Survival Skillset #3: Athletics

This is Skillset #3, Athletics, on my list of essential skills for staying alive in the wilderness. It is part of a continuing series the beginning of which can be found here.

Survival Fitness and Athletics

Athletic skill and physical ability are an important part of survival fitness. And with this, I am not referring to the normal sorts of sports activities we do, although regularly participating in something along those lines goes a long way towards helping out your cardio capacity.

In general, I am talking about real functional fitness that you will find yourself relying on heavily in a post-collapse world. Things like hiking long distances, swimming strongly, as well as the strength and endurance for constant physical activities and manual labor.

That’s right. I said manual labor. Survival and post-collapse living is not all about fancy gear and obscure skills like many prepper books might have you believe. It’s about digging holes, tending gardens, and walking incredibly long distances over rough terrain.

In a real societal collapse scenario you are going to see the world, and your life, change forever. No more driving around on even the most casual errands, no more internet, and no more grocery stores to visit when food supplies get low. You are going to have to walk, or bike, everywhere. You will be spending a lot of time working your garden, hunting and fishing in the field, washing clothes by hand, and even scavenging and repairing gear. No more 40-hour work weeks to worry about, it’s a 24/7 job now.

A fit, fast, and strong individual is harder to kill for certain, and they will not fall ill as much and will recover from it faster. A person who is survival-fit has a much easier time defending both themselves and others when the violence begins, and they will always have that as an advantage over a less capable attacker.

So, let’s get right into the things you need to work on.

Post-Collapse Fitness

Working to improve your general fitness for survival is one of the most critical and impactful steps for preparation that you can take. Absolutely nothing will be more important than your health and general physical fitness after civilization has collapsed. Yet most people ignore its importance in preparation, mostly because playing with tools and gear is much more fun than working out and improving your diet.

The thing is, health and fitness greatly improve your way of life right now, reduce your risk of having medical emergencies, and improve your odds of surviving after a crisis has taken place. After such a collapse-level crisis unfolds, you will no longer have access to accessible modern medical care, and your body will have to endure the hardships of survival life until you are able to achieve some sort of stability. Being out of shape and unhealthy already greatly reduces your chances of successfully surviving beyond the initial stages. Do not neglect your health and fitness.

Most of us are not nearly in the sort of shape we want to be in, not by a long shot. It often seems too difficult to stay healthy in the modern Western world, with its poor-quality junk food, sedentary lifestyles, lack of time for exercise and fitness, and poor scheduling around work, not to mention the sheltered and easy lives we have that do not keep us on our toes. Fitness is the main aspect of preparation that is neglected more than any other when it comes to preppers. Collecting gear and supplies, and of course, mastering survival skills, always seems to be the primary focus, but that is a mistake. Without the necessary physical abilities to endure the trials of a post-collapse world, all the gear and skills you have amassed will not amount to much.

That being said, there is no reason to starve yourself on bland food or become a professional athlete to get yourself into shape for survival. There are a few basic, practical things you can start doing today that will have a very big impact on your health with very little extra time or effort. There’s no special formula for survival athletics other than focusing on well-rounded functional fitness, meaning strength, endurance, agility, and mobility.

Getting yourself healthier is never a bad thing. Physical fitness even impacts mental health, and you will perform better at work, feel more confident about yourself, and even enable yourself to have more fun in life. Becoming healthier means you will be reducing the chances of complications like heart attacks, strokes, sprained joints, and broken bones, which are some of the most common incidents you’re likely to face in a SHTF scenario. The more fit you are, the higher your odds of surviving such scenarios as they unfold.

When the SHTF, you will quite suddenly need to do lots of strenuous activity, such as running and walking, digging through rubble, carrying your bug-out supplies, and later on building shelters and defenses. You will find yourself in the position of having to survive on less calories and less sleep. You could be in the freezing cold or oppressively roasting heat. What if you have to swim across a channel to safety? Climb a wall or fence? Hike up a steep mountain?

These things are not out of the ordinary, they are going to be a part of everyday life. You will need to be able to run fast and far to escape danger. You will have to hike for days with a heavy pack through broken and hostile terrain. You will spend hours and hours at a time doing heavy manual labor. And yes, you will, at some point, have to fight off some other survivor out to kill you for what you have. Maybe that sounds extreme, but that is just the reality of it. The rules of survival in a post-collapse world are brutal and uncompromising. You can either do it, or you can’t, whatever “it” happens to be.

So, like in every other aspect of prepping, you need to be ready. You get your supplies ready, right? And your tools and gear? You get your mind ready with all the skills and knowledge to survive, so why wouldn’t you get your body ready too? Depending on how things play out, your mind and body may be all you have when the SHTF, so do not neglect them.

