Chris Carter

The top three killers of the American people are heart disease, cancer, and medical error. That means the top three killers of Americans are largely preventable illnesses and conditions.

Our food is one problem. The staples of the American diet are seed-oil filled, ultra-processed, ultra-pasteurized, double-hybridized, geneticially modified, nutritionally depleted post-war consumer slop, with added sugar. These foods are addictive and unable to be processed by our bodies. Our fathers drank raw milk and ate homegrown meat and vegetables. Big Food and Big Pharma are to blame here, along with the government organizations who enable and tolerate them. But that’s a topic for another time.

Our physical condition is the other problem. One of the great fragilities of modernity is how soft and weak a man can be and still thrive in it. There will always be soft and weak men in any society; there is nothing new under the sun. But post-industrial modernity has radically shifted the lifestyle of everyone towards the kind of “ignoble ease” that Teddy Roosevelt warned of in his speech, “The Strenuous Life”. In our hyper-technological day, it is too easy for a man to lose himself in the virtual world, as if his body was meant only to be an interface to screens. Videogames, video streaming, social media, online gambling, and many, many other virtual products consume our most of our lives. We functionally treat these artificial worlds as if they are the real world; we sit motionless, and passive, losing ourselves in the virtual reality of consoomerware, consoling ourselves that we need a break, that we deserve to binge watch Netflix and YouTube for a bit, and that browsing Twitter (or X, or whatever) is helping us to stay informed on the what’s happening in the world.

Accompanying these passive temptations are the active pressures to partake of them. The Regime actively rewards sloth and consumption. The highest paying jobs are the vocations of the corporate email farmers, the bankers, the consoomerware developers; it pays to be sedentary. Traditional food, like home-butchered chicken and raw milk, is illegal to sell, but ultra-processed factory food is cheap, widely available, and can be bought with food stamps. Being fat, weak, and lazy is not just the path of least resistance, it’s the path to prosper in the hypermodern West, at least financially.

The freeman must rail against normality with all the power of his will. Normal is fat, weak, diseased, depressed, indebted, confused, and dying. He must resolve deep within himself to heal himself of the slow death plaguing him and his countrymen. He must resolve to be an effective man, a full man, a man of power and endurance. He must choose to pursue these things relentlessly, resisting the soothing lull of modernity’s comforts and temptations and pressures.

As Brian Alsruhe once said, “we lift weights because we don’t do manly things anymore”. Quite true. The men of the progressive, post-industrial era, including Roosevelt himself, have ironically worked very hard to make manliness obsolete in the modern world. Feminism is legally and systemically institutionalized, and the comforts of the modern era have made hard-living high-testosterone masculinity superfluous. According to the modern world, your character, your strenth, and your sacred honor are no longer the means by which you provision safety, peace, resources, and prosperity for your family and your countrymen. You have been afforded the compulsory luxury of being soft, weak, lazy, and sick by the Regime.

You are not an exception to this. 77% of military-aged men in America are unqualified for military service due to their physical constitution. I don’t care who you are. This epidemic of ignoble ease affects all of us. You need to train harder. You need to get stronger and gain endurance. You need to eat clean, whole foods from the earth. You need to get after it.

Your daily life should involve some aspect of heavy lifting and some aspect of endurance training. These are the two ends of the spectrum of human activity. Aspire to be a master of every metabolic pathway in your body; resist the modern urge to specialize in a particular “identity” as a powerlifter, or a runner, or a crossfitter, or a hybrid athlete, or whatever other hip new thing the Instagram influencers are becoming nowadays. You are a man; you are the ultimate multitool. Lift, sprint, run, bike, hike, throw; do it all. Train yourself to have the strength, endurance, courage, and fortitude to weather the mountains.

Now, much ink has been spilled in regards to how to structure a training program. Let it suffice for now to make a few basic points about effective training.

1. Begin with a goal in mind. Training is a process to achieve a desired outcome; exercise is recreation. Don’t just do what feels good, do what works.
2. What works for strength training are compound, multi-joint barbell movements that have been the staple of gym culture for decades. Learn to squat, bench press, deadlift, and overhead press, and milk these for all they’re worth. This is how the fathers of strength training trained.
3. What works for endurance is a mix of low intensity long duration (zone 2) and high intensity short duration (zone 4-5) training. Stick with running, as it is very natural for human beings. Make the majority of your training running long distances at an easy pace, and a minority of it running short distances at a fast pace. If you don’t like running, or it hurts your knees or something, find something else to do. I’m not your mom.
4. Utilize progressive overload. When it gets easy, make it harder. Add 5lbs every strength training workout, or an additional 10% of your weekly running miles.
5. Almost everything online is a gimmick. Eschew fitness gnosticism and “science based” garbage. Understand the human body in its design and train in accordance with it.

And no, I’m not going to go into more detail. If you want me to tell you what to do, figure out how to contact me and I’ll coach you. This is not a how-to guide on how to be ready for the mountains. Other men have already done that work.

This is a reminder that the mountains are there and you were made for them. Modernity is not a guaranteed insurance policy you can cash in when bad things happen. Industrialism is not a safe space. The healthcare system is run by drug companies who want to keep you sick. Food does not come from a factory. As much as the world tells you that masculinity is an obsolete virtue of the primitive past, the truth of the world is that people, in times of great need, are rescued, saved, and bailed out by strong men who are knowledgeable and capable. When 77% of your men aren’t fit to defend your nation in military service, its end is near. Beowulf is dead, and how the Geats mourn! Who will defend their land? Troy burns, but who, like Aeneas, will have the strength to carry his father on his back? The Achaeans have taken the beach of Troy, but where is mighty Hector? The kingdom of darkness looms to destroy the last vestiges of Protestant Christendom…

Do you have what it takes?

The mountains call, brother.