Fitness for Survival

Small Amounts of Exercise May Save Your Life
Exercise is important for your long term survival in many ways that include mental, physical, and cardiovascular health.  A new study indicates that even 12 minutes a week of intense activity can improve your physical condition by 10%.  What this means is that you have no excuse at all for not exercising for at least a small amount of time.   Even walking up and down the stairs until you are breathing hard is a good way to accomplish this task.

Survival benefits of this include improving your ability to handle a life or death survival situation that requires bailing out of a situation on foot at a rapid pace.  If you are out of shape the physical exertion combined with the emotional stress could induce a shutdown in the form of a cardiac event.  You hear about this all the time when an emergency occurs that some 40 or 50 year or man survives the incident only to fall prey to a fatal heart attack.  Improve your chances by improving your cardiac status.

Strength Training Prevents Injuries and Improves Performance 

An example of this could be with firing a handgun.  Some people do develop injuries from handguns due to muscle weakness, arthritis, and joint injuries.  Even a simple weight training regimen with a 10 pound dumbbell could improve your arm strength enough to improve your shooting scores and manual of arms performance.  Additionally, sustained firing of weapons does place a toll on the joints and muscles in one or both arms depending on how you practice.  Here is one site I came across where the author makes the case for weight training to train for handgun usage.  I agree with him though some of the exercises should be based on your needs so I would simply start with a dumbbell of minimal weight and begin from there.  If you want to get more exotic about it by taking on other forms of training other than curls or then start low and build  your abilities. 

Here is a study on grip strength that correlates the qualifying scores with a handgun and grip strength making the case for some strength training.


There are plenty of resources online to give your the proper exercises and techniques and some are even age specific.  If you are above age 50 you might check out dumbbell exercises for seniors.

Dumbbell Weight Training for Seniors
Dumbbell Exercises for Seniors

You could even search for sport specific weight training and while on that subject I should mention that taking up a sport that involves movement whether it is jogging, rock climbing, hiking, swimming, bike riding, basketball,  badmitten, or tennis can greatly improve your fitness in terms of endurance, strength, balance, speed, and agility.

Another thing is to use any opportunity to do exercises that need no equipment so here are a few.

The plank - this will build your core with nothing but you and the floor.

Here is a list of risky exercises and better replacements.

Do it now and improve your survival chances.  If you can't fight you can run and if you can't run you should still be able to shoot.  All of these require some type of training whether in the dojo, on the track, or at the range.   Train hard so you can function easily under pressure.