The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

Fall is coming, and fall outdoors is *the best* kind of outdoors. Temperatures are cool but not cold. Elk are calling. Trails are dry. Leaves are turning red and yellow and orange (why? Chlorophyll.)

In August, many of us scramble to get physically ready to take advantage of the season—hunting, hiking, rucking, mountain biking, and trail running among the turning leaves.  

Today we’ll tackle a few top-level fundamentals of outdoor fitness.

• The concepts are important for everyone, even if the wildest thing you do is ruck in Central Park.

• That’s because training for the outdoors likely has the most carryover to general health and longevity compared to other types of focused training.

Outdoor fitness indeed hits all the skills humans need to be physically useful and resilient—relative strength, cardio, mobility, and physical and psychological resilience. It makes you useful.

There’s also strong evidence that outdoor exercise has significant cognitive and mental health benefits over exercise indoors or in the built environment (more on that later).

Let’s roll … 

• P.S. This story may or may not have something to do with August’s Burn the Ships Workout, which is dropping Friday. 

1. Feed the Wolf

In short

Build more lower-body strength than upper.

The details

The 1980 U.S. Men’s Olympic hockey team coach Herb Brooks allegedly used to run his players through endless lateral skating drills—which, I imagine, might make your legs feel as if they’re taking a bath in a vat of acid. 

As the players skated and suffered, Brooks would allegedly shout, “The legs feed the wolf.” 

Brooks knew that the US could never be as skilled as the Russians—but we could be fitter than them. And it all started with building legs like pistons.

Outdoor sports require that you produce force with your legs over and over and over because you’re covering ground and changing elevation.

Even rock climbing requires long hikes to crags in wild places while hauling heavy gear.

And you can literally “see” this phenomenon among top outdoor athletes across disciplines. Most are disproportionately shaped, with a relatively larger and more muscular lower body than upper.

How To Use It

A simple, effective way to approach lower body training is to hit the “front” and “back” of your legs with exercises that requiring one and two legs.

I do a few sets of exercises that fall into these patterns at least once each week. Here are examples. I’ve included moves anyone can do with anything that weighs something (e.g., a ruck).

• One-leg front of legs: Rear Foot Elevated Split Squat (You can do this with or without weight)

• One-leg back of legs: Swiss Ball Single-Leg Hamstring Curl (easier: Single-Leg Hamstring Bridge)

• Two-legs front of legs: Zercher Squat (less complicated: Goblet Squat)

• Two-legs back of legs: Romanian Deadlift (more complicated: Trap Bar Deadlift)

There is, of course, crossover. All those exercises work both the “front” and “back” of your legs, but the emphasis is different for each.

2. Build An Engine

In short

Do lots of easy cardio to build more endurance.

The details

Getting your body from one point on the map to another takes a good set of lungs. 

The problem is that many people think going really hard for short time periods—i.e. intervals—is enough to build great endurance.

• Intervals help. But improving your endurance requires spending lots of time in the slow and steady zone.

You may have seen different intensities of cardio classified by “zones” (E.g. “zone 2”). 

Zones are a useful directive for research and personal rabbit holes (listen to Peter Attia’s conversation with researcher Iñigo San-Millán if you’d like to go down one).

But don’t get too married to the idea of zones. As the running guru and author Steve Magness wrote, zones are just “a way to classify and categorize training. They distinguish between variations of hard and easy. That’s it … Zones and the borders between them are arbitrary … (they’re) classifications/categories that allow us to roughly organize training. They aren’t rigid. They aren’t even tied to precise training adaptations. There are no magic zones, or magic paces … everything is a stimulus that can lead to a potential adaptation.”

Read the full thread here.

How To Use It

Cardio Rule One:

Spend most of your cardio time going relatively easy, at a pace you can hold a conversation at or breathe through your nose during (nothing magic about breathing through your nose, either, it just works as a governor). 

This is where rucking shines—it keeps you at the ideal pace, plus you get a strength benefit and likely more fat loss.

Cardio Rule Two:

Go hard less often.

