This is an update to a piece I wrote years ago for Survivalblog.com. A few people disagreed with some of my points — but survivalblog isn’t much of a forum and responding to them didn’t wasn’t possible (in truth I didn’t even know about their comments until now). This is a complete rewrite, using only the base ideas from that article.

Gaining These Skills is Hard

This article is about how to prepare your body for survival. There is a lot of info about gear for survival, even some about skills, but damned little about how to make your body ready. I’m going to be talking about that, about how to get in the kind of shape that will allow you to survive when things go very wrong. Your shelter could burn to the ground; your home base could be compromised; you could find yourself cut off and unable to reach your base.

The Skills

Below you will find a list of some skills and exercises I believe are essential in terms of body maintenance. These are purely how to make your body work for you, not how to survive in the wilderness.

Walking

Running

Cardio

Climbing

Parkour

Swimming

Martial Arts

Weightlifting

The Most Important Skill — Walking

Walking is king. There is no other survival skill that beats walking. In an emergency, the ability to walk long distances is imperative. It seems silly, I mean most people can walk right?

Quite a few years ago, I started hiking. It didn’t take long before I went from being able to walk a few blocks to being able to go a very long distance. That seems to be fairly universal. When we start walking, it is reasonably quick to gain the ability to make miles. The key is to start slowly. Don’t go for vast distances right off, build up gradually.

Walking isn’t fast, it’s a damned slow way to get anywhere, but it will get you there in time, and if you are used to it, you will get there safely.

Footwear

A lot of people make a big deal out of the shoes you wear for walking. If you ask most people what you should wear they will say a good pair of boots. I’m going to recommend that you at least gain the ability to walk without a good pair of boots. They are another thing that will wear out. The only footwear that regenerates when it wears out is your bare feet. Now, that’s highly environment and weather dependent (obviously if you are walking in the snow barefoot is a bad plan), but feet are much more capable than most people think.

There are parts of the world where owning a pair of shoes is rare, and most people go barefoot. Those people walk on hot pavement, stones, packed earth, etc. They do just fine. The thing is, it takes a long time to condition your feet for that. Most people in North America have almost no muscles in the arch of their feet. You can’t go from having your arches supported all the time to suddenly walking without arch support for days and days (please note: the linked article is by a shoe company — I don’t have any affiliate status with them so gain nothing from it but do take it with a grain of salt and confirm for yourself). Work up to walking barefoot. Start by doing it every once in a while, for a little bit. Do enough that the arches of your feet feel it but pay close attention to how much they feel it.

Stretch your toes. They are probably stiff from a lifetime of not getting to move very well.

Walk often. Build up the distance over time.

Running

Running is the next skill in terms of importance.

Humans evolved as persistence hunters. We evolved doing a forefoot or midfoot strike. What that means is that when your foot comes down, it comes down on the front of the foot or the middle, not the heel. This is counter to how we are usually taught to run in western countries, but it’s what we evolved to do, and there is evidence that it’s better for our knees and for sustainability. If you run with minimal footwear like the Nike Free (there are a lot of other options these days), you will find yourself moving to a forefoot or midfoot strike.

The evidence for forefoot or midfoot strike is still considered controversial. What is clear is that a forefoot or midfoot strike isn’t harmful. The proof that it’s helpful is evidence I find compelling (there was an excellent study on gait in long distance running out of Harvard medical that I found particularly convincing), but I’m not a doctor or kinesthesiologist.

My preference is for a minimal shoe, very strongly. I have knee issues due to an injury sparring, and I find minimal shoes work much better for me.

Run, but go for distance. Follow something like C25K to start yourself off. That will build up your abilities slowly, not pushing yourself too hard right away. All of the skills I mention here require gradual training — no sudden jumping into anything.

Breathing exclusively through your nose seems like it might be better for you than breathing through both your nose and mouth as most people in North America are taught these days. I find it makes it easier to breathe in the cold, but I also can’t always manage it. When I’m fatigued, I gasp. I’m working on it. When I do manage it though I keep my wind a lot longer and can run much further.

