What’s most fascinating about Hébert’s theory is that it extends far beyond fitness and into every aspect of life. Hébert believed natural training would make people more noble, intelligent, resourceful, generous, successful, and happy. Why? Because every day, you practice problem-solving under extreme conditions, and once you’ve figured out how to carry a hunk of timber through a swamp in your bare feet, nothing at work will stress you. Natural training makes you introspective, not combative; you see conflict as something to be resolved with force and dexterity, not violence and its brother, fear.
In 1913, Hébert astounded the International Congress of Physical Education with the results of tests performed on 350 navy recruits who’d been trained in Méthode Naturelle. On a rating system that scored performance according to strength, speed, agility, and endurance, French sailors were performing on a scale with world-class decathletes. The French Ministry of War assigned a team of colonels to study under Hébert, and Natural Method “playgrounds” were soon being installed at eight military bases across the country.
Unlike Edwin Checkley, Georges Hébert was eager to open-source everything he’d discovered. He published a monumental work—L’Éducation Physique, ou, L’Entraînement Complet Par la Méthode Naturelle—that crammed together more than five hundred pages of theory, practice, photos, training sequences, and muscular anatomy. But the whole thick stack, Hébert admitted, could be summed up in a single sentence: “Teach your boys to walk, to run, to jump, to box, and to swim, and leave those artificial extension movements, which mean nothing, alone!”
The time had come to take Méthode Naturelle to the world. Hébert handpicked an elite team of trainers and prepared to deploy them throughout Europe, Asia, and America. Right before they scattered, Hébert captured the moment on film; in the photo, he and his Natural Method team are stripped down to rather alarmingly loinclothy shorts, and they look fantastic. They’re of all ages and sizes, but they share the same body; to a man, they’re lean and carved, looking lithe and powerful as a pride of lions. None of them are flexing, because none of them have to; their true strength, they know, lies beneath their muscles, in the knowledge that whatever challenge arises, they’re ready.
That photo was snapped in late 1913. Months later, German troops were tromping through Belgium and Luxembourg on the way to France. The men of Méthode Naturelle joined the fight, and because of their superb physical conditioning and dedication to service, many were leading front-line charges in the Great War. Four years later, every one of them—along with nine million other combatants—was gone.
Georges Hébert was heartbroken, but not surprised. He was a realist, and he understood that no matter how skilled you were, being useful could sometimes be lethal. The Natural Method was never about trying to live forever; the goal was to make a difference before you died. Hébert barely survived his own wounds; he’d spend the rest of his life struggling to regain the ability to walk and talk. He’d be honored as a Commander of the Legion of Honor, but it was like laying a wreath over a sinking ship; Hébert’s noble dream of heroic health was swept away by a world that was sick of danger and wanted to pretend that it was gone forever.
The Natural Method was all but forgotten. Until many years later, when a guy selling glow-stick bracelets on a Corsican beach came across an old paperback and began to read….
CHAPTER 27
When I became Governor, the champion middleweight wrestler of America happened to be in Albany, and I got him to come round three or four afternoons a week…. While President I used to box with some of the aides.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT,
the only U.S. president who swam naked in the Potomac in winter, went blind in one eye from boxing in the White House, gave a speech immediately after taking a bullet in the chest, and nearly died mapping an uncharted river in the Amazon
NEARLY ONE HUNDRED YEARS after the Natural Method disappeared, I witnessed its rebirth in the form of a half-naked man vaulting through my second-floor window.
“Ready to play in the jungle?” he says. “You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”
“I’m not wild about them.”
“That’s because you never learned how to climb. Let’s get started.” He vanishes back through the window, which is about three feet from an unlocked and perfectly functioning door. For a man pushing forty, his energy and suppleness are off the scale; it’s not even 6 A.M. and Erwan Le Corre is already straining to go. His last name sounds like the French word for “the body”—le corps—and he certainly lives up to the billing: Erwan is tall, sun-bronzed, muscular as a puma, usually barefoot, and rarely in anything more than surf shorts.
I’d arrived the day before at Erwan’s base in Itacaré, a tiny village squeezed between the Brazilian rain forest and the Atlantic Ocean. Itacaré is ordinarily a sleepy outpost of fishermen and roving surfers, but it has lately become a rambling outdoor training camp for a bizarre collection of adventurers who are trying to pick up the Natural Method that the Great War cut short.
Wild as he looks, Erwan is dead serious about one thing: he’s convinced the entire multi-billion-dollar health club industry is based on a lie. And judging by raw numbers and results, he’s probably right: fitness clubs are the only business that depends on customers not showing up. It’s an amazing financial success story, especially since it’s based on such a defective product. Health clubs, by their own metric, just don’t work: the more gyms we join, the fatter we get. In fact, the rise in obesity tracks right alongside the rise in health club revenues, with both climbing steadily at about 2 percent a year.
“For most people, the gym is broken,” agreed Raj Kapoor, the well-known tech entrepreneur who cofounded Snapfish and was quoted in an interview about his new focus on American health. “Globally, it’s a $75 billion business, and more than 60 percent of people don’t go, even though they’re paying.” Here’s how it works: Every January, gym enrollments skyrocket. Gold’s typically doubles its membership, while other clubs report increases of up to 300 percent. At the maximum rate, that means four times the number of bodies are squeezing into the same amount of space. No facility can handle a stampede like that without the walls bulging.
“It’s like a damn cattle call” when the doors to exercise classes open, one regular complained to the Wall Street Journal. But no worries. Gym owners know they can pocket the cash without bothering to expand, because within a few weeks a fresh cycle takes over: by spring, fewer than half of any gym’s members turn up anymore. Ordinarily, that would mean death for an operation that counts on repeat business, but shame and magical thinking are powerful marketing tools: by the following January, the majority of the dropouts—roughly 60 percent—will feel guilty and decide once more to open their wallets and get in shape. No wonder the fitness mill keeps booming while other businesses are folding: during the recession’s darkest days, health club memberships increased by 10 percent.
So what went wrong? How did the modern health club, with all its whiz-bang machinery and calorie-crunching digital technology, prove so ineffective at actually improving health? With total revenue exceeding fifty billion dollars a year, you should expect at least some visible effect on overall health. It’s a staggering investment in a demonstrably failed approach, and it’s not as if people aren’t trying. We go to gyms; we just don’t stay. You can blame the public for not forcing themselves, but that’s like a restaurant blaming customers who don’t like the food; ultimately, you’re responsible for what’s on the menu.