Disclaimer:

This article is presented as an example only. The author is not a licensed medical practitioner and is unable to diagnose any medical condition or give recommendations on treatment of any medical condition. There is inherent risk involved with any physical training, and if you undertake anything mentioned in this article it is at your own risk. Neither the author nor SurvivalBlog.com are responsible for any injury that occurs while exercising under the guidance of this article. Please consult with a physician before beginning any exercise program.

About the author:

I've spent the largest part of a decade in the United States military, including deployment to combat. I've attended a number of highly advanced courses within numerous branches of the military, all of which have high physical demands. I've experienced the physical rigors of both real world combat, and successfully trained for some of the most difficult selection processes. I have real world experience with real world fitness.

Foreword:

How many times have you thrown on your BOB and walked more than three miles? How long did it take? Were you winded after, and could you repeat the effort numerous times in a single day? How recently have you dug a trench, chopped a cord of fire wood, fell trees, or hammered fence posts? When's the last time you carried cans of water, crates of supplies, or (God forbid) another human up a hill? My guess is that most of you haven't done many of these things, and unfortunately all of them are very real tasks, which may have to be undertaken in a "TEOTWAWKI" scenario. As self-sufficient people/survivalists/preppers, we have a tendency to greatly overestimate our own physical capacity. What good is your BOB if you can't move with it efficiently and consistently? What good are knowledge and skills if you're exhausted or too broken to enact them? My hope is that this article will give people a reasonable starting point for building a base of physical fitness, one that is both applicable to a TEOTWAWKI scenario, and sustainable in their current every day lives.

Scope:

This article will address only the physical training side of fitness. Diet and nutrition are beyond its scope, and there are volumes of information freely available about those subjects to the curious reader. This article will not detail what physical training (if any) should be undertaken in a post-event world, as that is too highly individualized and circumstantial. This article will also not detail specific physiological adaptations to exercise, as that information is also freely and widely available. This article WILL detail what the author feels are the essential components of fitness for a post-event world, and it will provide templates that can be used to enhance those components. The overriding purpose then is not to give readers a rigid, defined workout plan; rather it is intended to give the tools and knowledge to build an effective and sustainable program. Teach a man to fish…

Fitness – definition and standards

Fitness can be defined as an organism's ability to fulfill a particular task or role. Various organizations and establishments have defined the components of fitness in various ways, and most are valid. For our purposes, we're most concerned with the following (very simplified definitions):

strength – the ability of a muscle or muscles to apply maximal force

stamina – the ability of a muscle or muscles to repeat an effort of given intensity (muscular endurance)

cardiorespiratory endurance – the ability of the heart and lungs to supply oxygen and remove by-products of physical taxation

durability – the ability of the body to withstand wear and tear

Throughout time there have been numerous tests created to gauge physical fitness, and most of the time people default to those tests administered by the military. While these are valid tests, they are most often very basic and far from the be-all end-all. It is my opinion that you can come up with your own standards of fitness. which may be more applicable to your situation. For example, you may say, "I want to be able to walk ___ far under my ruck, in ___ amount of time. I want to be able to sprint 100m. I want to be able to fell and process a tree, and still function the next morning." Our first objective then will be to define a set of goals. Training without goals is akin to running in a hamster wheel. To give ourselves a starting point, let's first reverse engineer our primary objectives. In a post-event world, we will likely need to perform a variation of five different tasks

pushing (think pushing a vehicle that is out of fuel or a wheel barrow of dirt or supplies, for example)

pulling (dragging downed trees, pulling a rigid litter, or lifting stones, for example)

locomotion (simply walking under load, running to avoid animals or detection or sprinting in certain hostile situations, for example)

carrying (carrying cans of water or fuel or carrying stones or heavy equipment, for example)

swinging (a term I use to describe movements that require the dynamic articulation of the shoulder joints and/or hips, while the core works to stabilize the mid-section; think digging, chopping, and hammering.)

We can see from this list that every activity involves stabilization of the core to prevent injury and large muscle movements in the extremities. Each movement will also likely involve odd objects– ones that are not perfectly balanced or are uneven in some way, which is something we should try to replicate with the implements we choose in our training (more on this later.)