Humans in our past (and in some parts of the world now) run a hundred kilometres a day, every day, for incredibly long stretches. Because we sweat, we can keep ourselves from overheating exceptionally effectively.

Cardio

The better condition your heart is in, the longer you can go without a rest. Running is one of the best forms of cardio, but many will also serve. Biking is excellent, rowing, anything that ups your heart rate. Also, it will help you avoid zombies — at least that’s what rewatching Zombieland far too many times has taught me!

Climbing

Climbing is one of those combined things. It gives you cardio, it makes you strong, and it lets you get places that you can’t otherwise. Climbing is a great wilderness activity (provided you take the correct safety precautions) or you can do it at an indoor gym (where they will make you take safety precautions).

It can also get you out of a lot of situations that you don’t want to be stuck in. If you are lost in the woods sometimes climbing is your best option, if you know how to do it that is.

Parkour

That’s me in the photo

I love parkour, and I am a practitioner (called a traceur in the parkour community). Parkour is the fine art of running away very efficiently. Running away is the best form of self-defence.

The idea that Parkour is about running away is a bit of a joke (not entirely, it’s great for running away, but it is suitable for more than that). Parkour is about overcoming obstacles. It teaches you how to jump, roll, climb, etc. You can get past a large number of terrains that would be close to completely inaccessible if you have strong parkour skills.

In the original article, Rawles states that parkour requires foot protection. I have done parkour barefoot and usually do it wearing minimal shoes. There is ample evidence that using overly padded shoes is detrimental to parkour. Unfortunately, I can’t find my sources right now — it’s been a few years since I read them, but the article linked above on foot strike patterns back this up. When your heel hits the ground force transfers to it, even if you are wearing padded footwear, not saying don’t protect your feet at all, but work up to the level you want while using minimalist footwear. I used to train wearing a pair of Vibram Five Fingers (the creepy toe shoes) and have also trained in tabi boots. My usual shoes were Nike Free’s, but they do tend to shred to pieces pretty quickly, which can get pricy.

Parkour is about gradual improvement. To train landings, you make the motions of the landing without jumping until you can do them a hundred times in a row correctly. Then you jump a little. When you can do that a hundred times in a row perfectly you go to a flight of stairs and go up the first step, jumping off of that. Then the second step once you have mastered the first step.

If you don’t know if you can be precise on a jump from one railing to another, you practice a jump of the same distance on flat ground. When you can do that a hundred times in a row correctly, you try the real jump.

Find a community where you live or seek out people online. One thing — the original philosophy of parkour included the note that flips are not parkour. Flips are fine, they look cool, the founder of parkour even does them from time to time, but he also points out that parkour is about efficiently overcoming obstacles and flips are inefficient. If people acknowledge this, they are probably pedantic dicks, but they are also probably going to take the whole gradual progression and safety part very seriously. If they don’t, they might not be as careful in that department.

Swimming

Go for distance over style when it comes to swimming. Being a stronger swimmer is never a bad thing, but for most purposes being able to go a long way without drowning is the most important aspect.

I would talk about gear, but this is swimming. Most people don’t have equipment other than goggles and a swimsuit. You may never need it, but if you do have to swim to stay alive, it’s way better not to start learning right at that moment.

When I was training to SCUBA dive, we had to swim a long distance right off. It was before anything else. I learned in the third world, so it wasn’t all that regimented. My dive master pointed and said, “see that rock?”

“No,” I squinted into the distance, shading my eyes with my hand.

The divemaster handed me a pair of binoculars and said, “How about now?”

I swam to the rock and back. It took me a really, really long time. Because of that, I know that I can swim for a long distance and not drown. I won’t do it fast or pretty. I can even do it carrying some gear (not a huge amount, like I said I’m not the greatest swimmer — it’s an area I’m working on).

Martial Arts

In the original version of this article, I went into a lot of detail about specific martial arts. There are a couple of things I was wrong about at the time — so I’m going to correct them. After that, I’m going to take a different approach to martial arts.

Taekwondo has statistically one of the strongest kicks, but any individual may be different — at least according to an old episode of fight science I watched. Muay Thai has a stronger roundhouse on average than Taekwondo.

