- What's up my friends, I am Miranda.
If you're buying your first backpack,
you might be wondering how to find your size.
Now we often invite people to go into their local REI
and get sized by a professional.
But if you don't have that ability right now,
you can actually size yourself at home.
So I'm going to show you how you can find your torso length,
so you can buy your perfect backpacking bag.
Let's get started.
You'll need a tape measure and a pen and some paper.
If you don't have a tape measure,
you can use some cord or string and a ruler.
I don't actually own a ruler, so this is a level
with a ruler on the side, make use what you got, right?
So to find your size backpack,
we are going to take two measurements.
First measure we'll take is our torso length
and the next measurement is your hip width, so let's do it.
So the first step is to drop my chin to my chest like this.
And then I'm gonna find C seven,
which is this great big bone
that sticks out at the base of my neck.
And that's the starting point, for my torso measurement.
So, we'll take our tape measure,
put it right there and then holding it really in place
with my head up.
Cool, the base measurement of my spine
is the top of my iliac crest.
So to do that, I need to find my hip bones.
For some people, this might be really easy,
you just basically put your hand on your hips,
so that your palm is wrapped around your hips
and then where my thumb is in the back
should be tracing along the top of my iliac crest.
So I'm going to basically continue to trace that
in towards my back to keep my thumb at that marker,
I wanna stand up nice and tall
or try and make sure that this tape measure
is running straight down my spine,
get that thumb measurement, pinch it off
and then take a look.
I measured at about 17 inches,
someone write that number down
and then I'm going to do the exact same thing
two more times.
The reason we do this three times is that,
it's a little bit challenging
to get an accurate measurement on yourself.
So if you take three different measurements
and averaged them together,
I think you'll you'll be a lot more likely to come up
with a true measurement of your torso length,
let's do it again.
Now, we've done it twice,
now we're gonna do it third time.
Cool, so I took three different types of measurements
and I got 16 and a half inches, 17 inches and 16.75 inches
and then I'm somewhere in between there, wait.
The next measurement that I'm going to take is,
my hip measurement.
This is gonna be a little bit different
for men and for women but basically,
you're just looking for the absolute widest part
on this part of your body.
My wide section.
So now with those two numbers,
I can look at the size charts on packs
and find the pack that's right for me.
Let's look at pack charts, hurray.
So every brand does torso measurements differently
and on http://www.rei.com,
you can actually see the range of torso sizes
depending on the size of the pack.
So I'm gonna show you three different brands
and just how you might see a variety of different sizes.
So here I have the Osprey Aura AG 50 Pack for women.
You can see that it comes in an extra small,
a small and a medium.
So I'm gonna scroll down to where you see
these technical specs of the bag
and you might be tempted to look at this and go,
Okay, well the extra small pack is only 44 liters
and I wanted a 50 liter I'll just get the medium but again,
what we're doing with the sizing is finding the pack
that's going to fit our body the best.
So my torso measures somewhere between 16 and 17 inches.
You can see down here it says fits torso length,
the extra small is 14 to 17 inches as small as 16 to 19,
medium is 18 to 21.
I know that I need a size small pack
but just to confirm I can look down here
at the fits waist and hip and that's gonna fit
my waist slash hips completely fine.
If you're buying your first backpacking bag,
I would recommend looking for one
that has an adjustable torso length,
instead of a fixed torso length.
So something like the Osprey Aura,
where you can see here that the torso has a range
from 14 to 17 inches in terms of sizing.
This is the women's version, if we're looking at the men's
same kind of thing.
You can see the sizing is small, medium, large.
And then we go down here can see for the men
fits torso length 16 to 19 inches,
medium 18 to 21, large 22 to 23.
Let's take a look at the Gregory Jade 38.
So this pack is size a little differently.
For torso sizes you have an extra small,
small and a small medium.
So if we scroll down to the chart on this one,
you can see that it says that the small medium,
fits torso length 16 to 20 inches
and the extra small small fits torso like 14 to 18 inches.
This is where this can get a little bit confusing.
So if you are in the very wide overlap in this,
of somewhere between 16 and 18 inches like me,
you might be unsure what size you should buy.
I know that for myself,
I would probably end up getting a small medium.
I actually have pretty broad shoulders
and like pretty big lats,
I got pretty big lats, I'm pretty strong.
That's just something I knew about my body.
So I know that having a little bit of extra length
in the suspension system and the harness
is going to give me more space
for it to come over my shoulders.
Let me put you down.
So if you have a really broad chest,
if you're really muscular, if you have really big packs,
you might want to get the larger size torso
so that you can have basically the straps
can come over your body more.
With that being said,
a number of packs actually have interchangeable hip belts
and harnesses or shoulder straps that you can buy separately
from the pack or when you have an opportunity
you can go into local REI
and have them swap that out for you.
All right, let's look at one more let's look at
the REI Co-op Flash 45 Pack.
So this pack comes in an extra small, a small and a medium.
In this case, there is only a single measurement
on the torso.
So we have a 16 inch torso,
the extra small 17 for the small
and an 18 for the medium.
Again, since I know that my torso length
is somewhere between 16 and 17 inches
and I have measured myself at closer to 17 inches,
I'm going to go with the size small
instead of the extra small.
So this is why we do these variety of measurements.
You do this a couple times and you're measuring yourself
and then just kind of average all of that together.
Cool, so hopefully this video was helpful
and you're able to find, what am I trying to say?
How do you do these things?
What is happening?
Don't answer that.
Hopefully this video was helpful
and you were able to find your torso size
and figure out which size pack you need.
As always, you can read all of our REIs.
Awesome expert advice articles online.
I hope you all are staying safe out there.
That's it, have a great day and I will see you next time.