Cardio Rule Three:

Go exceedingly hard even less often.

That’s it. That’s the whole program. Here’s Steve, being all poetic about it:

3. Forge the Mental Edge

In short

A good attitude is sometimes more important outdoors than physical fitness.

The details

I recently spoke with Dustin Deifenderfer of MTNTOUGH, a training facility and app specializing in mountain fitness. 

“Our major pillar that we are going to run everything through is mental toughness,” he said. “Our philosophy is mental toughness trumps physical—someone who is more mentally tough and has better resilience and adaptability is usually going to outperform someone who is more physically fit than them in the backcountry.”

If you crack up in bad weather, get frustrated when the day gets long, are overly paranoid about bears, can’t smile through mishaps, etc, it doesn’t matter how fit you are in a gym.

How To Use It

I recently recorded an AMA about how the fallacies of mental toughness are also its strong suit. I’ve found that two things build what we think of as mental toughness. Listen here.

4. Build a Solid Core

In short

Do loaded carries and bird dogs.

The details

A stronger core reduces your risk of injury and improves your performance. 

For example, a group of scientists at the University of Arizona recruited over 400 members of the Tucson fire department. Injuries were plaguing the team.

The scientists taught the firefighters a simple core-strengthening routine and asked them to regularly practice it for a year. The results:

The intervention reduced lost time due to injuries by 62% and the number of injuries by 42% over a twelve-month period as compared to a historical control group.

Core strength also boosts performance. It provides a foundation to generate force from your legs and arms. This is likely why other research suggests that core strength relates to how efficiently you can cover ground. And, of course, it’s also critical to carry weight over ground. 

How To Use It

In my experience, variations of loaded carries and the bird dog exercise best transfer to outdoor sports. Here’s how to do the bird dog. I usually do a few sets at least twice a week.

5. Bulletproof Your Joints

In short

Do the exercises in “How to use it” once a week.

The details

When I was training to spend a month in the Arctic, the brilliant, savage Witch Doctor Doug Kechijian helped me train. 

His programs included a lot of drills to make my joints more resilient against injury. This was particularly important for my situation. 

If I were to roll an ankle 100 miles from civilization, it would have been a long hobble back to the landing strip. Assuming a grizzly bear didn’t find me first. 

This same rule applies everywhere. Getting injured on a trail sucks, with the ratio of suckiness increasing the farther you are from the trailhead.

How To Use It

To prepare for Alaska, I did various exercises to strengthen my ankles, knees, shoulders, etc. 

For example, this one helped my ankles. This one helped my knees. This one helped my hips and hamstrings. This one helped my shoulders.

I work them into warmups and do them each once a week.

6. Be Supermedium 

In short

Be strong but not big.

The details

Dudes often think more muscle = more fitness. But nature doesn’t give a sh*t about your biceps.

In the outdoors, strength is important, while excess muscle is more weight you have to carry. It makes each step more effortful. You’re better off being lighter and stronger.

• Think of it this way: A person who weighs 150 pounds and can squat 200 pounds will be better off outdoors than someone who weighs 250 and can squat 250.

This is why most elite outdoor athletes aren’t overly muscular. They’re built like Jimmy Chin, Courtney Dauwalter, or Alex Honnold.

There could be some argument for building extra muscle for a heavy hunting pack out. But I’d personally rather be 20 pounds lighter for the majority of the hunt and have the hour or two long pack out be a bit harder than carry 20 extra pounds for the other 7 days I’m in the backcountry.

How To Use It

Literally just do what humans did for most of history and you’ll find it:

• Eat whole foods.

• Cover lots of ground outdoors.

• Lift and carry things that weigh something.

• Chase function not form. 

Have fun, don’t die, be supermedium.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

Correct posture can improve your rucking, walking, and lifting and fix the most common pain Americans face.

I got cozy with the research on rucking and back pain while researching my book The Comfort Crisis. Luckily one of those things, rucking, can help fix the other, back pain. But there are subtle tweaks you can make to rucking to get more out of it—more fitness, resilience, etc.

