Can Any Backpack Be Used for Rucking?

Grab the bag sitting in your hallway, put something heavy in it, go for a walk. That's rucking, and it's a perfectly good way to start.

Two or three walks with whatever you own will tell you more about whether the sport suits you than any amount of research will.

What that setup won't do is carry you past those first few walks. Ordinary backpacks come apart under load, sometimes literally. The people who quit rucking in the first month are usually the ones who hit that point without knowing what was happening, and they walk away thinking rucking hurts when the bag was what let them down.

The honest version of the answer

Any backpack will hold weight, and any weight will make walking harder. That's most of rucking right there, and it's why the barrier to entry is so low.

So for a first go, use what you've got. Wrap something heavy in a jumper, pack it high, walk 3km. That answers the only question that matters at this stage, which is whether you like walking under load.

Rucking-specific packs exist for what happens after that, once you're going twice a week and adding weight.

What actually goes wrong, in the order it goes wrong

Every complaint we hear from people who tried rucking with an ordinary bag falls into one of four buckets. They tend to arrive in this order.

1. The weight sinks

Put a 5kg plate in an ordinary backpack and gravity takes it straight to the bottom, where it sits against your lower back and behind your hips.

Weight sitting low and away from your spine has more mechanical advantage over you, so it pulls you backwards, and you lean forward to stay balanced. Now you're walking hunched. It's uncomfortable at 5kg and it gets worse fast as you add plates.

A rucking pack fixes this with internal pockets that hold the plates high, flat, and hard up against your upper back, roughly between the shoulder blades. The plates physically cannot slide down. It's the design difference people feel first, and the one that changes the walk most.

2. The load starts moving

An ordinary backpack is a fabric sack. Load it heavy and it deforms around whatever's inside, so the weight shifts as you walk, especially on uneven ground or heading downhill. Every shift is a small correction your body has to make.

One of our customers described rucking with a loose dumbbell as letting a hunk of iron thump his lower back with every step. The real cost there is consistency. The load never sits in the same place twice, so your body never settles into a rhythm.

A rucking pack holds its shape because there's an internal frame running up the back panel. The frame stops the bag folding around the load. A sternum strap and hip belt then pin the whole thing to your body so it stops swinging.

3. The straps start biting

This is the one that ends most people's rucking. Shoulders burn, usually somewhere between the 20 and 40 minute mark, and the walk turns into a battle with the straps.

There's good research on why. A Swiss team measured pressure under the straps of loaded packs and found peak pressure alone explained around 85% of how much discomfort people reported. They also found the shoulder region is more than twice as sensitive to pressure as the hip region (Wettenschwiler et al., PLOS ONE, 2015). Blood flow through the skin starts getting cut off around 16 kPa, and most of the pressures they recorded under loaded straps sat above that.

Two things bring peak pressure down: spreading the load over more surface area, and putting denser foam between the webbing and your body. A commuter bag with thin, soft foam on a narrow strap does neither once there's weight in it. Soft foam compresses flat under load, and then you're carrying the webbing directly on your shoulder.

The hip belt earns its place here too. It won't take the bulk of the load the way a hiking pack's belt does, since rucking weight is meant to ride high on your back, but shifting even part of it onto a region that tolerates more than twice the pressure makes a real difference over an hour.

4. The bag gives up

Slower than the rest, but it happens. Everyday backpacks are built around a duty cycle of maybe 3 to 5kg of laptop and lunch. Loading 10kg or 15kg into one repeatedly goes after the stitching where the shoulder straps join the body.

Most bags don't tear dramatically. They sag, the straps stretch, and the whole thing gradually loses whatever shape it had. Then people decide their pack was never comfortable, when what actually happened is that it wore out weeks ago.

Rucking packs use heavier fabric, usually 1000D nylon, the same weight of cloth used in military packs and heavy-duty work gear. Fabric gets the attention, though the stitching does more of the work. The place to look is the shoulder strap anchors, where a proper pack will have reinforcement well beyond a double row of stitches.

What you put in the bag matters as much as the bag

Here's the part people skip. You can buy a proper rucking pack and still have a miserable time if you're loading it with the wrong thing.

Dumbbells are round and roll. Barbell plates are round, thick, and stick out from your back, which drags your centre of mass backwards. Bricks have corners. Sandbags shift constantly and go everywhere when they split, which they do. Water works reasonably well and has the nice property of being dumpable, though it's bulky for the weight.

What you want is flat, dense, and shaped to the back it's sitting against. That's why purpose-made rucking weight plates are cast the way they are: thin front to back, and taller than they are wide, so the load runs down the line of your spine instead of spreading out across your back. The handle slots mean you can load them one-handed too.

All three of these weigh 10kg. The round plate is about 40% wider than ours, bunches its mass into a band through the middle, and puts the whole load through one narrow point at the bottom of the circle. The dumbbell is roughly four times the thickness. Ours spreads the same 10kg evenly from top to bottom, flush against your back.

Our plates and our pack were designed around each other, so the plate fills the pocket exactly and can't move at all. On paper that's a small detail. On a 10km walk it removes the most common source of discomfort we hear about, which is a weight sitting in roughly the right place while still shuffling around.

How to ruck with the backpack you already own

If you're trying this for the first time, do it properly and you'll get a fair read on whether rucking suits you.

Pick the sturdiest bag you own, ideally a hiking daypack with a sternum strap rather than a school bag. Wrap your weight in a towel or jumper and pack it as high in the main compartment as it'll go, then stuff clothing underneath so it can't drop. Fill the space around it so nothing slides sideways.

