By way of an introduction, I should cite the two posts that brought me to this point. One was entitled If Squats Aren't A Part of Your Lifting Routine, They Should Be, or Why You May Want To Try 5X5 Stronglifts, and contained the following comment by /u/JP_Whoregan:

I've been privately discussing this with /u/MGTOW_player. In my opinion, the sub needs to return to more engaging content that will actively help not only new, but existing members of the sub. We've gotten waaaaay out of hand with the "look at this BP asshole", and "look at this crosspost from /r/relationships that proves RP is true" or "Lena Dunham fingered her sister" posts.

WHO THE FUCK GIVES A SHIT?

Let's get back to not giving a shit about pop-culture examples of BP behavior. We know. If you're gonna post a BP example, make it relevant and teachable.

In the meantime, men like us are lifting weights, improving ourselves. Lets discuss that.

I fucking agree, completely. Indeed, I have made one (public) comment to a post, as well as sending PMs to multiple people, telling them to knock it off with all of the fucking whining about how evvviiiillll the wommmynzzz are . . . WTF, this place is starting to fucking sound like HuffPo. But, rather than just bailing on the sub, I thought I would try to post some useful content. Thus, the second post (from AskTRP) that motivated me was entitled I have realized that I do not do anything that is not boring during my free time. What new things can I try?. And I realized that this kind of question comes up all of the time, so it seemed like a good thing to write about.

In some sense, many, many things that you are passionate enough about to get reasonably good at is better than just sitting on your ass all day, and what any given person finds not "boring" is extremely subjective, both of which will make this a little bit of a difficult topic to discuss. For the sake of concreteness, I am going to write a series of posts, each being a brief discussion of hopefully non-boring things that are activities that I recommend for people with available free time, but most of which are probably less obvious and definitely less mentioned on these subs, and which I think would be great activities for people that don't know what to do with themselves, other than play video games and eat pizza. There are a few things that I will intentionally exclude:

  • Schooling/career: It goes without saying that you really need to have your shit together in this regard before anything else. If you don't, this is where you should be spending most of your "free" time.
  • Lifting: This has been covered here enough, and doesn't really need any more discussion, except to say that "squats" in the above referenced post title should have been (explicitly) replaced by "squats/deadlifts/flat bench presses", or maybe "compound lifts".

Now, on to the actual content . . .

01: Tactical Training

So, my first suggestion for a discretionary activity would be to do some tactical training (in the general sense). A beginning instantiation of this would be to just go to the range and plink some targets. Of course, if you end up purchasing a gun, you will need to clean it, which will improve your familiarity with design and operation, which will be useful if you end up sticking with it. As you get more experienced, you will likely want to shoot a wider variety of firearms; indeed, there is nothing quite as cool as watching the shock wave, feeling the recoil, and the ability to touch a target a kilometer away with a M82 (wikipedia, sorry about the cheesy music) or blowing through a couple of belts with a M249 (FPSRussia).

Note that one nice thing about taking up shooting is that, at least in the beginning, it is not particularly necessary to own a gun. All of the parts of the country I have lived in for a substantial period of time have ranges at which you can rent firearms (Of course, if you live in the core of a major urban area, you will likely have to go at least out to the 'burbs . . .). In this case, a trip to the range can be under $50 per occurrence, which makes shooting an easily tenable activity for, say, undergraduates to do once a semester.

Once you have a bit of experience under your belt, you might be interested in taking some type of formal shooting training. There are multiple categories of shooting, and you can find both training and competitions for each. Many of the reputable tactical training schools are run by retired soldiers, so in addition to getting fun and valuable training, you can actually meet some pretty interesting, and typically seriously RP, people.

N.B.: For anyone that doesn't know it yet, shooting can be actually dangerous (as opposed to modern-day, "you might get hurt playing kickball", helicopter parent, dangerous). If you are inclined to take up shooting, either take a safety class, or go with someone with a fair bit of experience, or both, and for all our sakes, put your fucking pride away and be willing to ask for help your first few times at the range, or, indeed, any time you don't know quite what you are doing with a gun. When you fuck up a squat, well, you will bear the (probably much less severe) consequences alone, but with a gun, hubris could result in you or someone else getting killed . . .

Next week: Martial Training