So, you thought prepping was just a question of doing some shopping, laying down the stores, closing the doors, and waiting until the inevitable calamity happened?
How wrong you would be! All the carefully stocked food in the world and all the gadgets and equipment you might have assembled is going to be precious little use if you are unable to keep up with the physical rigours of bugging out, fall sick, or keel over from exhaustion.
So how do you get yourself – and keep yourself – fit for the prepping that lies ahead?
Principles
However fit you consider yourself to be now – or even how unfit you consider yourself to be – the aim is to make yourself fitter. So, there are no absolute standards that you are aiming to achieve – there is no “now I am fit for prepping” moment.
Even so, it might help to have a few benchmarks against which to measure yourself now and the condition of fitness you are eventually aiming to achieve. Once again, these markers are likely to vary quite widely depending on who you ask.
On its website, for example, the Primal Survivor, suggests seven basic benchmarks by asking whether you can:
- Walk for 12 days while carrying a heavy pack on your back;
- Carry a person weighing say 10 to 11 stone across your shoulders;
- Carry in each hand containers each holding two and a half gallons of water from a stream to your bug out base;
- Scale over a wall;
- Get around on crutches;
- Run five miles over hilly countryside; and
- Swim 500 yards across a lake or other stretch of open water.
It’s no coincidence, of course, that measures such as these are the kind of activities that might be testing you if and when you find yourself in a real emergency or crisis situation. And that is a good way of setting your fitness goals – ask yourself what you might need to be able to do and, if you can’t yet manage it, keep practising and training until you can.
Looking after your body
Fitness for prepping is not only about physical fitness – the number of miles you can walk, run, or swim in the shortest possible time – but prepping your body so that it is in the best possible shape to face whatever rigours are to come.
One of the first favours you can do yourself is to stop smoking. Not only will giving up the habit lead to more or less immediate health benefits but you will also be able to cast off an addiction that is likely to become increasingly difficult to feed in any crisis situation – shops selling cigarettes are likely to be few and far between.
Your diet is also critical to your state of health and fitness. Strive to eat well, eat less, but eat better. To prepare for any eventuality, get used to eating only those foods you are likely to be able to get once life beyond your bug out zone gets critical. In other words, if you can’t already make it from the stores you laid down, if you can’t catch it, or if you can’t grow it, get used to not eating it now, urges The Prepared website.
Prepping might also be the time to reacquaint yourself with the virtues of a good night’s sleep.
Get into the habit of sleeping well enough and long enough to let your body have time to repair itself and grow. This helps regulate all-important hormones and assists with the synthesis of proteins needed for muscles to recover after a hard workout.
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