Keep your body warm without fire - alternative ways to keep warm during survival
I do not wish anyone a situation in which I found myself a few years ago during my trip to Norway. Getting ready to spend the night under the tarp, I was unable to light a fire. Everything around me was soaked to the skin and the temperature began to drop alarmingly. However, I was not condemned to shivering all night long - I chose a place to stay sheltered from the wind and with insulation from the ground. A combination of a few less conventional ways to warm up was also necessary, which I will describe here in the form of a short guide.
Methods of warming up the body when fire fails
Some time ago, we described ways to warm up in the forest using NRC foil and accessories to start a fire. Today, however, we are interested in a situation in which we do not have a thermal blanket, and it is dark and all hope for fire is lost. What to do? First of all, you need to warm up your body as quickly as possible and retain the generated heat:
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Start with your evening workout. Run, do some push-ups, burpees, jumping jacks. This will stimulate circulation, but be careful - you cannot overdo it. If you train too hard, you will sweat, and your underwear will absorb the moisture that will gradually cool you down.
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After a light workout, put on all layers of dry clothing that you have with you and get into the sleeping bag immediately. Thanks to this, you will slow down the transfer of heat generated by training to the environment. It is worth mentioning here that even the most expensive sleeping bag and the thickest jacket cannot warm you up. These are just insulators that keep the heat you emit. Hence, point 1 of the guide is so important.
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Even the best insulation does not work 100% and you may find yourself freezing again in the middle of the night. Then repeat steps 1 and 2 or go to 4.
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Recharge yourself with the heat generated by your inventory. Do you have chemical heaterswith you? Great! Fire them inside the sleeping bag and put them around the nape of the neck, carotid arteries or warm your hands with them. You don't have a heater? Are you sure? Look out for the powerful LED flashlight in your backpack. Its aluminum housing is nothing more than a heat sink that dissipates heat from the diode. Turn on the flashlight in turbo mode and proceed as with the chemical heater. Battery dead? Maybe you still have hot tea in a thermos? Drink it in as many sips as possible and as soon as possible. It should warm you up better than any external heater.
If you can't light a fire, your muscles turn out to be the best source of heat. Keep warm so that your clothes do not get wet afterwards.
If exercise is not enough, hide in a sleeping bag under the tarp and use chemical heaters and electrical appliances that generate a lot of heat (e.g. a flashlight or a telephone).Finally, it is worth mentioning that there is one more method of obtaining an improvised heater. However, I do not recommend it if you do not have an emergency power bank with you. Namely, it is worth having a demanding game installed on your smartphone, squeezing the last sweat out of the graphics system. Igniting it will cause the device to overheat, and thus - release large amounts of heat.
Author: Kajetan Wilczyński
Editing: Tomasz Świgoń