Tactical Obstacle Course To Enter Crouch In and Exit The Bonsai Food Forest Dome

In the spirit of having gardening and homesteading chores be core parts of a work out and conditioning routine, the bonsai food forest garden dome serves a mini tactical obstacle course. It wasn't initially by design but it was sort of the result of fate. The price difference when I was bargain hunting for geodesic domes was quite a bit between the 5 foot high ones versus those that were 6 or more feet high. I'm over 6 feet tall so that meant, to save money, I'd have to crouch to be gardening inside the dome I bought. To me this was a reasonable trade-off with a additional benefit, it forces me to spend a percentage of my life in a more tactically correct position.

One of my combative arts trainers repeated scolded me for not crouching enough during training. I'd just have a natural tendency to stand up straight for the sake of it not being as taxing and demanding. He was quick to notice me standing straight up and since it was mostly edged weapons training, it was imperative that he remind me to lower my profile and thus remain in a more guarded position with less attack surface exposed.

I'll never forget him say, get down, drop lower, remember...tactical. The way he said that word conveyed a lot of deep meaning. He didn't just mean, yeah, we're training to fight so just like a boxer has to keep their face covered by having the guard up. What he meant was that, this is not for sport, this is not for a performance art competition, this is life and death. If you expose all of your organs like that, you'll be easy to kill. To be tactical, to be hard to kill is to operate with mindset in training that one mistake can be not just a point lost, but a limb or a your life.

So is it an inconvenience not to be able to stand up in the garden dome? Yes, it's an inconvenience, but the value that I get with the trade off is that it forces me to crouch, to crawl, to hold my weight and optimize my back in ways that I never think to practice without this height constraint. I teaches me my limits and conditions me to maintain the ability to crouch and hold more defensive lower profile postures.

It's enough of an obstacle course to remove the heavy rocks that secure the door and to have to effectively break dance to drop to the ground, slide and roll through the ground level door before you get attacked by whatever insects are thriving at that given moment in the changing seasons. It's enough to have to be careful to not get scraped and cut by the hardware cloth fencing. Though for me as a taller person, the most critical aspect of the mini tactical obstacle course is the unrelenting, inescapable forcing of a lower profile.