Your body is going to feel the stress of whatever crisis develops. And stress is a massive strain on your body and a drain on its finite energy reserves. It makes you less effective and can trigger all sorts of underlying health issues. Physical stress in excess of your maximum capacity threshold will greatly impair your thinking and decision-making abilities. It can also make you more likely to be injured, and the last thing you need is to suffer from a preventable medical problem while at the same time struggling to evacuate from a hostile or dangerous environment.

Exercising is a way to purposefully put stress on your body, which is what makes muscles grow, and increases your general endurance. Being fit means nothing more than that your body has become used to stress, and conditioned for extremes, so it will perform better in a crisis. People are animals too, and you already have biological responses that will help during extreme activity. Things like adrenaline pumping into your body to outrun a hostile enemy, or using the fat stored in your body to make up for lost food. But those natural defenses still have their limits and will get weaker as you become less physically fit. The idea of survival fitness is to make sure that when bad things happen you are already ahead of the game with as much reserve capacity as you can have.

Survival fitness goals

In general, the goals of survival fitness are to improve your general health by reducing risks of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, and so on. These issues increase your odds of having a medical emergency when you can least afford it, and also make it harder to survive strenuous activity that you will no doubt be facing.

You want to accomplish improvements in three key areas: Strength, endurance, and agility. Strength will be needed to allow you to carry more gear comfortably and manage activities like chopping wood or building shelter. Endurance gives you the stamina to walk further, climb tough terrain, get by with less sleep, and continue going for long periods of time without wearing you out or suffering an injury. Heightened agility is necessary so that you can bend, twist, and balance your way across obstacles and through uncomfortable conditions. All of these will also play a big part in any defense as well.

Basically, you can consider yourself at a decent level of survival fitness if you can handle the following:

1. Manage to get by on about 1,500 calories per day with high physical activity.
2. Carry a 35-pound pack while hiking for 8 hours without being winded.
3. Lift a 5-gallon water container and walk 150 feet or so with it.
4. Drag or carry a 160-pound person for at least 100 feet.
5. Easily climb over a tall fence or large obstacle.
6. Run or jog a mile over broken ground.
7. Swim across an average river or pond.
8. Escape from or defend yourself against an average human opponent.
9. Spend the day doing manual labor without inflaming your joints or back.

This is just a short list to provide some context, and while it is a worthy goal at the beginning, the general idea is to be able to exceed it as much as possible.

General Fitness fundamentals

You don’t need to become a gym rat, or start consuming all sorts of gimmicky nutritional supplements to achieve the goal of becoming survival fit. Actually, some of that stuff can be counterproductive in the long run.

Think about the general stereotype of the strong “corn-fed” farmer. They aren’t all cut up and defined like bodybuilders or super stringy and lean like a long-distance runner, but what they are is generally more survival fit than either of those, or any professional athlete for that matter. Their fitness comes from real, daily, functional work, the normal routine of running a farm. Their fitness matches up perfectly with their needs because they conditioned it by regularly doing what they needed to do.

The general point of such an example is that if you want to get better at survival fitness, then you need to do the things you would have to do in those survival situations. And that doesn’t mean any complicated workout plan, it is actually very simple stuff.

Go out on regular hikes carrying your survival pack or bug-out bag. Get used to going out longer and farther each time or start including more steep elevation gains during the hikes. You can even start right in the city, something simple like walking to a grocery store for your shopping and then carrying everything home in your pack. Go camping and spend time chopping your own wood for the campfire rather than buying it or hauling it in. Head down to the local lake or river and go for swims along the shore or build up to making a crossing.

The examples go on and on, but you get the idea. And the bonus with exercises such as these is that not only does this help you get fit, but it also affords you with opportunities to practice your survival and outdoor skills, learn more about the environment around your area, and get familiar with some of your gear and tools.

There are some general fitness and lifestyle basics that you should try and apply to your life and your exercise activity. Let’s go over then one at a time.

Functional training

This is already covered in part above, but there are a few other details you should be aware of. With regards to the exercises that you are doing, keep functionality in mind. Doing curls with weights is great to improve bicep strength but try to avoid focusing the movements so much. You want to generally try and include as many supporting muscles as possible for each movement, which is what helps with functional strength over just getting big muscled biceps.

Bodyweight exercises are a great place to start, and excellent for maintenance. The bonus is that you can pretty much do them any place and at any time, no special equipment needed. Things such as pushups, pullups, crunches, and squats or lunges.

For weights, kettlebells are awesome for providing functional strength as opposed to focused lifting and are very versatile.

