Ways to Lighten Your Backpack

By Allie Caton on September 14, 2017

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If you have ever experienced the pain of carrying around an overweight backpack, you know it’s not fun. You’re hunched over with an entire textbook arsenal on your back, spine threatening permanent disfiguration, and sore feet ready to give out.

Carrying around a backpack that is 20 percent of your own body weight can significantly deplete your energy, cause accidents, and cause long-term chronic back issues. Carrying a heavy backpack can also lead to more pedestrian-related accidents. Students who are carrying an overweight backpack cross streets less safely and have more accidents and close calls than students without an excess of extra weight on their back.

The injury is not worth the gains that might come with carrying around four big textbooks at once. But how can you avoid it when so many college courses require textbooks?

Because there are no lockers in college like there were in high school, it might be tempting to carry around every textbook you might need throughout the day — who knows when you will have a few minutes to squeeze in some homework reading? Luckily, there are more ways than just having a locker to help relieve and save your back from acquiring a hump at the hands of your heavy textbooks.

Save your spine by trying out a few of these ideas to lessen your backpack load.

1. Ebook

Ebooks are a great way eliminate the extra weight of a textbook and to save some money! You are most likely already carrying around your laptop or tablet, so getting the ebook versions of your textbooks won’t add any extra weight to your backpack at all. The portability of ebooks is great because it allows you to read them anywhere. Your reading homework can be done almost anywhere with minimal hassle.

2. Sharing

Sharing is caring! Link up with a friend in your class and share the textbooks with each other. This will also lessen the weight that you are carrying around and save you some money. Split the cost of the textbook and take photos or scan the pages that you need for each week or month. Reading textbooks off of pictures taken on your smartphone can be a bit tedious so scanning might be the better route.

It might take a few more minutes, but carrying around the individual chapters that you might need rather than the entire textbook will save you a lot of weight.

3. Just don’t buy it

Many times, the textbook isn’t even necessary to the class. If you don’t ever buy the textbook, it never even has the chance to break your spine. Instead of buying every textbook on every syllabus at the beginning of the semester, wait until you’ve had one or two classes to evaluate whether or not the textbook is essential.

Some professors only test on what is taught in class or go over in detail each chapter of the book. If this is the case, evaluate how you learn best to decide whether or not it’s completely necessary to get the textbook at all.

4. Identify storage locations on campus

Find places on campus that are safe to leave your textbooks at and pick up throughout the day. Maybe you have an on-campus job or are on the e-board of a resource center that is centrally located and feel like your books would be safe left in a cabinet there.

If you have a friend with a conveniently located dorm room, ask them if it would be okay to leave a couple books there to pick up later. Make sure that whatever locations you choose to leave your stuff that it will be safe there.

5. Break the book

If getting the physical textbook is unavoidable or the best option for how you learn, you can still lighten your backpack by breaking the book up. Take a big textbook and just tear it up. Break the book into a few smaller sections of about 100-150 pages and bind them so the pages stay together and in order.

You can do this either with bookbinding tape or just simple binder clips. If you really want to get fancy, you can make cardstock covers for each section, but this isn’t necessary. By doing this, you are cutting the weight of the textbook significantly down, and you can simultaneously let out some rage you might have towards a class.

Try out one or more of these methods to keep your back safe and strong. By doing so, you will be saving yourself a lot of time, energy, and pain. No textbook is worth injury to your body. They already cause us enough pain with 45-page reading assignments!

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