Tighten the shoulder straps hard, so the bag sits high and flush against your upper back. If you can slide a fist between the pack and your spine, it's too loose. Clip the sternum strap if you have one.

Start at around 5kg and 2 to 3km. If your shoulders burn, stop and loosen the straps for a minute rather than pushing through, and cut the walk short. There's more detail on load and progression in our guide to how much weight to ruck with.

Pick somewhere you'll actually enjoy walking, since that matters more than you'd think at the start. Our guide to Australian rucking routes covers five capital cities if you want somewhere decent to try it out.

Two or three sessions like that is plenty. You'll know.

When it's worth getting a proper pack

The trigger isn't a weight or a distance. It's the moment you decide rucking is something you're going to keep doing.

The comparison we keep coming back to is running shoes. Anyone can run a lap of the oval in whatever's on their feet. Once you're out three or four times a week, the shoes become the thing that decides whether your knees let you carry on. Rucking works the same way. Past the trying-it-out stage, the pack is the equipment.

Most people start at 5 or 10kg and build from there. The usual ceiling quoted for experienced ruckers is a third of bodyweight, and most people are better off sitting well under that, so the 30kg our weight pockets hold is more headroom than the vast majority will ever want. The main compartment carries whatever else you need on top of that.

What we built into our pack, and why

Every part of our rucking backpack exists to answer one of the four problems above. Here's the reasoning behind each choice.

Two weight pockets set high in the main compartment, sized to our 5, 10 and 15kg plates and taking up to 30kg between them. The plates sit flat between the shoulder blades and stay there, which is the whole point of the design.

An internal frame running the height of the back panel. It's stiffer than a hiking pack's frame, because a hiking pack wants flex to accommodate a soft, uneven load. There's still a little give, since a completely rigid panel against your spine would be miserable, but far less than you'd find in a bag built for camping gear.

Closed-cell XPE foam in the shoulder straps, cut wide. Thick soft foam feels better in the shop and compresses to nothing under 15kg. XPE is denser and closed-cell, so it holds its shape under load instead of packing down over a season, and it doesn't soak up sweat. The extra strap width spreads the same load across more of your shoulder, which brings peak pressure down.

1000D nylon with reinforced stress points. Double stitching at every stress point, and at the shoulder straps and side handles a full anchor panel: a reinforcing patch of webbing stitched right through the pack body, with a bartack across the top. A bartack is a dense block of stitching worked back and forth over the same few millimetres, so the thread can't unzip under a sudden load. Look at an everyday backpack and you'll find the straps sewn straight onto the fabric. That join is where loaded bags fail.

Beyond those four, there's a detachable hip belt for stability and to take some load off the shoulders, a port for a hydration bladder tube so you can drink without stopping, a ventilation channel down the back panel that earns its keep through an Australian summer, daisy chain webbing for clipping gear to, and a water-resistant outer.

On the price

Our pack is $235, and yes, that's more than a backpack. It's the fair objection and worth answering directly.

You're paying for construction that survives 15kg going in and out several times a week, closed-cell foam that still holds its shape an hour into a walk, a frame that keeps the load where it belongs, and strap anchors built for weight an everyday bag will never see. None of that shows up in a product photo, which is why it's worth spelling out.

It also works out to less than a few months of gym membership, and unlike the membership it keeps working for years.

Frequently asked questions

Will rucking with a normal backpack damage it?

Eventually, yes, if you're loading it heavy. Everyday backpacks are built for roughly 3 to 5kg. Repeated loads above 10kg stress the stitching where the shoulder straps meet the body of the bag. Expect gradual sagging and stretched straps rather than a sudden failure.

Is a hiking pack good enough for rucking?

Better than a school bag, and a reasonable middle ground for a few weeks. A hiking pack has a frame, a proper hip belt and decent straps. The catch is that hiking packs are designed to carry load low on the hips and are usually deep, so a weight plate ends up sitting away from your spine.

What's the heaviest I should go in a regular backpack?

We'd cap it at 10kg, and only if the bag has a sternum strap and you can pack the weight high in the main compartment. Above that, both the discomfort and the wear on the bag climb quickly.

Rucking backpack or weighted vest?

They suit different jobs. A pack keeps the whole load behind you, so your chest and ribcage are free to expand, which matters more the longer you're walking. It also carries everything else you need out there: water, a rain jacket, snacks, a first aid kit. A vest sits tight to the body with nothing swinging, which makes it better for bodyweight training and quicker, more dynamic movement. If your main interest is covering distance under load, the pack is the natural fit.

Do you need special weights for rucking?

Not for your first few walks, though it makes a real difference once you're regular. Purpose-made plates are flat and dense, so they sit against your spine instead of pressing on it at two points, and they lock into the pack's weight pockets so nothing moves. Loose dumbbells in a bag are the most common reason people find rucking uncomfortable.

Do you need a rucking backpack?

For your first couple of walks, no. Use what's in the cupboard, keep it light, see how you go. That's genuinely the best way to find out whether rucking is for you.

Once you've decided it is, a proper pack is what makes it sustainable. The weight sits where it should, the straps stop being the limiting factor, and the bag is still going strong in three years.

New to this? Start with what is rucking for the basics, then our rucking for beginners guide. If you're worried about your back, we've covered that in is rucking bad for your back.

When you're ready, our rucking backpack is built for exactly the problems above, and the pack and plate bundles get you the full setup in one go.

Questions about any of it? Email us at hello@ruckaway.com. Happy to help you work out where to start.