Humans are easy to kill. We are soft tissue and muscle covering a fragile bone skeleton. Given the right circumstances, our deaths can happen in an instant, but what if the event happened and you weren’t dead yet? How prepared are you to survive?

What if you had to fight for your god damn life – what if you found yourself fighting for the life of your loved ones, or fighting against all odds just for your own survival, to take another breath.

So, here’s a question for you!
What have you done today to help ensure your survival into the future?

Do you even lift, fight, train, run, study?

Danger, conflict, risk and death are awaiting you every day. Perhaps it’s in the form of a terrorist attack, a robbery, an earthquake, land slide, flood, a traffic accident, plane crash, whatever! The point is, if you’re not dead at the start of the event you’re going to have to make choices, decisions that are based on your level of experience. You’re going to have to rely on the level of fitness that you currently have and the ability to overcome injuries or illness and fight on. The experiences and knowledge you have now to survive might be all you have.

These following six points are the basics of what you need

1. Situational Awareness

A higher level of fight or flight, honed by studying people and the environment. Situational Awareness is developed through training and being present in the moment. However, we humans are now training ourselves to do the complete opposite – we focus on our phone screens, wear headphones and pay little attention to the outside stimulus. When you’re outside, in the real world, you need to be honing your senses not depriving them. Teach yourself situational awareness – it could save your life.

2. Rudimentary fighting skills.

Everyone thinks they can fight. The problem is, these days most people can. Boxing and MMA  are fitness crazes, Brazilian JuJitsu is easier to access and more and more kids are learning self-defence. Also, don’t forget the people who have come back from fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and have killed, and know how easy it is. And…. I don’t just mean the good guys….

You will never know how good someone is at fighting it until it’s too late. but, you have to know locks, throws, strikes and blocks to survive the first 30 seconds of a fight. You must have developed a combat mindset, even against an opponent much better than you, you have to have a winning attitude – to at least stand a chance of getting away.

3. Firearms use.

I bet you don’t know how prolific guns are. Be they the guns being carried by police officers and the military, or those that are floating around our streets with gangs and other nefarious people. In a terrorist situation, or a robbery, there will no doubt be guns in the vicinity. If you find yourself in a bad situation there may be the requirement to recover a firearm off someone and then use it. Could you?

4. A high level of fitness.

Can you swim. Can you run, Can you lift. Fighting is exhausting, running is tiring, carrying an injured person is draining. Functional fitness is the key to being combat-ready and if you’re injured your level of fitness before the injury could be the difference between life and death. Fitness also helps you develop a combat mindset, training hard lets you find a frame of reference for what’s hard and what’s not. In a survival situation it could be your level of fitness that guarantees the next meal or lasting through a freezing night. Of all the skills, fitness is the most perishable and needs to be maintained the most, it is linked to every other skill. Being unfit means the brain slows down faster, it effects your ability to render first aid, it effects your ability to think clearly about a situation – fitness is the first real building block to being hard to kill.

5. First Aid training.

Being able to provide someone with CPR or deal with injuries that require splints, bandage a snake bite, stop the bleeding of a gunshot or sucking chest wound and applying tourniquets, to yourself or others. These skills are basic and take very little effort to master. The there is the requirement to deal with these injuries under time pressure and stress, perhaps even under a threat or in a remote setting. There’s always a more challenging way to reinforce the learning. An understanding of basic First Aid is vital if you’re going to survive after a catastrophic event.

6. Survival.

This is a lot harder than you think. You probably don’t know this because you’ve likely lived your life oblivious to the protected state of society. Food and water are guaranteed and shelter too, as a minimum. But, the environment wants to kill you. A soft human will succumb to thirst in a hot environment in hours not days, you will die of hunger in days not weeks, and the cold and wet and windy landscape can kill you in minutes not hours. Survival is a fight to the death. You need to be able to build a shelter, procure water and food, start a fire, navigate across country by day and night. Trust me when I tell you that this is the thing that brings many people to their demise.

So, given these six points – how did you stack up?
Are you hard to kill?
If you’re easy to kill, what are you going to do about it?