To understand how these two topics interconnect, let’s start with back pain.

Back pain is popular in the sense that McDonald’s is popular—more than a billion served.

Research suggests that 80 percent of people in developed countries will experience back pain sometime in their lives. A quarter of Americans say they’ve had it in the last few months, according to the National Institutes of Health. 

The good news is that back pain is mostly preventable.

A bad back can happen for reasons a doctor can see with a scan. Like an injured disk, tumor, or osteoporosis. 

But 85 percent of this pain comes from mysterious “nonspecific” sources. Scientists at Harvard estimate that 97 percent of nonspecific back pain is caused by how we live in the modern world. 

It results from a nasty combo: too much sitting, poor posture, and not enough physical activity. 

This trio makes us fragile. We become weak and adapt to odd positions.

Then when we lift something—this could be a weight in the gym or a box on our porch—we can’t handle the weight, and it goes somewhere it shouldn't. Pain pops up. 

There are solutions. And Katy Bowman has them. She’s a biomechanist and author of the new book Rethink Your Position. Today we’re covering ideal posture and making a few changes to your environment and habits.

Katy *gets* the 2% ethos. Here are a few paragraphs I pulled from a description of Rethink Your Position that Bowman published on her website:

Every day we make hundreds of choices about how to move our bodies.

Will we walk, or will we drive? Will we sit, or will we stand? Will we slouch or sit up tall? … All day long we make choices about the positions we place ourselves in, and how often we vary our body position, whether we realize it or not.

While disabilities might immobilize us or parts of us, by and large we have uncountable choices to make about how we move. The problem is, we make most of those choices subconsciously, usually choosing the move that’s easiest in the moment, and we suffer long term consequences for not being more deliberate in our approach to using our body.

… Bodies start to hurt when they aren’t moved enough, but also because when they are moved, some parts aren’t moving with ease. This then makes it harder to move enough, and our movements get more diminished, immobility and pain arises, and we think it’s all inevitable.

It’s not inevitable. 

So how do we make it not inevitable? One way is to fix our most fundamental position: how we stand. 

Bowman’s wisdom can not only bolster your back, but also help you ruck better and be a higher-performing and more resilient human. Katy is changing how we think about movement, and her new book is filled with ways to move better.

Leverage the “neutral spine” posture

In short

Keeping your spine in “neutral” improves your movement, balance, and stability while strengthening your back.

The details

The average human used to walk about 20,000 steps a day. Now most Americans take less than 5,000 and spend their days sitting while hunched over phones and computers. This has changed us in many ways. 

Posture is one of those ways. Hours of sitting while slumped into a screen, Bowman said, flattens your spine in your neck area and rounds your upper back. 

Exercising with that wonky spine—whether you’re rucking or lifting weight overhead—can lead to pain. Or, at least, make you work from something of a deficit. 

Think of it like a car with a slightly warped frame. The car is fine when it’s parked. Accelerate the car, however, and you might have some issues.

Hence, we need to rediscover our spine’s happy place. 

Here’s how to find it.

1. Stack your hips directly above your knees and ankle joints in a vertical line.

2. Center your pelvis. Your pelvis can tilt both forward and backward. Your pelvis’ top should be its bottom.

3. Redact your ribcage. When we “stand up straight,” we often tip our shoulders back and move the bottom of our ribcage forward. This can compress our lower back.
   The fix: Tip the top of your ribcage forward so it is stacked over the front of your pelvis.
   Be aware: If you are used to moving the bottom of your ribcage forward to feel like you’re standing straight, this will feel like you’re slouching (the next step will help reduce that feeling).

4. Slide your head back. Reach the top of your head toward the ceiling while sliding your head back (don’t lift your chin). This should feel like you’re bringing your ears back over your shoulders—all while keeping your ribcage in position three.

A spine aligned in these natural curves is called a “neutral spine,’” Bowman writes. 

It’s how our bodies naturally want to “be,” she explains—but we lose touch with this posture when we sit too much.

