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Don’t take supplements to artificially enhance muscle mass, and don’t take recreational drugs. None of this will stand you in good stead post-event. Don’t obsess about having ‘six-pack abs’; this is neither important nor natural. Consider the utility of having a little ‘reserve’ around your waist, so long as it is not excessive.
On the long strenuous marches across the Falklands Islands by British Forces in 1982, carrying heavy weight and advancing on the Argentinian positions, it was notably the PT instructors that suffered and fell out. The ‘Gym Queens’ never do well: they are often either on supplements or have too little body fat to sustain themselves. So, don’t try and ‘get massive’ for its own sake and on the other hand, take a good look at you: for example, are you really a big boned guy, a big strong tough guy, or are you just overweight? Would you be better served reducing your body fat and being able to maneuver yourself better?
Blog Post
Keep Low, Move Fast – PT for Survival:
I often get asked about "How fit do I need to be to train with you." My answer is that you don't have to be very fit, because you will learn the basics, but that the fitter you are the more helpful it will be. I tell people that even if they are not moving fast on the ranges, they are still running through the maneuvers, the principles, and applying accurate fire to the enemy, thus creating and maintaining momentum. Let's be realistic - many people are older, 50's/60's and are still doing this tactical training. They will invariably not be as fast as when they were in their 20's, but they still need to be able to do the business if this thing collapses around us.
I find that some people try and lose weight in the time before attending training, and still want to lose more, and others realize while training that they are not in very good condition for tactical maneuver and need to work harder. This does not stop them training, and I see them go up the range with great heart, usually moving faster than you would think when you hear them complaining about their fitness level! Adrenalin helps with that...
When I am training students in fire and movement, because I am focusing on teaching them the basics and not simply exhausting people, I make using the prone position voluntary, most of the time. For me, it is fine to run through the drills using a kneeling position, if that suits their level of physical capability. Once the student leaves me, they can work harder on the fitness, the importance of it having been illustrated. I cannot however abide students kneeling in front of an active target (enemy) while, for instance, dealing with a stoppage. I will tell people to take better cover in those situations.
When people have got the basics and are working well together in their buddy or team elements, I will tell them that 'in the real world' if they want to improve their chances of survival in combat, they need to work on 'keep low, move fast' - by which I mean a faster speed of the rushes they make and lower (usually prone) fire positions in better cover. This can even include crawling between fire positions, rather than making short rushes (bounds), if the enemy fire is heavy enough.
So the message here is that to maximize your effectiveness and survivability in dismounted infantry / resistance combat, you need to be fitter. This will allow you to patrol, infiltrate, exfiltrate, stay alert and fight. If you are exhausted, you will become a slow mover. There are times when you will be exhausted but still have to produce the goods, and that is where determination and heart come into play. Why do you think elite SOF/light infantry style units place such a premium of determination, fitness and will to fight?
I am most definitely not talking here about the 'six-pack abs' steroid kind of vanity fitness here. It is also not just a young man’s game. As you get older, so long as you continue to fight the ravages of increasing unfitness and obesity, you will generate better endurance but suffer from lower VO2 max, which basically means you won’t be able to sprint so fast but you can carry a ruck for days.
When us old farts in our 40's, 50's, and 60's get going to fight, after the collapse and the onset of full-on lawlessness or tyranny, we will not be young infantry soldiers. But we are the gray foxes, the experience. We should have the maturity and mental determination to keep going and never give up. The more physically fit you are, the better able to will be to fight off mental fatigue when the going gets tough.
It doesn't matter if you have a bit of a gut. It matters that you take fitness seriously and work hard at it. One of the problems we have nowadays is increasing obesity, in all generations. Junk food, GMO's and all that. What better way to cow a population into ‘sheeple’ by making them lazy and obese and unable to get off their butts to actually put up a fight. I suggest you spend less time behind your keyboard talking on the ‘interwebz’ about liberty, and put more time into getting ready to be able to fight for it. PT, and actual tactical competence, will matter if/when it comes down to it.
Some of us are older; some have injuries and medical conditions. It does not matter, work within what parameters you have. I often get asked about this, and have commented in the past. But things like military standard PT tests and training designed for young recruits are not necessarily helpful measures. If you can run, run. If you can ruck march then do it. If you have to do non-weight bearing exercise like cycling or whatever, do so. One of the things I very strongly advocate is a generally active lifestyle, to include as much simulation of 'manual labor' as you can do. By this I mean activities like digging, which simulate the life of an infantry soldier. When I am out working on the ranges at my site, I am cutting trees, moving logs, digging holes, all day. This is great training. It does not help me run two miles faster, but it helps with endurance and conditioning. If you get a chance to dig out your yard, do so.
Don't kid yourself; anytime you are going to gear up and fight in combat, you need to be able to carry a combat load. This is your rifle, ammunition, your sustainment load of food water and shelter, plate carrier etc. Instead of complaining about it, ensure you are not carrying excess weight (ammo is not excess weight) and get used to it. You need to be able to move while carrying a combat load about your body.