Even more important than strength workouts will be cardiovascular improvements. Increasing your endurance goes a long way towards increasing your survivability in most situations. Whatever you are capable of doing, one thing that is for sure is that you will be required to do it repeatedly and for extended periods of time. Whether that is running, swimming, climbing, or just walking with a backpack on for long distances, cardio will be a big part of it. Jogging, bicycling, whatever your preferred method, get that cardio work done. It will pay more dividends than anything else once the SHTF.

I won’t try and provide a workout plan here, this is just about general guidelines, and I am sure you get the picture. As above, the idea is to work out the same way you plan to work in a survival situation.

Proper nutrition

This should be a no-brainer, but you really have to eat better, and probably eat less. Americas are known for often eating portions that are too large. This is probably one of the main reasons why European nations have lower obesity rates than the US, even though the food we are all eating is mostly the same. Still, there is also a much greater tendency towards junk food here as well, and most of us are eating way too much of that as well.

Try and avoid ultra-processed foods, junk snacks, and candy, and please stop with the sugared soda! There is very little nutritional value to be had there, and certainly more harm than good. Try to eat more fruits and veggies. Complex carbs, like those found in grains and legumes, are better than simple carbs found in fruits or sugars. Healthy fats come from foods like nuts and avocados.

Again, I am not going to present some prepared meal plans here, but if you want to look into following some established diets it can’t hurt to take a look at the paleo and keto diet plans. They much more closely mimic the kinds of foods humans used to eat before civilization made us fat and lazy, so biologically speaking our bodies are built more for those types of diets. Furthermore, they also mirror what you might end up eating in a post-collapse world. No, it won’t be all “Iguana-on-a-stick” or “Crispy squirrel bits” but it certainly won’t be Pepsi and Pringles either. Find a good, healthy diet, and stick to it.

Ditch unhealthy habits

Still smoking cigarettes? Chewing tobacco? Get into the new nicotine vaping trend, or perhaps mainlining methamphetamine? Yeah, you should probably give those up ASAP. Not only are these some of the most destructive things you can ever do to your body, but they also create a weakness for anyone trying to survive post-collapse. You are addicted to something that will be hard, or impossible, to get after societal collapse. Remember, we are talking about things like food and water not being readily available anymore, how likely is it that you are going to find cigarettes? Besides, the use of stuff like this reduces your mental and physical potential greatly.

I used to be a smoker myself. And quitting wasn’t either easy or fun, but believe me when I say I feel much better now than even back in my younger days when I was smoking like a chimney. I may have been much cooler then, but I could now kick the shit out of my younger self, I can promise you that.

That about covers the basics of fitness and health, so now it is on to the “skills” part.

Athletic Skills

When it comes to the physical activity of the post-collapse world, there is a distinction between athletic skills and athletic ability. You do not need to be an Olympic swimmer, but you do need to know how to swim. The same can be said for all of it. Running, climbing, hiking, and so on. What is more important than improving your skill is becoming practiced at the ability and very aware of your own limitations. You will want to be familiar with how fast you can run, as well as how far. Your personal limitations are important to be aware of for planning purposes at the very least. In an example of a potentially hostile encounter with some very fit-looking individuals, it might prove better to try and talk or fight your way out of the situation rather than run from it if you know that you cannot run fast or far.

The basics are already covered by fitness, as we have already gone over, but there are other things that I place under the athletic skillset. Things that are usually considered “recreational” activities. Kayaking, basic horseback riding, skiing, those sorts of things. Part of being prepared for a collapse is trying to have as many abilities as you can. I am not saying that you have to try and master everything but don’t pass up any chance to learn something new. Get out there and do stuff and ask questions while doing it. Go river rafting sometime, take that day-sailing class you always see on Groupon, and don’t shy away from your brother-in-law’s ski trip.

There are a ton of things you can go out and do to improve your personal collection of athletic skills. And the bonus is that most of them are pretty fun as well. Again, just like not becoming a bodybuilder in the fitness arena, you are not trying to be an expert whitewater rafter or champion archer with this, you are just out to learn whatever you can about a wide variety of activities. But, exactly like the functional fitness above, try to focus on activities that you can see yourself having a use for in the post-collapse environment you are going to be in.

You can always take some basic classes for mountaineering, climbing, and rappelling. Maybe go out to the local lake and rent a canoe for the day and become familiar with rowing and managing one. Go for some river rafting or learn offroad mountain biking. Many times, you can find little mini vacation packages offered by companies that take you out on a tour like kayaking, and in the process offer some basic beginner training.

The important thing is to get out there in the world and learn how to do some of this stuff while society and all its protections still exist to keep you safe. In the future, there will not be a lifeguard on duty, and calls for help are going to go unanswered. You are now the one who has to answer those calls from your friends and family. Better be prepared to do so.