I spend 8 of the 12 months of the year with people who I train with and get the majority of my fitness through sparring, which is the closest thing to actually fighting and surviving. But, while in rural locals where hand-to-hand combat notions are taboo and only the gun matters, there is no such activity. This article outlines how an old, broken, weakling tries to remain viable for urban combat while living in rural concord.
There are no dumbbells in these locations. Most places were I stay where there are dumbbells have 15 to 40 pound weights which are all far too heavy for me. I can really only use women’s weights. When using dumbbells, I prefer 3 to 10 pounds and doing 4 sets of 40 per exercise.
My training has the following priorities:
-Not getting injured training.
-Not making my pre-existing injuries more severe: these are two hernias, two torn miniscus, 2 chronically sprained ankles, two torn rotator cuffs,
-Not causing a reoccurance of historical injuries that have healed, a history of lower back sprain and disc ruptures, two previously ruptured flexor tendons and a torn hip rotator and torn aductor tendon, both on the left
-Mobility, maintaining the ability to walk and haul all 45 pounds of my worldly possessions on my back.
-Combat training, the ability to spar with fighters I coach who often have no one to spar with other than I.
-Survival, the option to combat criminal attackers.
-Suicide, the option to be enough of a threat with a knife to force the pigs to kill me, if they come to avenge my surviving an attack against criminals.
These last two are all about mobility. I need to be able to step with every stroke of my knife or club to survive an attack by three men, who will each be one third my age on average and one third larger. Police doctrine teaches that you must shoot the knife user if he is within 21 feet. I need to be mobile enough at range to convince them to draw their gun rather than their tazer.
Combating criminal attackers focuses on weapon use, edged and blunt, with empty hand striking a backup. Even a grappling stud like Henzo Gracie is unlikely to defeat three men grappling. He’d be better off KO’ing the first two and then choking out the last one.
Grip strength and pliability while striking with a weapon is a priority. In the four months in rural locations I am near many jobs that need done, and many hand tools that I can complete these tasks with. Hand tools are a traditional boxing fitness tool and offer great benefits, including increased bone density form the shock. These hand tools are typically, never used, as my hosts use power tools.
While it makes sense for me to use the unused hand tools for exercise, and my inexperience with power tools, and the fact that power tools are more dangerous to the user even in experienced hands, is amplified by the fact that I have plenty of time to do these unpaid tasks, there remains resistance. Across the country, hosts, neighbors, travelers, businessmen, women and busy bodies will interrupt me to plead that I not use hand tools, that I am insane or stupid or both, and that I must employ power tools!
This does not serve the purpose of exercise, as power tool use only helps grip strength for static use, not striking with knives and war clubs and machetes. In the grocery business:
-deli slicer cause more and worse injuries than box cutters
-ban saws cause more and worse injuries than butcher knives
-Power jacks cause more and worse injuries than manual jacks
I have no insurance and a life savings of $900. If I get hospitalized, I’m in debt. I will not willingly go into debt, and using dangerous tools that I am not experienced with to do something that I can do, want to do, like doing and am seeking to do for fitness, with safer hand tools, qualifies as volunteering for an injury.
For instance, a chain saw, which I have never used and is obviously dangerous, is too hard for me to start with a pull chain. My hernias prevent this. But I can use an ax that ways 5% of the weight of that chin saw and that ax generalizes to self defense tools more closely than a chain saw.
Here in Utah, I like taking my time loading a cart with lumber and pushing it, easily. But I am told to load a pick up truck, which entails a clime into the bed and yanking over waist level, that is dangerous to my hernias. Tonight, I loaded and hauled two carts of wood by hand while my coworker hauled one with a lawn mower in the same time. We were bot taking it slow. My better time was simple, I didn’t have to start, mount, wrangle and dismount a machine, just grab a cart and push.
In Washington State, I was given a power saw to cut fence posts. I am not King Kong. I do not have three arms. Using a heavy power tool that weighs 15 pounds in one hand and holding the fence post in the other, is begging to cut off my left thumb while the power saw bounces around. So, I had to use both hands on the power saw, and the fence post bounced around. I cut half way through that fence post in 5 minutes, melting a blade. I grabbed a 10 ounce hack saw and finished the cut in 30 seconds and cut down the next fence post in 90 seconds.
Despite all of this experience, working with safer manual tools, rather than with dangerous machines, causes much friction between me and my hosts.
So, I try and do low tech stuff like weeding and sweeping and gardening as much as possible. Every time I do something by hand that my host believes should be done with a power tool, I am insulting them. That is rude.
Pulling weeds is not as good for the fighting grip as using an ax or machete, but it does not piss off my friends, so I get by with lesser training.
Walking and hiking and foraging, things that cannot be done with machines yet, like scrambling up and down mountainsides to get mushrooms and other things that my less mobile hosts cannot access, makes for a more symbiotic cohabitation.
The gardening has me bent over at the waist for about 14 hours a week and my flexibility is improving. To make sure I don’t develop an imbalance, once a day I stand with hands behind neck, and bend over and touch elbows to knees and gently return to standing without jerking, in an attempt to strengthen my spinal erectors that run from tail bone to skull. I do this about ten times.
Every other day I alternate half push ups on a picnic table with a standing exercise.
The push ups keep elbows in by ribs, like in combat, and do not lock elbows out or stretch out shoulders [which are torn] by going all the way down. I work in the range of my injury tolerance to try and maximize tricep development, with every second set of push ups gripping the table corner in a close grip.
The exercise I alternate is standing with my feet next to a porch or patio pillar, fence post or tree, or clothes pole, feet together, hand around pole cupped, and then letting myself fall slowly to the ground with far hand extended for more leverage and doing one arm lateral pulls with the hand lower than the torn shoulders. This has been very good for my lats and okay for the biceps.
I alternate these exercises with waist rolls, standing outward check knee circles, side bends and toe and heel raises.
My fight goal is to have a submission stick fight and a four 3-minutes round boxing match at age 60 and then retire to only writing.
