Top 8 survival skills you can easily learn now (and are inexpensive)

When starting out in prepping, it's overwhelming with all the things to buy and learn. I often get comments on my videos and emails from subscribers feeling a bit overwhelmed as to where to start. While adding things to your inventory of preps is critical, even more important is developing skills that can keep you alive when the grid goes down. In this video, we'll cover 8 skills that you can start developing now that are relatively inexpensive and could keep you and your family alive. So, stick around. In a true prolonged grid down situation, these 8 survival skills can make the difference between life and death, and by rehearsing them and mastering them, the less apprehension you'll face if there were a regional or national emergency. In addition, the more skills you learn, the less gear you'll need if you're forced to bug out. So, here are the 8 skills you can learn and develop now that will cost you little to nothing, and several of these can help you improve your life daily. This list will not attempt to cover all the recommended skills as a prepper you should develop, but if you start with these, you'll have a great foundation to pursue other important skills. Like with all skills, take the time to master them. Some in this list will take longer than others. Try and pick one each month to study and practice. As I go through these one by one, I won't go into great detail about each one of them, but will explain the skill on a high level to serve as a springboard, and I'll provide links in the description section below to books and other YouTube channels where you can learn more. The first few skills are items I'd recommend you start now, as they will take time to develop. By the way, please feel free to post the 8 top skills you think are critical in a post-SHTF situation in the comments section below. The first item is gardening. I recommend this one as the number one item on my list to start now, as it will take time to see your results. Gardening will be an extremely vital skill to develop as soon as possible, as having a way to replenish your food supply will be a very valuable skill you can teach others as well in a prolonged grey-down scenario. This is actually something I'm personally focusing on at the moment. I'm going to get a greenhouse next week to set up on my property, and I'll dive into learning. While there's more unknowns and knowns for me at the moment, I realize that this will be a talent I'll be developing and honing for many years to come. I've been putting this off for a long time for various reasons, and now is the time where I'm forcing myself to learn it. I've recently purchased two books to help kick-start my learning. Mini Farming, Self-Sufficiency on One Quarter Acre, and The Backyard Homestead, Produce All the Food You Need on Just a Quarter Acre. I'll post links in the description section if you want to check out these two books. I'll be doing reviews on them shortly, and based on their Amazon reviews, they seem to be great books to start with. I have many reasons for wanting to learn to garden. Apart from being self-sustainable in a post-SHTF environment, I plan on storing my crops now by freeze-drying my produce. Even if you don't grow a large amount of food, the items from your garden will help supplement the food you store in a long-term food storage inventory to help add variety. And even just as important, you can barter food. It will be its own currency when the supply trucks stop coming. With learning how to grow your own organic food, one of the obvious advantages is introducing healthy food into your diet, which is smart in general. Learning to take care of yourself through a healthy diet helps the serve to ensure you'll be in peak performance if the grid goes down, which brings me to my next point, physical fitness. This is one item which is so overlooked in the proper community and yet so crucial. Many people have this notion that they'll rise to the occasion after spending years neglecting their own body. Unfortunately, this is just not reality. If the grid goes down, many of the conveniences that we enjoy on a daily basis that are powered by our infrastructure will vanish. Physical labor will be the norm. There will be undoubtedly those who simply will not survive the first few weeks or months as their body simply will give out. The key is to continue pushing yourself physically. Personally, I enjoy jogging three or four times a week for about three miles each time I jog. I used to lift free weights for years, but after sustaining multiple injuries, heavy lifting is more challenging now. I've found other methods to continue resistance training and plan on introducing free weights back into my workout routine soon. At the moment, I use elastic bands for resistance training that allows me to continue pushing my muscles. While it's not as effective as lifting with free weights, I don't suffer the same joint pain I've experienced for years while doing power lifting. In addition to physical fitness, it is important to learn basic nutrition, which leads me to my next point. Cooking. While some might find cooking as a prepper skill set, a bit out of the typical list within the prepper community, having a food inventory and not knowing how to properly cook the food you store is a mistake. Even more importantly, if you haven't planned your food inventory around your family's diet, you'll find that the food you store may not be something your family will want to eat. Never underestimate food fatigue, especially with the elderly and young. You can't force someone to eat something they no longer enjoy, even when they may be starving. This is one of my weakest skills among this list at the moment, but as I'm building out our freeze dried food inventory, I'm learning to cook items we enjoy as a family so I can prep food we'll be putting in our freeze dryer. At the moment, I've been working with my wife to learn how to cook. It's a slow process for me, but I'm making progress. There are many YouTube channels that teach how to cook. A simple search in YouTube and you'll see many options. If you have a personal preference, please share it in the comments section below. Organization. With being a prepper comes a need to store gear and supplies that are critical for survival. Sometimes I feel like I'm a borderline hoarder, but I try to maintain order in the chaos. This skill will be critical for preppers, as you'll need to rotate items and keep things organized. There's many tools I've learned over the years to help me stay organized. The free tool that I use to run my business is Trello. It allows me to create lists and cards to move tasks along it that I can monitor. In addition, having information about your supplies stored in a spreadsheet, which you can print or store on a backup hard drive, should the grid go down, will allow you to keep order and monitor your own inventory. I personally use Google Spreadsheets, which are free. That allows me to