Remember these cues. It can take some work to get at first. But keep reminding yourself, and your posture will improve—which means everything else you do physically will also improve.

Apply it to rucking and walking

In short

A good carrying and rucking position should look about the same as the neutral spine posture. Otherwise, your weight is too heavy. 

The details

Carrying is a uniquely human skill. Compared to other animals, we’re losers in sprinting, jumping, and climbing competitions. But we can carry heavy things for miles and miles.

Which brings us back to the neutral spine. Bowman says that our natural spine shape is one reason we’re good at carrying. 

“(The shape) helps the parts of the spine—the bones, discs, ligaments, tendons, and muscles—carry loads efficiently and with minimal damage,” she writes in her book.

When you ruck, Bowman says your posture should only slightly deviate from that “neutral spine” position.

“Moving slightly out of a ‘neutral spine’ position is a part of carrying things on your back,” she writes. “That said, a significant change in position with added weight can also indicate that the load is too much for your current core or leg strength.”

• A sign your ruck is too heavy: “You’ll slide your ribcage forward or lean your torso forward to keep the backpack from tipping you backward, just as you might when giving a kid a piggyback ride.”

Researchers in Canada believe rucking (walking while carrying a weighted backpack or rucksack) can help relieve and prevent back pain because the weight “pulls” your spine into a position that compresses its discs less. But going too heavy too far and often can reverse that.

A good strong carry allows you to “maintain pretty close to the neutral spine alignment throughout most of your trek,” Bowman said. 

Your fix is simple: If you slip significantly out of the neutral spine, lessen the load for your average ruck.

Yes, it’s OK and even beneficial to push it every now and then. Like, in my case, when Jason McCarthy recruited me to do the One-Mile, 100-Pound Challenge.

But most of your rucks, most of the time, should be at a weight that allows you to move while maintaining that solid position. For example, I use a 30-pound plate for most of my rucks, which is about 16 to 17 percent of my body weight.

As your fitness increases, you can bump up the weight while standing well. 

Have fun, don’t die, and keep on ruckin’.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

I recently learned from 22 of the world’s brightest minds in health, fitness, mindset, community, warfare, adventure, and more.

Why it matters: These 11 ideas will help you meet goals faster, improve your habits and happiness, breathe and age better, and more.

11 Lessons from Sandlot Jax Speakers

I recently spoke at the 2023 Sandlot Jax fitness festival and also emceed all the other talks. There were 22 total. Think: A TED Conference focused on health, fitness, nutrition, adventure, and more. 

The speakers included CEOs of the world’s top fitness brands, Special Forces soldiers, CIA operatives, top nutritionists and trainers, and more. 

These ideas stood out:

1. Train in uncharted environments

From: Christian Shauf, Founder and CEO of Uncharted Supply Co.

• Exercise outdoors—the wilder nature, the better. It will improve your fitness and mental toughness more.

Why it works: Unlike a gym, the wilderness is not climate controlled, predictable, or perfectly manicured. All those factors make each moment tougher. You must account for the weather, terrain, wildlife, and more. This improves not only your fitness, but also your ability to manage all sorts of uncomfortable and unpredictable situations.

How to use it: Christian gave a fun tip that I loved. “Run outside and get lost. See if you can find your way home. I always wear a Garmin so I can get home, but I try my best to find my way home without using the Garmin.” The trick forces him to pay attention to his environment and exercise longer as he finds his way back.

2. Compete against yourself

From: Dee Brown, NBA veteran, and 1991 NBA Slam Dunk Champion

• Dee played against the greats. Michael Jordan, he said, is the greatest of all time.

• Jordan was famously competitive with other players. But Jordan’s real secret—and the secret of all the NBA greats—was that he was reallycompeting against himself.

Why it works: Psychologists outline two types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation, they write, “leads to some separate outcome such as a reward, approval from others, or the avoidance of punishment.” Intrinsic motivation, conversely, is “doing an activity without the necessity of external prompts or rewards because it is interesting and satisfies the basic psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness.” I.e., intrinsic motivation allows us to rise higher instead of falling to the level of our competition. The psychologists wrote that intrinsically motivated people are “more engaged and persistent, perform more effectively, and display higher levels of psychological health and well-being.”

