Your health account, your bank account, they’re the same thing. The more you put in, the more you can take out. Exercise is king and nutrition is queen. Together you have a kingdom.
I truly feel that one of the biggest shortcomings in the gun-owning world is a lack of focus on physical capability. When you look at it, though, our physical fitness underpins nearly every activity we do. Strength helps you carry heavy loads for hunting and hiking. Cardiovascular health helps you be more accurate and recover quicker from exertion during a hunt or match stage.
Muscle mass helps you survive longer when the situation grows dire.
Since the Everyday Marksman community emphasizes taking action, I want to make sure you have the resources and tools to own your physical fitness and improve upon it. Here you will find all of my articles, podcasts, and challenges related to your physical capabilities.
If you haven’t tested yourself against a Marksman Challenge, be sure to check one of them out and lets us know how you did over in the community forum.
/// Test Yourself
We all need objective standards to hold ourselves to, it gives us a direction to train for and a yardstick to measure our progress. And as part of promoting a more capable type of citizen, I thought it was important to develop a set of standards for the community. So here they are! Think of them as a progression as you improve and develop your personal capabilities.
/// Fitness Archive
How to Prepare for the Tactical Games with Mike and Pascale Green
The Tactical Games are part of a growing trend with combining physical fitness with marksmanship in competition. I’ve seen them talked about quite a bit over time, and I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Green and his wife Pascale to talk about how the games started and what to look out four while you prepare.
Tackle the Kettlebell Mile Challenge
This Marksman Challenge is a test of strength and endurance. Like rucking, but with an added twist. The short version: pick up a kettlebell and carry it one handed for a mile. The devil is in the details.
Strength and Honor: Accountability Challenge
The theme for May is Strength and Honor, so I’d like to spend a little time talking about what I’m doing this month in support of it. It’s going to be a doozy, and I’m telling everyone so you can hold me accountable for doing it.
Level 2 Fitness Standards: Strength and Work Capacity
This is the second level of the Everyday Marksman fitness assessments, and it focuses on strength and work capacity. Caution, this is not for beginners.
Why a Fitness Test? Why now?
This is just a quick unedited rant about why I decided to launch a physical fitness test for The Everyday Marksman. In short, 2020 sucked, and 2021 might be worse: maybe it’s time to hold ourselves to some objective standards.
Level 1 Fitness Standards: The Baseline
It’s time to set some standards. Members of The Everyday Marksman community have been trading ideas back and forth about what a proper set of fitness standards might look like, so I decided to try and answer that question. This is Part 1.
A Marksman’s Balance: Making Time for Things that Matter
Today’s episode has to do with the theme of the month within our community over at The Marksman’s Quarter: finding balance. I thought this was an appropriate topic because I just came off of a month-long break from writing or recording, and wanted to talk a little bit about what led to that hiatus and the things that have been on my mind.
The 12-Mile Ruck Challenge
If you’ve been around The Everyday Marksman for long, you know I’m a fan of rucking. It’s a foundational skill of light infantry work as well as a fantastic builder of strength and endurance. I thought it was time to have another challenge about it. As I write this, we are still amidst the COVID-19 struggles. It’s difficult to get together in groups, either indoors or outdoors, and ammo is hard to come by due to the panic.
So let’s do something that requires no ammunition, range time, or social contact.
Sharpening the Edge: There’s Value in Competition
Life is full of competition. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, all of life is a giant competition for resources and reproduction. Entire species either prosper or go extinct on the macro level due to their collective abilities to compete in an ever-changing environment.
Nations, businesses, and people operate in a similar way. And so should you.
Finding Balance: If Everything is Important, then Nothing is
In today’s episode of Everyday Marksman Radio, I’m talking to an old friend of mine, Garret Glover. What makes Garrett interesting is not that he’s my friend, though. It’s that he has managed to strike a balance between his career as an active duty Air Force officer, planning a wedding, getting his second master’s degree, running a side business, and still compete as a bodybuilder.
So where does he find 36 hours per day to fit all of this in?
It’s all about smart time management and prioritization.