You also need to be realistic about food and shelter. You are a modern American. Hopefully you are participating as much as possible in the outdoors camping/hiking lifestyle. But you still have needs. No, you are not on the Ho Chi Minh Trail subsisting off a handful of rice a day while squatting in the jungle. You are not an Afghan hill fighter in flip flops. You have basic sustainment needs. You need ammo, more than one magazine for your AK. You need food and water and decent footwear. Coffee. Logistics.
So leave off some of the more ridiculous references to guerrilla/insurgency movements and think about how it would work for real here in the US. Coffee anyone?
In summary, if you find yourself in combat, your effectiveness and survivability will owe a lot to your physical fitness and the ability to carry at least a basic load in and out of the fight. If, right now, you have work to do, then get on with it. Do not delay either physical or tactical training. Training can be adjusted to take account of your current state of fitness, so that you learn and practice what you need to know now.
If you are busy being a keyboard commando, telling yourself that you will somehow rise to the occasion when necessary, then you are in denial and kidding yourself. You need to get out, train and test your gear. You will be surprised at even the gear revelations that people take away after running through drills on my ranges. I quote this from an email from a student on one of my training weekends: "I know now that many of the notions I held before last weekend were naïve and foolish as to how to prepare to defend myself and my family".
Blog Post
Realistic Rucking:
I've seen some stuff around and about recently about rucking. I remember back in the day when I could ruck twenty miles carrying 150 lb. in about an hour. Ooops - BS Alert!
Let's take a realistic look at rucking. I did do an article not so long ago about extreme rucking on UKSF selection - but remember this is an extreme event designed to select
and is not to be taken as a way of training or a standard to aspire to.
Let's think about a couple of factors. I am now forty years old. I used to think I was luckier than some by getting out of the British Army without destroying my knees, but more recently I have suffered for it, it appears to be catching up. A lot of you out there are older, looking for ways to protect your families in SHTF. You are not of the age where you might be joining the army for the first time. You may be aged anywhere from your 30's to 70's. This means you may already have injuries and it is not a time to start destroying your knees or back.
The flip side of that is that you may never have done activity that would perhaps have caused overuse injury, but you may have gone the other way and destroyed your body by inactivity and fatness. That is also something that you need to try and fix while you can.
Why would we consider needing to train by rucking? Because we plan to carry arms and operate in the way of a light infantry soldier when SHTF arrives. That will entail the carriage of at least a basic fighting load of weapons, ammo and equipment. We may have to patrol, move or bug-out over varied terrain carrying fighting and sustainment loads. We may have to escape an enemy force while carrying our gear. So, there is a reason for it, and the more conditioned you are the better you will be able to cope, the more alert you will be, and thus the more chance of survival you will have.
I used to ruck for a living. We used to call it 'tabbing', or being on a 'tab'. The Royal Marines call it 'yomping'. Tabbing with fighting and sustainment loads was part of the selection into and the role performed during my time in the British Army. One of the things to immediately point out is that the athletic selection and conditioning events that you see and hear about are simply that. They are standards and conditioning events. They are not what you do when you go into the field or on operations. But, the fitter you are the better you will be able to cope on operations.
For example, part of the selection standard on 'Pegasus (or 'P') Company, passing which is a requirement to attend parachute training in the British Army, is the '10-miler'. There are other tabs with varying distance and weight to pass as part of the course. However, the 10-miler is historic because it came about following the jump into Arnhem in 1944 as part of operation 'market-garden' (of the movie 'A Bridge Too Far'). The Paras had to rapidly move 10 miles from the drop zone to the bridge. The standard for the 10-miler is 35 lb., water and rifle, over hilly terrain, in 1 hour 50 minutes. This is an 11 minute mile pace.
It has to be understood that this is a hard event on its own. To make this time, you have to run on the downhill and 'tab it out' on the flat and uphill. The technique is to take the longest strides possible, swinging the arms or rifle out to the side, almost like speed walking. If you are not conditioned, it can hurt the muscles on the front of the lower legs (shins), cramping them up. When you are 'double timing' it you are either shuffle-running or outright running downhill to make up time. When you are marching ('tabbing') you are not allowed to run, to shuffle, because it causes the squad to concertina and makes it really hard on those at the back - but you can run to catch up if you fall off the back of the squad.
The standard for the British Army overall is (was?) the CFT (Combat Fitness Test) which is 8 miles, 55 lb., water, rifle and helmet in 2 hours. This is a 15 minute mile pace. This is also achieved by 'tabbing' and shuffling downhill.
You have to realize that by doing this you are putting a lot of stress on your knees and other joints, including your back. This is not hiking. 15 minute miles is a 4mph pace which is actually pretty fast and most hikers will not sustain that over hilly terrain. As I mention in the SAS rucking article linked at the top, the required pace on UKSF selection is set at 4kmph as the crow flies (checkpoint to checkpoint). When you hike downhill, your knees take 8 x more mechanical stress of your bodyweight. Imagine that with a heavy ruck and running. There is a lot of stress there.
When I was training to go on UKSF selection, I had learned of the danger of overuse injury. I used to run one day, and go on a long cycle ride the next. I would then take time out to go up into the hills and hike. The cycling and the hiking are excellent endurance conditioning for carrying a pack over the hills. When I would hike, I would not 'tab' - I would not run downhill. I would just walk all day over the mountains.
