your gear, food and water) to reach significant energy savings when using one of our Aarn Backpack and Balance Pocket Systems.   

Aarn Balance Backpacks maintain normal body posture, balance and movement by reducing leverages and spreading the pack weight around your body, meaning you can spend more time enjoying trails and less worrying about your pack. 

We base our Balance Backpack and Balance Pocket 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 

Stated very simply, a load-carrying system should compliment the natural posture and movement of the body, not disrupt it. This is what makes naturally balanced and body-friendly load-carrying. Add our U-Flow motion systems and your body agility is not compromised. The result is that you now flow naturally balanced under load. 

FOUR WAYS AARN BACKPACKS IMPROVE YOUR POSTURE  

1. Aarn Balance Backpacks maintain your natural upright posture. 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.  
2. Aarn Balance Backpacks eliminate the rearward force on your shoulders. 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.  
3. Aarn Balance Backpacks evenly distribute the weight on the hips. 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.  
4. Aarn Balance Backpacks allow fluid body movements. 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.

For those of you wanting a bit more in depth information: 

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. 
 

“The Porsche of packs” 
Patrick Rottiers, CEO, PROconsulting International, Christchurch, NZ