Which was strange, because until recently you weren’t an adult until you could rescue someone. Rites of passage for most cultures were based on sheer physical usefulness: you counted as a person only when you showed you could be counted on. Some proved it in blood, like the Spartans and the Zulu impi; the impi had to stomp barefoot on thornbushes to demonstrate they were ready to race into any situation without flinching, while Spartan teenagers were handed a dagger and sent off into the countryside to secretly stalk and murder the boldest local peasants “in such a way,” according to Thucydides, “that no man was able to say, either then or afterwards, how they came to their deaths.” By ruthless Spartan logic, this krypteia was the perfect multipurpose path to citizenship: it kept insurrection at bay and turned young Spartans into masters of stealth and survival.
Speed and strength weren’t just a young man’s game. The Navajo kinaaldá and Apache na’ii’ees were coming-of-age ceremonies for young women that focused on speed, endurance, and a lifetime of muscular fitness. The young women set off on daily morning runs into the rising sun and had their arms and backs massaged in hopes they’d always be strong and supple. The stronger the women, both tribes believed, the stronger the community. “Throughout most of na’ii’ees, the girl’s power is used to benefit herself,” one anthropologist notes. “However, immediately after the ceremony, it becomes public property and is available to everyone.”
So Georges Hébert had to wonder: What went wrong? Why did we turn our backs on this tradition of strength and allow ourselves to become so helpless? But even as he was asking the question, a machine-shop worker in Philadelphia already had the answer.
Edwin Checkley was born in England in 1855, right at the teeter point when the Industrial Revolution was shifting from radical innovation into unstoppable juggernaut. It was the end of the era of the amateur, a time when everyone had to be a bit of everything. You helped your neighbors build their homes, fight their fires, raise and butcher and preserve their own food. You knew how to repair a weapon, pull a tooth, hammer a horseshoe, and deliver a child. But industrialization fostered specialization—and it was fantastic. Trained pros were better than self-taught amateurs, and their expertise allowed them to demand and develop better tools for their crafts—tools that only they knew how to operate. Over time, a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched.
Checkley straddled the two worlds: he landed a factory job as a machinist but soon left to travel with his own tumbling act. He was nineteen when he immigrated to the United States, in 1874, and spent the next few years as a human tornado: he studied medicine at Long Island College Hospital, trained and taught at a gym in Brooklyn, and moonlighted weekends at a machinist’s shop in Philadelphia. It was all propelling him toward a masterpiece: in 1890, Checkley released an explosive little book titled A Natural Method of Physical Training: Making Muscle and Reducing Flesh Without Dieting or Apparatus.
Critics’ reactions were weird and rather frenzied: everyone loved it, without knowing exactly what it was. Science reviews excerpted it; so did literary journals, women’s magazines, fitness publications, even coffee-table flip-throughs like Ladies’ Home Journal. The only people who hated Checkley’s book, it seemed, were the ones he was writing about: gym owners and exercise scientists. Because the one thing wrong with the fitness industry, Checkley proclaimed, was everything.
Barbells? Forget it.
Weight machines? Waste of time.
Women are sweet, men are sweaty? Ridiculous.
Diets, exercise circuits, resistance training? Hopeless, useless, and unnatural.
Look at every other creature on the planet, Checkley urged. They don’t binge and starve, or heave and strain to make one part of their body bulge. They don’t sit on a bench and lift a weight to their nose over and over again. Why would they? You’d never do that in the real world, so why do you do it in training? All you’re creating is “hard muscle” and “stiff strength,” as he put it—the exact opposite of true fitness.
“You pull this and push that so many times a day and you get to be a little amateur Samson,” Checkley wrote. “You already feel the muscles expanding. Those biceps especially draw attention, as if they were the synonyms of health and strength. The strength of the man so trained has no reliance on itself. It is superficial—only skin deep, as it were—and will not ‘stay put.’ The truth is that there can be no proper training that does not educate the whole system of the man.”
Wait—make that the whole system of the human. This idea that women were fragile little flowers was a farce that Checkley wanted to end. “The ‘weaker’ sex would occupy no such position of relative weakness if natural laws were followed,” Checkley argued. “If women must, as is so freely complained, remain physically short of man’s strength, there is no reason why the disparity should remain so great as it often is. Where women lead an active life their strength and endurance comes remarkably close to the strength and endurance of the other sex, and in the control of their own systems may readily under development excel the other sex. In other words, tradition has more to do with the ‘weakness’ of women than has nature.”
Conventional exercise advice was so bad, Checkley believed, you were better off doing nothing at all. At least you’d know you were doing nothing—instead of being duped into thinking that feeling bored, sore, and swollen was the same as being fit—and with luck you’d eventually get disgusted and do the right thing.
And the right thing was?
Natural training.
Natural training, as one of Checkley’s disciples testified, gave him everything: “shape, speed, strength, suppleness, endurance, abounding health, and every blessed physical advantage a man can have.” Checkley’s method involved no repetitions, no weights, and no fussy food restrictions. It was based on fun and play, and was apparently remarkably effective: business was booming at the Edwin Checkley Gymnasium, in Philadelphia, and even well into his fifties Checkley himself looked carved from marble. After studying under Checkley, the founder of a barbell company publicly declared he’d been wrong all along about weights.
So what exactly was “natural training”? Well, you wouldn’t find the details in Checkley’s book, which was more manifesto than manual and gave only the raw basics. Checkley was trained as both a performer and a businessman, so he knew how to build an audience and control trade secrets. First, he’d whet appetites and win converts; then, over time, he’d feed the faithful with future books. It was an excellent marketing plan, taking into account all but one thing: the leaky gas pipe in his home. Before Checkley could write a second book, he died in 1921 from gas poisoning.
When Georges Hébert set out to create his own French version of natural training, he picked up where Edwin Checkley had fallen short. Hébert wouldn’t just make people healthy. He’d make them heroes. Because if you do it right, Hébert suspected, they’re the same thing. That’s the math at the foundation of every heroic tale from the Odyssey to the Old Testament to Xena: Warrior Princess:
Health = heroism.
Heroism = health.
Heroes are protectors, and being a protector means having strength enough for two. Being strong enough to save yourself isn’t good enough; you have to be better, always, than you’d be on your own. The ancient Greeks loved that little interlocking contradiction, the idea that you’re only your strongest when you have a weakness for other people. They saw health and compassion as the two of the chemical components of a hero’s power: unremarkable alone, but awe-inspiring when combined.