Prior to going on selection, I attended a short prep course run at one of the Para Battalions. They took us out for a tab. It was very interesting, because the concept of the PTI who was running the training was that we would not tab conventionally. Conventional tabbing, walking uphill and running down, is the best way to efficiently get from A to B. But it potentially injures you, and overuse injuries are not good before turning up at selection. So, he had us running UP the hills and walking DOWN. Really hard work, but less stress on the joints.
It is apparent that you need to do some conditioning for rucking. But if you do you must balance that out with exercise that is non-weight bearing. If you run and ruck too much you are headed for injury. So, run a day, ruck a day, then do other stuff like swimming, cycling, rowing. Good hard cardio exercise that reduces the stress on the joints.
Pace: as already shown, some of the paces you see are not realistic unless you are prepared to run and bust a gut to achieve the sort of time quoted. A 15 minute mile pace with a heavy ruck is still achieved only by fast 'tabbing' and some running downhill. If I were you, training for SHTF, I would not concentrate on the speed. I would simply concentrate on 'hiking'. Just being able to carry the ruck for decent distances over hilly terrain. After all, once we move away from the conditioning events, that is what we are actually training for, right? Carrying the ruck on a bug-out or a patrol. I don't mean dawdle and pick flowers, but I mean set a good hiking pace and just sustain it, taking water breaks every now and then.
Granted, you may have to do a 'two miler' when you have to run with your fighting load to relieve another unit in heavy contact. But if you are overall fit, you will do it anyway. The best conditioning with a ruck comes from carrying that load up a hill, not running down it.
Ruck weight: I discussed this concept a little in this post about gear philosophy. You will be making a mistake if you plan to carry too much gear. Notice the weights that I have quoted for the conditioning events above: 35 to 55 lb., no more. UKSF selection weight is 55 lb. plus food, water and rifle. Even once you have conditioned yourself to carry basic loads by starting off light, I would not recommend that you go beyond 35-40 lb for your regular ruck weight that you train with. Yes, that is mostly for those who want to actually tab and get those 10-miler standards that I quoted above, but simply carrying a very heavy ruck has limited utility.
In the Para Battalions, the standard ruck weight for a Friday morning routine 10-miler was 35 lb. That is sufficient. Once in a while, mainly in Support Company, we would do 'heavy carries'. This meant much heavier loads, mainly achieved by going out and doing the 10-miler carrying the battalion support weapons on top of the 35 lb. weight. So, support machine guns, mortars, MILAN anti-armor weapons. Carried on top of rucks and shoulders. This was done very much at a walk. The purpose here was to condition troops whose job it was to carry that equipment dismounted. If you are not ever going to do that, why ever ruck with more than 55 lb.? Last time I was doing my own ruck training I was carrying 40 lb. and I was running the downhill, but I was training for an event.
My point is this: don't set unrealistic goals and don't head for overuse injury. It is not so important to listen to what people said they did "back in the day," but better to worry about what is right for you now. Don't try and carry too much weight in your ruck, and don't try too much running downhill to make up pace time. You mostly won't be doing that when carrying a ruck SHTF anyway, because you will be in a tactical environment. So, get the cardio and muscular system ready to tolerate the load, without breaking yourself doing it.
Weapons
“Excuses [Opinions] are like assholes, Taylor, everybody got one.”
SSGT Barnes
, Platoon (1986)
Weapons are freely available in the United States. Therefore, there are plenty of weapons for people to use against you. Therefore it follows that to defend yourself you need to have weapons, and the right ones. Post-event, there is no room for moralizing about whether weapons ownership is right or not. Weapons are a necessary tool of self-defense. For a soldier, weapons are a tool of the job; you get what you are issued. There is little room for being a ‘gun nerd’; save that for a hobby if you enjoy it.
At the basic level you just have to make sure you have the right tool for the job. There is no room for lengthy debate about this and that, and this widget, that caliber and this velocity and so on; some of that simply comes from being spoiled for choice. Make sure you have the right weapons for the job. Preppers will talk ad nauseam about the arsenal of weapons they need for this job and that job and all that. In addition, there is also a lot of nonsense out there about the capability of various firearms and ammunition. For example, the 5.56 (.223) is the US and NATO standard assault weapon combat round. It is highly effective in combat. For hunting use, it is often considered a ‘varmint round’ and sometimes not authorized for bigger game hunting. This does not make it ineffective. If you are struck center mass with a 5.56 round, you are not going to walk it off.
This is really the point here – there is a tendency to disappear down a rabbit-hole of debate about what weapons you need. For tactical use, you are best served by tactical combat weapons, but at a pinch anything you have will have to serve. There is an additional prepper debate as to the other uses that you will require weapons for, which can lead to a whole armory full of niche weapons. You need to buy what you can afford and can comfortably train yourself to use for the worst case situation, which is you being targeted and hunted by fellow humans. In a survival situation, you can always use those tactical weapons for other uses, which would be an imperfect solution in an imperfect world.