Are You Fit Enough to Run a Homestead? What Nobody Tells You Before You Start
I want to talk about something that does not come up nearly enough in homesteading conversations, not in the books, not in the YouTube channels, and honestly not even much in the forums where people are otherwise pretty candid about the hard parts. Physical fitness. Not in the gym sense. In the survival fit sense. Not in the "how many miles can you run" sense. I mean the very specific, unglamorous kind of fitness that determines whether you can actually do this work day after day without breaking down. Whether your back holds up through a full season of planting and harvesting. Whether your hands can keep going in November when there is still firewood to stack and the last of the root cellar to organize. Whether you bounce back from a hard week instead of spending the next one recovering. I learned this the hard way in my first real year of serious homesteading. I was not unfit by any normal standard. I walked, I did some yoga, I was not sedentary. But I was not prep...