How to use it: One of my favorite lines (one I remind myself of constantly) is “Be a racehorse.” When racehorses compete, trainers put blinders on the sides of their eyes. The reason: The moment those horses look at what the horses next to them are doing, they get distracted, slow down, or even collapse. I.e., they fall to the level of their competition. Take that same mindset in your work: Be a racehorse. 

3. Fix the problem and shut up about it

From: Paul Litchfield, Head of Product at GORUCK, Inventor of the Reebok PUMP

• Paul invented the iconic Reebok PUMP. But it almost didn’t happen.

• Disaster struck when Reebok was about to release their first run of PUMP shoes. The valves of 2,000 of 6,000 pairs of shoes weren’t working, making the pump useless.

• Paul secretly paid a team of sewers to work five days straight to fix the issue.

• The shoes dropped on time—and became one of the best-selling shoes of the 1990s. Paul didn’t tell anyone else at Reebok about the problem until a few years later. Catastrophizing the issue and looping in higher-ups would have slowed the process and led to a bungled launch.

Why it works: When problems strike, our first inclination is often to complain or look for help. Complaining does nothing. Help is necessary if we can’t fix the problem ourselves. But if we can fix the problem ourselves, we’ll work faster by solving the issue quietly and immediately.

How to use it: Got a problem you can solve? Don’t complain. Just fix it, move on, and don’t go looking for praise by announcing your accomplishment. 

4. Breath well under stress

From: PJ Nestler, VP of Performance at FitLab

• The downshift breathing protocol can help you recover quicker and perform better—especially under stress. 

Why it works: Box breathing—a slow breathing technique—has become popular among people interested in increasing their performance. And it’s great for when we’re at rest. But it backfires under high-stress situations, like intense exercise or performances. Better is to use the downshift breathing protocol, which matches the intensity of the situation. This better restores the balance of your oxygen and CO2, helping you recover and de-stress.

How to use it: When you’re in a high-stress situation and need to recover or calm down, try the downshift protocol: 

1. Take six deep and fast breaths in and out of your mouth. 

2. Now take five deep and fast breaths in your nose and out your mouth. 

3. Now take four “recovery breaths,” where you quickly suck air into your nose, and then slowly breathe out your mouth.

5. Smile first thing in the morning

From: Michael Chernow, Founder of Kreatures of Habit

• Smile immediately after you wake up. “And I’m not asking for a grin,” Michael said. “I’m asking for the biggest grin ever.” 

Why it works: Researchers at Penn State recently looked at the research on how smiling impacts mental and physical health. The studies “consistently suggest that smiling may have a number of health-relevant benefits, including beneficially impacting our physiology during acute stress, improved stress recovery, and reduced illness over time.” The scientists pointed to several plausible reasons why this is. But the TL;DR is that smiling—even forced smiles—seems to boost happiness and reduce our stress. We’re more likely to behave in a way that improves our lives and the lives of others.

How to use it: Just like Michael said. When you open your eyes in the morning, immediately look up and smile—big, toothy, near-idiotic—for 20 seconds. You’ll feel dumb the first five seconds, then it’ll be fun—and then you’ll have a better day.

6. Follow the 30/10 rule at breakfast

From: Dr. Mike Roussell, top nutritionist

• Eat at least 30 grams of protein and 10 grams of fiber at breakfastto kickstart muscle recovery and rebuilding processes, feel more full and eat less junk throughout the day,  and more.

Why it works: Most people stack their protein and fiber in an unideal way. If a person eats 100 grams of protein daily, for example, they might eat 10 grams at breakfast, 15 at lunch, and 75 at dinner. Distributing the nutrients more equally across a day by following the 30/10 rule helps us live and perform better.

How to use it: To get 30/10 at breakfast, try a protein shake or Greek yogurt with berries, oatmeal with a scoop of protein powder, etc.

