Training and Survival – 3 Considerations

Editor’s Note: Here’s another helpful article from Craig Caudill. You may recall he was my guest on DestinySurvival Radio a few weeks ago. View my post about that here.

If you have read about the Law of Threes, you probably realize how vital it is to your survival. If you haven’t read about it, I suggest you do. One concern many people have about the Law of Threes, is how do you put it to work for you during your survival training.

The simplest and most effective way to get a good handle on any skill is to practice. A lot. There are a few things you can do to really become familiar with any survival skill.

• Practice frequently
• Seek training from a qualified person
• Test your skills in stressful situations

Practice

You can never practice too much. Here is a little story about how a simple excursion with the family turned into a practice situation. My family and I were doing what we love–walking in the woods, when my son stumbled on an uninhabited hornet’s nest that had fallen to the ground. We could have just walked around it and carried on down our path. Instead, my son decided the nest material would make a good tinder bundle. And you know what? He was absolutely right.

This is one of those things he learned through practicing. Now, if he is ever in a survival situation, he knows one more thing that will work as a tinder bundle. Through him, the entire family added to their cache of survival knowledge. Even if it wouldn’t have worked, it still would have been an excellent learning opportunity. We would have all known in the future, skip the nest and keep looking for something else to use as a tinder bundle. You have absolutely got to get out there and practice and experience the outdoors.

Seek Instruction

This one is tricky. There are plenty of people who claim to be “experts” in survival training. However, let me give you a tip. An expert would not proclaim his or her way is the only way. The very nature of survival skills involves tweaking and improvising a specific skill until it suits you and your needs. There is no one size fits all. Sure there are best practices and you should listen to these insightful words. Take the advice, mull it over and apply it to your practices. It is imperative you keep an open mind and see what all is being taught out there. Take what you can from each person who has survival knowledge and piece it together to make your skill set work for you. Do not assume you know it all and cannot learn from another person. That is a dangerous practice.

Testing Your Skills in Intense Situations

This is crucial to your survival in a true emergency. If you do all of your practicing in ideal conditions with the perfect gear, you will never know what to do in an actual survival situation. Could you start a fire in the rain without your matches? You are going to have to learn the hard way before you are in a life or death situation. Throw yourself into a situation like spending the night in the woods without your sleeping bag or your knife. Can you do it?

Like I mentioned earlier about the hornet nest, these are things you will only learn through experience. Your training needs to include high-stress situations that require you to think out of the box. Once you have come up with a solution, this is one more trick to add to your arsenal of survival skills. Do not assume you can practice your skills with your gear on a nice, sunny 60 degree day and manage to survive in frigid temps with no gear to speak of.

Maybe you are operating under the assumption that if you had to, you could rise to the occasion. Don’t bank on it. Sure there a few, a FEW stories of extraordinary people who have overcome some extreme circumstances, but again, do you really want to bank on being one of the rare ones who perseveres? The old adage is true, “You will not rise to the occasion, but rather you will default to your level of training.” Why not give yourself a little more assurance and take the time to practice now and under various types of circumstances.

Craig Caudill tests survival supplies for Dan’s Depot. He is also the chief instructor at his Nature Reliance School.

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