Other than that — it doesn’t matter what martial art you learn. The critical thing is to learn a martial art in a situation that has live sparring. If you don’t test your skills against opponents who are trying to fight against you, then you don’t know if they actually work or how they might fail.

You should learn a standing art that involves striking, a wrestling art that allows you to bring people to the ground, and a grappling art that will enable you to be effective on the ground. A common trio consists of Muay Thai, Greco-Roman Wrestling, and Brazillian Ju-Jitsu. That doesn’t mean that is the best combination possible and a lot will depend on the teachers you have available to you. Right now, all three of those arts are often taught against resisting opponents with lots and lots of practical sparring, but there are schools now that are watering them down.

Now, the reality is that if you are forced to fight somebody with your hands, something has gone terribly wrong. I still support learning the skillset because it will give you self confidence and a kind of fitness I haven’t seen elsewhere. It also gives you a large mental toolkit to draw from.

Resistance Training

Strong muscles are efficient muscles. Some degree of weight training makes a lot of sense. I’m going to give you what I use and why I use it, then I’m going to explain why that might not be the best option possible.

What I do

I was taught weight training with the principle of rapid muscle exhaustion. The idea is to make sure your muscles are under maximum load for around two minutes per exercise, with no more than four or five different kinds of exercise per session. Total time is going to be under twenty minutes.

This routine requires someone spotting you and that person is very active. You start by selecting a machine. There are no free weights in this routine. It’s too dangerous with free weights. Say you choose the chest press. You set the weight to whatever the maximum you can manage is (this will take some time to find, start lower and then work up). Each rep you do will involve moving the weight in one direction for ten seconds, then the opposite direction for the same. In the case of the chest press that is pushing for ten seconds then slowly lower the weight for ten seconds. This means you are moving slow. Far slower than you expect you will. Your spotter should count the time and the reps, making sure you are doing it correctly. You have an appropriate amount of weight if you can do between six and nine reps. If you can do ten, you don’t have enough weight. If you can’t do six, you have too much. There is no time in transition, no rest at all. You don’t quite fully extend your arms, just almost. Your arms should be right before the point where you could lock them when you smoothly switch direction. You also stop just before the plates touch on the in and seamlessly transition without pause to pushing.

You need to breathe the whole time you are training. This is why you don’t count your own reps or time them. You need to time each breath — a full four seconds in, then four seconds out.

This will be brutal. You will discover that you are working with a much lower weight than you are used to. It will hurt your ego. It will also make you much stronger very quickly.

Why that might not be the best

First: I’m not exactly winning bodybuilding competitions. I’m strong, or at least somewhat strong. Now, that may also be due to my lack of dedication — I work out far more sporadically than I should.

Second: My advice here is based entirely on the system that I was taught. There are many others. People swear by them. I don’t know that mine is the best. It seems to me like it is, but there are many, many reasons why I might feel that. Most of those reasons are because it fits the way I like to work out. I prefer something short and intense, that gives rapid results.

Then there’s the whole thing where this requires a very dedicated spotter/partner. If you don’t have that you are putting yourself in danger. I work to failure. By the end of my routine, I can’t move the weight at all. The odds of me dropping it are pretty decent.

Finally, there’s the argument for free weights and compound movements. My exercises are very isolated. Free weights mean you have to use a bunch of other muscles for stability. There is a strong case you could make that those stabilizing muscles are very important and that isolation is bad. Compound movements are another step in the natural movement direction. When you do a compound movement, you are moving all of your body. You are mimicking the way we move naturally, but with a higher load. I have heard many people argue that this kind of movement is what is best for our bodies and I can’t refute it. I’m tempted by it. A lot of kettlebell exercises fit that category, moving more of your body in a more natural way.

Putting it all together

This list will give you a body that is both strong and capable. There are some specific areas where you might disagree, but your body is the one tool you have at the end of it all. The average prepper isn’t going to let their knife get dull; why let your body get dull?

Also, a lot of this stuff is fun. I love running; I love hiking. I love martial arts, I tolerate weight lifting. I love swimming if the water is warm. It’s good for the soul as well as the body.