Carrying a heavy backpack may make you shrink
The pain starts in middle school. A 2010 study in the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which studied a small test group of children around the age of 11, found that the constant weight of the bag was actually causing spinal cords to compress and cause significant back pain. Those bags were on the lighter side of the average: only 26 pounds. It gets a lot worse with the average bag weight.
So funny story, when I was about 22 (I’m 26 now) I worked at a gym and we did this promotion thing that involved a local chiropractor doing the little spine scan you see above for free to whoever wanted one. So I was like well, fuck might as well.
Anyway, turns out my spine is pretty messed up and I lean a little to one side like the picture. Guess which side? To the right. Why? Because that’s the shoulder I carried my 20-30lbs backpack on for the 7 years of middle and high school.
The chiropractor just looked at me and gave me this knowing, slightly frustrated look and said something like, “Yeah, we’re starting to see this a lot in people your age.”
No one believed me but it’s real!!!
they’re actually starting to believe us wow.
As an AP student who walked to school everyday grades 4-12, let me say: the struggle is REAL.
I have a friend who, no lie, once got jostled in a hallway and fell over on his backpack. He couldn’t get up because of the weight of the thing and was left flailing helplessly like an upended turtle. That sounds funny until you consider what that probably did to his spine to carry a backpack that weight all day every day for 4 to 8 years. We actually had a rule when I was in junior high that you could not go to your locker except at certain times of the day, so if you had a heavy schedule (and we all did) you were effed.
Meg's Mumbles 