Training For The Apocalypse

I originally wrote this article back in 2015 for my site, Gritandteeth. I have updated it slightly to reflect a few more concepts that I think can be useful

Training for the apocalypse is a thought experiment to analyze the functionality of your fitness. The fitness most people are building is not applicable to real world stress, let alone a dystoptic future that can model capability as life or death. They've optimized for numbers that don't translate, on schedules that require abundance, in environments that don't exist outside the gym.

People love to talk about the end-of -days scenario, the apocalypse, or a reference of any fallen civilization that leaves all of us to fend for ourselves. It’s half-joke, half-paranoia. It's useful, though — it strips fitness down to the only question that matters: does this body work when it has to? The CDC and the Department of Defense have both run preparedness exercises framed around apocalypse scenarios (CDC 2011), so the frame isn't as silly as it sounds. It forces the question every fitness program should be forced to answer.

So here's the problem: after years of chasing one-rep maxes and stacking calories to "fuel the machine," most lifters are no harder to kill than they were on day one. They're just bigger, hungrier, and more expensive to keep alive.

Will a big bench press save you?

Strength does not make you harder to kill, and in all but a few scenarios, it makes you easy to predict. Strength as an asset is undoubtedly important to survival, however, strength training in modern times is not about the development of tissue that can be expressed in generally useful ways, it’s about specialization. The equivalent to a party trick. Its modern incarnation is represented with hardcore iconography and tough guy motifs. You can see it in the ads for bodybuilding supplements and pre-workouts. A lone individual, in a dark and dreary basement gym that has superb lighting and a plethora of technical machines for every part of his body he intends to isolate and make bigger. He has his hoodie up and looks determined but requires the perfect environment and precise chemical concoction to lift 3 sets of 10 on an incline bench press machine. This is what the industry wants you to think “hardcore” training is so you will buy overpriced drink mixes that make your skin crawl. But take anyone of these types of people and ask them to get more capable in an empty room, and they couldn’t do it. 

The powerlifters reading right now might be wanting me to make a distinction so I will. A 300lb deadlift and an 800lb deadlift both die the same way to a 7.62mm round. Again, this doesn't mean that high levels of strength aren’t useful but developing such specialized focus means deficiencies expand the more specialized and specific the expression becomes. In a very real way, an adversary becomes predictable. If one is heavy, and overly muscled, terrain can be used against him, because the cost of an incline or elevation means he will always take the easiest path. There is a balance here, but it is likely that “strong enough” is well below what is impressive on paper. Also, if raw strength translated to survivability, the most elite military units in the world would train at Westside Barbell. They don't.

The world's most selective fighting forces (CAG, SEAL teams, SAS, MARSOC) understand strength matters — but they prioritize something else entirely: efficiency. The bulk of their training is teaching the body to do work on minimal food and minimal rest. Rucking. Swimming. Calisthenics for hours. They are building soldiers who can carry 80 pounds for twelve hours and still function on the other side (Friedl 2018). At no point during selection does anyone suit up in a double-ply, belt, and wraps to test a max back squat.

This isn't an anti-strength argument. A baseline of strength is required for almost every endurance activity. But chasing maximal numbers outside of sport-specific preparation is a bad definition of functional. Strength is a foundation, not a finish line, because what matters in the real world is what the body can repeat — not what it can do once.

How we train ourselves to fuel performance is a weakness.

Caloric abundance is a performance hack that disguises itself as health. The more food a body requires to function, the more fragile that body becomes the moment food gets scarce. Athletes who eat constantly to chase top-end output have trained their metabolism to expect that input. Cut the input and the output collapses.

The Instagram protocol — "feed the machine," "fuel the engine," eat to grow — produces a body that cannot conserve energy. Survival is rarely about confrontation. It's about limiting exposure, finding water, finding food, and rationing whatever you find. Survival is metabolic patience, not metabolic horsepower. The opponent is almost always yourself: your needs, your appetites, your inability to wait.

This is the same logic that makes fitness work outside an apocalypse frame. The body that performs on less, recovers on less, and adapts on less is the body that lasts. Everyone else is one missed week from falling apart.

Get small. Go far.

Endurance is the survival trait. Far, fast, on little fuel. The average special operations male sits around 185 pounds (Sefton & Burkhardt 2016). That's not an accident. The strongest humans on earth are also some of the biggest, which means they need the most food and move the slowest. A slow target is an easier target. An injured big guy is a logistics problem his team starts solving by leaving him behind.

If the goal is to be harder to kill, weigh less, consume less, and remember how to wrap a splint.

“Crossfit is preparing me for the unknown”

The unknown is usually longer than eleven minutes. "Train for the unknown and unknowable" is a fine slogan, but the average CrossFit workout is around the eleven-minute mark, and the main site has rarely programmed efforts over ninety minutes in the entire history of the methodology. Our species did not survive 200,000 years on their ability to do butterfly pull-ups.

Worse, CrossFit disguises itself as GPP or General Physical Preparedness. But in application it has become a highly specialized sport. The same patterns, same planes of movement, in the same intensities is not variation. The utility of high intensity and moderate intensive gruntwork is undoubtedly useful, but this is rarely what you get in any of the 10,000+ CrossFit affiliates.

The unknown isn't a six-minute AMRAP. It's a 50-kilometer move under load, in weather, with poor sleep and no caffeine. It is hours, not minutes. The training that prepares a body for that is not the training that produces a podium finish at a fitness competition. Duration is the variable everyone wants to skip, because duration is the variable that hurts the most.

And now a take that everyone will hate; Hyrox is more useful than the fitness industry gives it credit for and that is because it requires a large aerobic foundation in order to perform. I agree that listening to people talk about Hyrox makes you wish a zombie would eat their face, and that training for Hyrox as a sport will eventually reveal deep imbalances and other deficiencies, but it is not the most terrible form of training when considering important factors for survival.

The slowest one gets eaten.

The real question is: how much of your training is functional and how much of it is actively working against your capability? This isn't a defense of cardio bunnies and it isn't an attack on the barbell. It's a reminder that the most basic human capacity — running far, fast, and efficiently — is also the one most people opt out of first. No other ability gets you away from a problem the way running does.

So when your training partner says running hurts their knees and migrates to the elliptical or builds a Venice Beach split, smile. There will be one more piece of human fodder between you and whatever is coming.

You don't have to be the fastest. You can't be the slowest.