What you’re aiming for is the hero’s holy trinity: paideia, arete, and xenía: skill, strength, and desire. Mind, body, and soul. Overload on any one of the three, and you’ll unbalance the other two. You can charge into action with the noblest xenía intentions, but you’ll get nowhere without the know-how of paideia and the raw arete arsenal of fists, agility, and endurance. That’s what made Odysseus, trickster and semi-scoundrel though he was, the greatest Greek hero. Odysseus wasn’t the best fighter: he was actually a draft-dodger who tried avoiding the invasion of Troy by pretending he’d gone loopy and was too addled to leave home. One of his fellow warriors saw through that scheme, however, because Odysseus was well known for slipping out of a scrap if he didn’t like the odds and only using his spear if he couldn’t deploy guile instead.
But as a hero he was one of a kind, as even a superstar warrior like Achilles would admit. When Odysseus visits the underworld during his journey home from Troy, the ghost of Achilles tells him enviously, “I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and above ground than king of kings among the dead.” Achilles went down in battle, but Odysseus remained alive and scrapping. And why? Because his paideia and arete were balanced by xenía—his loyal heart. Nothing will stop Odysseus from getting home to protect his wife and son—not storms, not vanity, not a Cyclops, not even a magical sex goddess. Mind, body, and souclass="underline" that’s what made Odysseus “the best of the Acheans.”
Georges Hébert grasped that, which is why he could see what was missing from Edwin Checkley’s notion of “the whole system of the man.” Checkley’s natural training was dynamite when it came to strength and skills, but where was the higher purpose?
“Exercise only with the intention to carry out a physical gain or to triumph over competitors,” Hébert believed, “is brutally egoistic.” And brutal egoism, Hébert believed, just isn’t human. We like to think of ourselves as masters of our own destinies, as lone wolves in a dog-eat-dog world, but guess what: Dogs don’t eat dogs. They work together. As do most species. As do we. In fact, when it comes to wolf-pack tactics, humans are even better than wolves. We’re the most communicative, helpful species that’s ever existed. If anything, we overshare. We share every idea, every tool, every belief. Even when we fight, we do it as a team; in war, we unite in fantastic numbers.
So forget brutal egoism, Hébert argued. That’s not our real strength. The single greatest moment of his own life came when he plunged that little boat into the seething cauldron off Martinique and began pulling burned, frightened survivors into his arms. Young Georges Hébert wasn’t out there because of ego. He was out there because it was natural; because being a god on earth is a natural human desire, and saving someone else is the closest we’ll ever come to achieving it. All Greek mythology and every major religion that followed has really been devoted to that single premise: the hero who leads the way is half god and half human, fueled as much by pity as by power.
Hébert, consequently, came up with the strangest mission statement ever devised for getting in shape. He called it Méthode Naturelle—the Natural Method—and it would be ruled by a five-word credo that had zero to do with getting ripped, getting thin, or going for the gold. In fact, it had zero to do with “getting” anything; Hébert was heading the opposite direction.
“Être fort pour être utile,” Hébert declared. “Be fit to be useful.” It was brilliant, really. In those final two words, Hébert came up with a complete philosophy of life. No matter who you are, no matter what you’re seeking or hope to leave behind after your time on the planet—is there any better approach than simply to be useful? “Here is the great duty of man to himself, to his family, his homeland and to humanity,” Hébert wrote. “Only the strong will prove useful in difficult circumstances of life.”
Now that he had his purpose, Hébert needed a method. Luckily, he had the perfect case studies right under foot: his kids. When children play, he realized, they’re really role-playing disaster scenarios. Turn them loose and they’ll run, wrestle, hide, roll around, kick-fight with their feet, and leap off anything they can climb—exactly the skills that could keep them alive in a real emergency. Natural training should spring from nature, Hébert decided, so kids’ play would be his starting point. It didn’t take long to realize that most roughhousing is a selection from three basic menus:
Pursuit—walk, run, crawl.
Escape—climb, balance, jump, swim.
Attack—throw, lift, fight.
With his list of “10 natural utilities” in hand, Hébert went looking for guinea pigs. The French navy stepped up and agreed to let him experiment with a class of new recruits. Hébert began by testing the young seamen in basic rescue and evasion maneuvers. Could they climb a tree, a rope, a pole leaning against a wall? Lift a slippery log, a lumpy human body, a heavy stone? Throw with range and accuracy with either hand? Hold their breath, tiptoe along a narrow ledge, fend off two attackers throwing punches?
Next, Hébert set to work on an outdoor training facility. Gyms, he believed, are a joke. What’s invigorating about being cooped up in a room full of foul air and clanking metal? What’s the point of practicing real-life skills with artificial equipment? Gyms benefitted one person, Hébert believed: the gym owner. No, the Natural Method should be open-air all the time, “in rain and dark and beating snow.”
Hébert created a giant adult playground, equipping it with climbing towers, vaulting horses, sandpits, and ponds. Scattered about were rocks and logs and long poles to be used for throwing, vaulting, balancing, shinnying up, passing from hand-to-hand while running, or anything else an athlete dreamed up at the moment. All you had to do was pick a combination of challenges, combine them into an obstacle course–like sequence, and have at it. “One can select a few exercises from each group, ideally all of them if time permits,” Hébert said. “There should be little or no rest between exercises.”
Hébert had one firm rule: No Competing. Ever. That meant no championships, no world records, no races. You didn’t get belts, medals, or rankings. To be honest, Hébert had little regard for competitive sports, which he dismissed as artificial “entertainments.”
“An individual who is satisfied with performing in exercises or sports of entertainment such as these games—soccer, tennis—but ignores the art of swimming, self-defense, or fears vertigo, is not strong in an useful manner,” he argued. “A weightlifter or a wrestler who cannot run nor climb, or a runner or a boxer who doesn’t know how to swim, or cannot climb, is not strong in a complete manner.”
Competition perverts true fitness, Hébert believed. It tempts you to cheat; to overdevelop some talents while ignoring others; to keep tips for yourself that could be useful to everyone. It’s a short cut; all you have to do is beat the other guy and you’re done, but the Natural Method is a never-ending challenge for self-improvement. Besides, competitive sports focus on rivalry and class divisions. The Natural Method was all about collaboration; every teacher was a student, every student was a teacher, bringing fresh ideas and new challenges. Raise the bar, but help the next guy over it—paideia and arete.