In any sort of disaster scenario we need to be physically ready to handle anything that gets thrown at us. Physical fitness for preppers is less about weightlifting, and more about endurance. It’s about being farmer strong.

Ok, when the SHTF your ready right? You have your bug out bag filled with everything you can possibly think of, you have a bug out location picked out that is only 10 miles away, you have picked a few different routes that you can drive there and a couple if you have to walk.

Or let’s say you have no plans to bug out and you have plenty of land to plant a garden, your water catchment system is top notch and you have some livestock that will help you be self-sufficient for a long time to come, so you’re ready for anything right?

A well thought out plan is vital to your survival when your life gets turned upside down. But running through scenarios in your mind burns 0 calories, and running for your life with a 50 pound bug out bag on will be far more challenging than you think.

SPP288 Physical Fitness for Preppers

Today’s show is a replay from a couple years ago when I had a friend Brian on talking about physical fitness for preppers. Brian is a retired vet, and a personal trainer among other things.

You can read more about Brian and what we covered in the show from the original show note here.

The Farmer & the Gym Rat

If you’re not prepared physically to travel 10 miles on foot, or you are not ready for some hard labor working on your homestead, your preparedness plan might not work out as well as you thought it would.

We don’t necessarily need to go to the gym twice a week and run on the treadmill with a backpack filled with 20 pound weights, but we do need to make sure our bodies are ready to handle the physical labor if it ever comes to that.

If you look at pictures of people during to the great depression you don’t see many people who looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Rambo, you see that most people that weighed between 100 and 150 pounds. These people were not exactly healthy because of their situation, but they could probably out work most of us today.

If I needed help chopping firewood or raising a barn I would pick someone who lived 60 years ago over the modern gym rat any day, someone who is 250 pounds of pure muscle might be able to chop down a tree faster than a 150 pound man, but at the end of the day that 150 pound man who is accustomed to manual labor will out work the gym rat.

Why is this? Because the gym rat is used to a specific workout routine that usually involves working out for an hour a day. The men and women who lived through the depression had to work 15 hours a day just to survive and had endurance.

Basic Training

The military is a perfect example of this as well, when someone chooses to join the military they go through hell during basic training. They don’t just work out every day to get buff and look intimidating,