7. Age like a badass

From: Tina Petty, Burmese python hunter

• As you age, finding more adventures will improve your longevity and increase your sense of meaning. 

Why it works: At last year’s Sandlot Jax Ruck Panel, Tina asked us, “How do you continue to level up as you get older and the injuries come more often, and the recovery takes longer?” Dr. Kelly Starrett took the question and answered, “You don’t. You set competition aside and train for adventure.” 

Tina’s adventure is hunting Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades. They’re an invasive species decimating the environment and killing off most mammals (more on that here). She’s helping the environment in a way that gets her outdoors and moving far more than she would in a gym. The act also brings more meaningful rewards, because she’s helping the environment.

How to use it: What’s your version of hunting Burmese pythons? Escape the monotony of exercise by finding an adventure. Be a badass like Tina now and always.

8. Make exercise convenient and community-oriented

From: Miranda Alcaraz, CEO of Street Parking

• Miranda created Street Parking. It started with her and her husband Julian posting simple, at-home workouts online.

• It’s now morphed into a 35,000-member training group. They’ve discovered that the key to getting more people to exercise is to make exercise convenient and build a community around it.

• Their workouts have a low barrier to entry, and members post their workouts and interact together online and in person.

Why it works: Communities develop under challenge. Research shows communities become tightest during times of hardship rather than ease. We can create this through group activities like exercise, volunteering, and more.

How to use it: First, develop a handful of simple workouts you can easily do anywhere. Next, look for a community to do hard things with. It could be online or in person. An excellent place to start: Street Parking, F3 (which is free!), or the GORUCK Training app.

9. Carry stuff

From: Sebastian Junger, Author of The Perfect Storm and Tribe; Co-Director of the war documentary Restrepo

• For his book Freedom, Junger walked the railways of the Eastern US.

• He carried with him everything he needed to survive and came to some interesting conclusions about freedom and the act of carrying.

Why it works: I’ve written about this at length, but carrying is the ultimate human physical act. We’re the only mammal that can carry weight for long distances on our own volition. It allowed us to take over the world. Still today, it’s one of the best things we can do for our health and fitness.

How to use it: Ruck, duh :). But also carry things in your gym workouts by doing loaded carries (here are a bunch of carries to try), and in regular life by carrying every opportunity you can—duffel bags instead of roll bags at the airport (GORUCK’s 57l Kit Bag is my favorite duffel), groceries while shopping, putting a light ruck plate in your everyday bag (here’s the one I use), and more.

10. Work remotely—very remotely

From: Matt Sherman, Senior Advisor to the US Department of State and Defense during the Iraq and Afghanistan War (fun fact: I traveled to some rather dangerous parts of Iraq for my new book, Scarcity Brain. If I was in danger, I was to call a very high-level politician there and say “I’m in trouble and I know Matt Sherman”).

• After the war, Matt started hiking. He’s covered 15,000 miles on foot, hiked *everywhere,* and done hikes that last months on end.

• Matt carries gear that allows him to make calls, send emails, etc from anywhere.

Why it works: Matt shows that you can, in fact, live the life you want to live while maintaining a solid career. Tech can be a great blessing if you use it to do more of what helps you.

How to use it: Matt’s setup runs entirely through his phone. He recommends the Iridium GO! satellite wifi hotspot and OCENSMail low-bandwidth email app. He also uses a small bluetooth keyboard so he doesn’t have to type out emails on his phone screen.

11. Put goals on a deadline

From: Ebenezer Samuel, Fitness Director at Men’s Health

• Ebenezer has found putting your goals on a deadline allows you to reach them faster.

• The tactic has helped him get in shape for Men’s Health fitness videos where he has to do incredibly hard exercises.

Why it works: Having no timeline for a goal makes it easy to slack off. Research shows deadlines help us prioritize our goal. So we work harder—and progress faster.

How to use it: Next time you set a goal, give it a deadline.

Thanks for reading. Have fun, don’t die.