The touring upgrades that make life easier on your body

There’s a moment, after years of serious touring, when the trip starts to feel different. Not less enjoyable, exactly. Just harder on the body than it used to be. The climb into a lifted 4WD takes a little more effort. Bending over a chest fridge in the back of the vehicle sends a small protest up through your lower back. Kneeling at each tyre to let air down before a beach run leaves your knees reminding you they’ve done this a thousand times.
If your plan is to keep touring well into your seventies and beyond, have you designed your setup around the adventure, or around the toll that adventure takes on us over time?
For a long time, the touring conversation was all about capability. Bigger tyres, more clearance, heavier loads, further into the bush. That’s fine when you’re forty. But sustainable touring, the kind you can keep doing for decades, depends on something we talk about far less often: reducing the physical strain that eventually decides whether you keep going or hang up the keys.
The good news? A handful of well-chosen upgrades can take a genuine amount of that strain away. Not by making you softer, but by making the setup work with your body instead of against it.

The first hurdle is literally getting in
Let’s start with the most obvious pain point, the one you feel every single time you stop. A raised 4WD is wonderful for clearance and terrible for hips and knees. That big step up, repeated dozens of times a day, is one of those small stresses that goes unnoticed until it doesn’t.
This is exactly where electric retractable side steps earn their place. They sense the door opening and drop down a solid stepping platform, up to 300mm lower, then tuck away again when you close the door so you keep your ground clearance. Rated to 300kg, Clearview Powerboards are not a token gesture. They’re a proper step at a sensible height, which for anyone managing a dodgy knee or a replaced hip is the difference between a groan and a shrug. Think about how many times you get in and out on a big touring day. Now multiply that by a month on the road. The maths makes the case on its own.

The fridge is the back-breaker
A fully loaded portable fridge is heavy, awkward, and usually sitting far in the back of the vehicle. Reaching awkwardly in to fossick for the milk is one of the most common movements in touring, and one of the worst for your lower back. Add a lift kit and suddenly you’re stretching even further.
The answer isn’t a smaller fridge. It’s bringing the fridge to you.
A motorised drop-down fridge slide does exactly that at the press of a button, lowering the whole unit up to 290mm so you’re reaching in at a comfortable height. For anyone who’s had back surgery, or simply doesn’t fancy needing it, the appeal is instant. No lifting, no straining, no awkward twist while holding something heavy.
If you’re after something more basic, the Clearview Easy Slide gas-strut version achieves much the same result mechanically. Handle up, fridge up. Handle down, fridge down. Those big struts neutralise the weight so your body doesn’t have to. It’s a simpler philosophy, and for a lot of tourers, a very sensible one.
And if your fridge is an odd size, or you suspect you’ll swap it down the track, the adjustable straight slide fits most portable fridges thanks to its wide range of dimension settings. The point across all three is the same: stop lifting, start sliding.

The small frustrations that wear you down
It’s rarely the one big lift that gets you. It’s the accumulation of small, repeated annoyances, each one asking your body for a little more than it wants to give.
A few thoughtful additions take the sting out of these. A portable clip-on tray hangs straight off your Easy Slide to give you a working surface right where you’re standing, so you’re not carting things back and forth to a table or crouching over an esky lid. A magnetic cable saver keeps your fridge lead from snagging in the runner, which sounds trivial until you’ve wrestled a jammed cable one too many times. And an adjustable fridge cage lets you stack gear safely around the fridge instead of digging through a collapsing tower of bags every time you need something. Less rummaging, less bending, less muttering under your breath.
For meal times, a slide-out camp kitchen installed in your Easy Slide brings 74 litres of storage, stainless steel worktops and even a collapsible sink up to a workable height. Instead of hunching over a low table or a milk crate to prep dinner, you’re standing and working the way you would at home. Your back notices the difference by day three.

Even the tyres don’t have to hurt
Airing down for sand and airing back up for bitumen is part of touring life. It’s also a lot of kneeling on hard ground at four separate wheels, up and down, up and down, one tyre at a time. On gravel, in the heat, with dodgy knees, it’s nobody’s favourite job.
A multi-tyre inflation and deflation kit hooks up to all four tyres at once, letting you inflate, deflate or equalise the lot simultaneously. You set it and you stand up. It was actually designed to cut down the time spent bending and kneeling at each wheel, which tells you the people who built it understand the real, physical cost of the job. It’s a genuinely clever bit of kit for anyone whose knees have started keeping score.

Comfort isn’t the same as giving up
There’s an old idea floating around that gear like this is somehow soft, that “real” touring means doing everything the hard way. It’s worth challenging that head-on. Choosing a setup that protects your body isn’t surrender. It’s the thing that lets you keep going. The tourers who are still hitting the tracks in their late seventies aren’t the ones who muscled through every task. They’re the ones who set themselves up smartly and saved their bodies for the fun bits.
So maybe the real question isn’t whether you need any of this. It’s how many more good years on the road you’d like, and what small changes now might buy you that time. If comfort keeps you touring longer, then comfort was never the indulgence. It was the whole point.
If any of this has you rethinking your own setup, it’s worth spending an afternoon browsing our range and imagining how a few of these might feel on your body a month into the next big lap. Your knees, hips and back have carried you to some wonderful places. It’s only fair to return the favour.

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