store the information in a neat and concise way. Whatever approach you use to keep your inventory manageable, be sure to find a way that works for you to ensure your preps are maintained, as they can easily go to waste or be damaged if neglected, ignored, or not properly rotated. Number five is firearms proficiency. There's a huge difference between going to a gun range and shooting at a paper target, and learning how to shoot and move, manipulate your weapon, handle malfunctions, quickly reload, and transition in between your primary and secondary firearm. I was fortunate to get training with a professional a few years back that radically changed my views on firearm proficiency. Up to that point, I'd assumed that by simply having put rounds downrange on paper was enough, but after three days of one-on-one training with a professional instructor at range six, I quickly realized how wrong it was. I've heard it said that it's better to spend $1,200 on firearms training and buy a $800 rifle than spend $2,000 on a rifle with no professional training. Someone with an entry-level rifle can be more effective in a conflict than someone that simply has a nice custom rifle with no training. If you were under stress in a firefight, would you know what to do if your gun jammed, had a misfire, or double feed? Watching videos about it and practicing it are two different things. When put under stress, you will fall back to your training every single time, which is why it's so important to develop the proper muscle memory. If your budget allows for it, find a local instructor to get trained. You can go to the NRA's website where they list local firearm instructors in your area. If time or budget does not permit you to get professional training, which I cannot recommend enough, at a recommend the Magpul Dynamics DVD series with Travis Haley and Chris Kossas, which you can pick up on Amazon. The training I did a few years ago is very close to the material in these DVDs, and it made a profound difference in my confidence in learning how to properly, safely handle, and manipulate firearms. While this item is definitely one of the more expensive items on the list, learning how to work your firearm properly is vital. Number six is starting and building a fire. Starting a fire in an emergency could literally make the difference between life or death. Fire allows us to do many things that is indispensable to survival with regards to providing warmth and the ability to cook on top of that list. For many, the assumption is that they can simply toss in a match to a pile of dry material and they'll have a fire right away. While this may be true in some circumstances, learning how to start a fire with a few different methods is a great skill to develop. What happens if your matches get wet? Would you know how to use other techniques? There's many options on the market with a small budget and a safe environment like a fire pit. This could definitely be a great way for you to learn one of the more critical and foundational survival skills. Try to learn to start a fire using three or four different techniques and not only starting the fire but learning different ways to build and sustain the fire. While this may sound like an easy skill to develop, and it is, again, practice this to make sure you're ready when the time comes that you may need it. Practice doesn't always make perfect, but it sure alleviates fear and anxiety which comes from doing something for the first time under stress. Number seven is water collection and purification. When the grid goes down, access to clean water will be lost. For those living in an urban or suburban environment, this will be even more difficult as city centers are artificial environments which rely upon the grid being up in order to provide residents with the necessary infrastructure to survive. When the hurricanes hit Puerto Rico a while back, I had a subscriber email me explaining how residents in our area became incredibly sick due to drinking contaminated water. During a time when the water system is compromised, not only will the ability to deliver water to your home be potentially crippled depending on how your city's infrastructure is built, but the ability to deliver clean water will almost definitely be non-existent as many components must work in unison to ensure the water is safe to consume. Don't expect this system to be in place after an emergency. I did a video a while back, I'll post a link to in the description section, showing how to build your own rain harvesting system. If you don't know how to collect rainwater and what is involved in the process, I encourage you to learn. It's not terribly difficult and there are some things which you must consider and factor in when building your setup. A little advanced knowledge will make a huge difference. Once you've collected rainwater, knowing how to properly purify it will be just as important. Whether you choose to buy a water filter in advance or build your own, be sure you have a plan in place to make water safe to drink. I personally have a Berkey water filter in my kitchen we use on a daily basis and I have several other water filtration systems in our bug out bags like the Mini Sawyer. Again, learn how to secure water and how to filter and purify it. Number eight is first aid. Out of all the items we discussed in this video, this one may be the most difficult to thoroughly train and learn without doing actual training. While I have met preppers with no advanced medical training, they have committed themselves to study first aid in depth and are very knowledgeable, yet the reality is nothing replaces experience. In a real life situation where someone may be bleeding out or suffering from a condition that could have easily been treated when the grid is up, the stress introduced in these moments on both the victim and the responder will undoubtedly be difficult to handle if a professional is not around. At a minimum, I encourage those watching this video to at least go through training through your local fire department that many cities offer every few months called CERT, which stands for Community Emergency Response Team, which teaches enough first aid to stabilize someone with moderate to severe injuries until a professional can help. I'll post a link in the description section below In this course, you'll learn the rudiments of stabilizing a trauma patient. At a minimum, have documentation, like the Survival Medicine Handbook, written by a doctor and nurse who themselves are preppers, which I'll link to in the description section below. With a guide like this book, you can study and learn to at least know where to get information if no one is available to help. Hopefully this video gives you a foundation to start building your own survival skill sets. I'd like to get your thoughts and feedback in the comments section with a list of items you feel are important to develop. If you enjoyed this video, please like, subscribe, share on social media, and as always, stay safe out there.