If you are caught in the open during a thunderstorm, you have probably been taught to crouch. Balls of the feet, heels together, head down, hands over your ears.
The National Weather Service stopped recommending that in 2008.
Their finding was blunt: the crouch offers no significant protection. If a lightning channel comes down on or very near you, your posture is not what decides the outcome. And the deeper objection is worse than “it doesn’t work” — teaching it makes people complacent. Someone who believes they have a technique is slower to do the one thing that actually reduces risk, which is leave.
The National Lightning Safety Council put it plainly: crouching only prolongs the time you spend at risk.
Both organizations reissued that warning in 2025, because the crouch keeps resurfacing on social media and in the safety guidelines of hiking organizations that have not updated in twenty years. I had it in my own book. It is out now.
So here is what actually matters.
Get to a substantial enclosed building. Not a picnic shelter, not a dugout, not a porch — a real building with wiring and plumbing to conduct a strike to ground.
A hardtop vehicle with the windows up is an acceptable second choice. Not because of the rubber tires, which is its own myth, but because the metal frame acts as a rough Faraday cage and routes the current around you.
And get out from under the trees.
That one runs against instinct hard. The open field feels exposed and the woods feel like shelter. But lightning takes the shortest path to ground, and a tall isolated tree is the best path available. Sheltering under one exposes you to a direct strike, to side flash when the current jumps from trunk to you, and to ground current spreading outward through the earth.
Trees are among the leading contributors to lightning fatalities, and not because people are climbing them.
If you are genuinely stuck in the open with nowhere to go, move to lower ground, get away from anything tall, and keep moving toward shelter. Do not lie flat — ground current travels through the earth and lying down maximizes your contact with it.
But understand that at this point you are choosing between bad options. The decision that mattered was made earlier, when you saw the sky and kept going.
Thirty miles is roughly the distance lightning can travel from its parent storm. If you can hear thunder, you are close enough to be struck. That is the rule, and it is simpler than any posture.
You’re Doing It Wrong: Dump the Myths, Misconceptions, and Bad Advice You Believe is here: https://amzn.to/4cX2M4U
