Survival Skills: Staying Warm Without a Fire

Description

When environmental conditions are bad and you can't get a fire, how can you stay warm? Here Kenton discusses various methods to avoid hypothermia when the going gets tough.

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Music is "The Woods" by Silent Partner.

Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods

Video Transcription

[Music]

greetings friends I'm about to be attacked by a velociraptor so it meets their close relatives you probably hear them all around me here they're coming to visit me in the woods today the subject is staying warm without a fire this is a perfect day to really get yourself in trouble with the cold I'm not gonna tell the whole story here for brevity's sake but often around the campfire I'll tell the story of the coldest I've ever been in my life it wasn't during my naked overnight in the winter or falling through the ice it was on a summer day a little bit like this you've got about 50 degrees Fahrenheit a little bit less you've got a wind going it's been wet everything is wet and improper clothing just wearing cotton this is when we start to lose heat from our bodies and you know there's people out there way more skilled than me but today especially if it started to actually rain rain this could be really hard to get a fire going today so what do we do we're out in a situation it's raining on us it's this cold we can't get a fire going we're in trouble right you know the odd thing about this is that sometimes we'll even get a fire going but having that fire sometimes is not the benefit we think it is I'm going to cover a lot of territory in this video hopefully keep it fairly short but I want to talk about the mechanisms of heat loss because that's really gonna help us to think how can we keep ourselves warm in a situation like today plus rain you can think of this as it's kind of a fairly simple equation here's my body and my body is self-generating heat so we are quote warm-blooded so endotherms meaning that we we create heat and our body is always trying to establish an equilibrium so it wants to keep my body at at 98.6 degrees is essentially and it's going to expend energy to do that now at the same time on a day like today my body is is losing heat and it does it through a different mechanisms and in a way these mechanisms are kind of artificial in that we're you know it's always just transfer of of heat from a warmer to a colder thing but we have different names for it that transfer of heat loss depending on on the medium of flow on the object or the substance that it's flowing into and so understanding these gives us really a bonus when it comes to trying to preserve this heat so the first thing that's happening here is is radiation that just means that my body all the time if you could look with infrared you would see that there's heat emanating out from my body the heating system inside of us is not super efficient and there's there's always this waste this waste heat that's going out into the air now if I put clothing on me then I start to slow down some of that radiant heat loss if I would make a little tarp shelter and seal myself inside of it then I'm gonna radiate out some of that heat is trapped and that trapped air warms up and then I start to radiate less so anything I can do to keep that radiant heat in on my body my clothes get wet I start to get into another aspect of of heat loss and you know some people put this under perspiration but I'm just going to talk about anytime that that we have wet on our body I'm not talking about being immersed in water here but I've been sweating or the rain has kind of coated me and that evaporates and when there's evaporation then there's this additional heat loss that happens it's why sweating helps us to stay cool in the summer but the same thing is going to happen right now if it rains on me and then even if the rain stops this wind is coming along and it's evaporating and that creates very Swift heat loss and I'm gonna start getting cold really really quickly so obviously here we're thinking about how can we not have moisture on our skin and this asks us again to keep ourselves sheltered from the rain to make sure that we don't sweat if we are gonna be moving or exercising and down here notice I have wet ground and so that wet ground if I sit down on that my butt's gonna get wet and then I'm gonna get that evaporative heat loss going and I'm gonna be in trouble the next one is convection so today we've got this air moving by me when this air moves by me this win it's essentially grabbing the heat off of my body and carrying it away and it's just going and it keeps doing that but I sit in a stream I'm gonna feel about water going over me and it keeps carrying that heat away from me as opposed to if I sit in a in a lake I'm gonna actually start to warm up the water around me just give me a graphic difference between sitting in a lake of a cold a certain cold temperature and sitting in a moving stream of an equal temperature same thing my my ambient temperature might be a certain degree so I said it's about 50 today if there's no wind it's gonna feel completely different than even if there's a little bit of wind coming shelter again right this is why we think of shelter as the most important of the survival aspects often not always if I'm if I'm in a ambient temperature that doesn't make sure it's are necessary but maintaining my body temperature so here I want to make sure that the wind isn't coming by me right now I'm sitting right in the open right in the wind and it would be much different if I was on the other side of a tree a big tree out here protected from the wind we're down in one of the little gullies over here lots of ways to protect ourself but thinking how can I minimize that convective heat loss then there's conduction this just means that if my body my skin is going to touch another solid object that there's a heat loss that goes out through here and different of these solid objects have more power essentially to pull the heat out of us if I sit down on a rock it's gonna just suck the heat right out of me that cold rock where if I sit down on a log that's the same temperature as the rock it doesn't suck the heat it doesn't have that same power so with conduction I want to think is there a way that I can separate myself from objects that pull that heat out of me the ground for instance tends to pull a lot of heat out of me know if I have a bunch of dry leaves or a bunch of dry pine needles on top of that ground it's going to reduce it if I have a wool blanket under there it's gonna reduce it so thinking about the objects that I'm touching now those are the mechanisms of heat loss but in a practical sense what do we do I'm gonna give a number of suggestions here that might really change up the game for you if you can't get a fire going and you need to stay water one is learn how to squat now that squat is can't really see it here but it's flat footed and only my feet are touching the ground my butt isn't touching the ground and I've just learned to sit down and get into a squat now when I'm in that squat position I just the bottom of my feet if I have shoes on there's insulation there and I'm not sitting on this wet ground if I sit on this wet ground I'm gonna start losing a lot of heat but if I can keep myself in a squat or if I just can't do a squat I could be up on my the balls of my feet if I have that wool blanket I could be setting it down underneath me now it's gonna get wet and there's some disadvantages there but that's better than me sitting on the ground and getting my butt what so learning how to squat learning how to move our body if you practice calisthenics or yoga you've got the tools already these are great tools for strengthening your body any way but if I am sitting in camp and here I'm gonna touch the ground with my hand not the greatest thing but I put it on the stick here it's better and I've put my legs out straight so I'm just supporting myself on this one arm now this is starting to warm my body my core is having to work here and I could drop down do a push up come up on to the other one and when I do this moving my body right I can do those squats stand squat and stand can do jumping jacks sometimes I've kept myself will harm on cold nights when I can't get a fire going by just walking in circles skipping in circles dropping and doing push-ups getting back up I don't want to do exercises where I'm gonna have to be laying on the ground then I'm losing that heat through conduction again but here I'm using this internal heater that I have going and it's remarkable how warm we can stay just by firing up that heater note that to fire that heater it's really important that I have calories in it so another great tip or trick is to eat if you've got some food there and you've got a cold night coming eat that food drink water stay hydrated that is going to really help you to have fuel for that fire inside of you it helps to think about this early so if I'm on an outing and the night is coming and I know I might not have a fire that night this happens to me because often them if I'm doing a survival scenario with students and I know I've set it up so it's gonna be really hard for them to get fire that might mean that I have no fire too so I need to think and I encourage them to think about almost being greedy with your heat early in the day I'm already starting to think about that sheet that I'm gonna need tonight so by thinking of that that means I'm not getting myself wet not standing out in the open and letting the wind go by me making sure I have lots of food lots of water I'm keeping my fuel burning keeping myself warm now here's something to guard against and this is mostly psychological but I see it get people over and over and over again and that is the tendency to hunker down I'm just a little bit cold my mind is still with me and it's really easy to implement some of these things I'm talking about stay moving right so I want to keep my body moving maybe I have zero confidence that I could get a hand drill fire or I could get a bow drill fire but I'm gonna make up a set anyway because most of us that have tried these we know you can get a really good workout trying to get a bow drill or a hand drill fire and so I'll sit there and try to get my hand roll and well I'm arming myself up but here's what happens to people is as the day goes on and I start to get a little bit cold I get this tendency to want to hunker down and when I start to hunker down I'm still losing heat and mentally I kind of closed in to when this starts to happen to us we'd begin to lose the will to do the things that we know will keep us warm I'll see people when they're really cold they'll try to get a fire but it'll be just sort of half-hearted or okay yeah you really convinced them to get up and and do a lap and they'll do one but then they'll just hunker down again that hunkering down unless you're doing it in a very well thought out shelter that's going to be conserving your heat protecting you against conductive heat loss and in convective heat loss it's going to be keeping in your radiation you're probably just going to get colder and colder and colder so we have to guard against that tendency to hunker down stay moving stay positive keep your mind working keep your body working what I'm not going to talk today is the wim HOF method or to mole or other methods to keep yourself warm that would be a different video but I will say that if you do cold conditioning you're going to be better able to keep yourself warm I see this from students out a tree while the University and what happens is even though I'm consciously cold conditioning back living in civilization they living out in the woods without any climate control they begin to develop a cold conditioning that's superior to mine and you can take cold showers you can turn down the heat in your house you can wear a layer less you can drive with the windows open on your car when it's slightly uncomfortable you can take ice baths if you want exposing yourself to the cold it's going to grow brown fat it's going to raise your metabolism it's going to create a stronger more efficient furnace inside of you and that's gonna mean when you're out in this cold situation you're going to be better able to generate that inner heat so to put this all together make sure you're doing your cold conditioning when you go out be thinking about wearing the proper clothing right wool not cotton think about protecting yourself from the radiant heat loss from conductive heat loss can convective heat loss think about making sure that there's good fuel food water in your body if you need to keep warm move your body make sure you don't break into a sweat if you break into a sweat then you're gonna be evaporating and you're gonna be losing heat and that's gonna be a losing game so learn to exercise move your body in a way that brings you right to the edge not too perspiration

but so that your body is working and keeping you on most important of all guard against the hunkering down don't let that happen to you it's a very powerful mental force that urges us to just curl up and get colder and colder don't let it happen stay moving stay positive

as we're getting colder we have to look at the tools and we have we can't look at the things we've lost right so my hands are too cold to hold the stick because because they're so numb but I might be able to hold the stick with my wrists I still have tools when we're trying to start a fire or gather things what are the tools you have and that again is where our mental or positive attitude that is the best tool we have so hopefully this video has given you a better understanding of how we become cold and it's given you some tools for staying warm even when you can't get that fire going and the conditions are kind of crappy like this share stories of times when you've been cold how have you kept warm if it's certain pieces of gear that's fine share that you know what's what's your favorite kind of windbreaker or baklava or you know hat or whatever you use to keep yourself warm any other tips or tricks that you have for keeping alarm when you can't get a fire going and the conditions are just right for sapping the heat right out of us can't wait to learn from you see what you have to say talk with you in the comments [Music]