Wait, put gender aside for a sec. What about age? If Hébert was right, Erwan thought, he wasn’t just promoting good health—he was freezing time. How did Hébert put it? Their bodies were resistant. Exactly. There’s no margin for error in the wilderness, so our survival depended on long-lasting suppleness and sinew. When that volcano blows, when the clan needs your help, when the moment comes to move, you can’t be icing your sore knee on the sofa or excusing yourself as too old, young, or girly. Méthode Naturelle could make you not only powerful, Erwan realized, but also age resistant. You’d get strong and stay strong, deep into old age.
Erwan was on fire. He went on a research pilgrimage to Reims, site of Georges Hébert’s first training playground, which was destroyed during frontline fighting in World War I. The Marquis Melchior de Polignac, owner of Champagne Pommery, was a big fan of Hébert’s work, so he made sure it was later restored to Hébert’s original specifications. While Erwan was in Reims, he knocked up at Pommery headquarters to see if maybe they had some old Georges Hébert stuff lying around? Journals, possibly. Or photos?
They had something even better: a phone number.
In the suburbs of Paris, Hébert’s son was still alive. Régis Hébert agreed to let this intense young disciple visit … and keep on visiting. Every time Erwan returned to the Hébert house, he was hungrier than before. “I came back with a big list of questions—questions I couldn’t find any answer to in Hébert’s book, about Hébert, his personal lifestyle, how he educated his children.”
Régis said his father had lived what he preached, including the revolutionary step of deploying his wife and other women as Méthode Naturelle instructors. Just before the war began, Georges felt he was close to connecting true health with heroism. “It was the great time of MN,” Erwan says. “Hébert believed that if everyone was practicing MN with its altruistic goal, with its moral education benefits, there would be no wars anymore, no reasons for people to be in conflict with each other.”
Hébert didn’t live to see his dream come true, but Erwan could. Someone had to remind the world what Méthode Naturelle had to offer. Erwan went to get Régis’s blessing—and the old man erupted. How dare Erwan think he could follow in the great man’s footsteps? If Erwan tried, Régis warned him, he’d regret it. Erwan was stung and mystified. What the hell just happened? A few weeks earlier, Régis had been all smiles and encouragement. Now he was sputtering and threatening.
. . .
Erwan couldn’t figure out what went wrong, until he tracked down some other MN old-timers who wised him up. “Hébert’s son is the gravedigger of his father’s work,” they told Erwan. Régis can’t revive Méthode Naturelle himself but is afraid someone else will, they said. So he just clutches his father’s legacy to his chest and monitors anything said or written about it “like some kind of censor.”
So the old man never really wanted to meet me in the first place, Erwan thought. He just wanted to find out what I was up to. Okay, Erwan decided; so that’s how we’ll play. Erwan knew Georges Hébert had sucked up information from all over—not just from native islanders but also from thinkers like Edwin Checkley; Dr. Paul Carton, the pioneering French physician; Francisco Amorós, the Spanish military instructor; and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, the Swiss education innovator. From their ideas, Hébert fashioned his own.
“Did Hébert just replicate the path Amorós had designed?” Erwan asks. “Nope. He followed it but retooled it, improved it, redesigned it.”
So to hell with Régis. Now it was Erwan’s turn.
Serginho and the guys have to scoot, and only then does it hit me that we’ve been working out nonstop for nearly two hours. I’m wiped out, but exhilarated. Erwan suggests we cool off by practicing one more skill—open-water deep dives—but before we reach the surf, we’re approached by a young woman who’d been watching from under a coconut tree.
So, she asks, what’s with all the rock jumping and stick throwing?
Instead of explaining, Erwan grabs a driftwood pole. He plants one end in the sand and rests the other on his shoulder. He bends into a squat. “What’s your name?” he asks.
“Sandra.”
“Sandra, if you can get to the top of this pole, I have a surprise for you.”
Sandra studies his face for hints of a prank. Then she sprints, straight up the pole and over the top of Erwan’s head. She’s on the ground before she realizes she really did it.
“Bravo!” Erwan says, delighted. Then he removes the pole from his shoulder and places it on hers. “Surprise!”
Erwan barely gives her a chance to protest before he’s off, quick-footing up the pole like a tightrope walker. Sandra’s face flashes through four emotional peaks in four seconds: surprise, fear, resolve, and—as Erwan reaches her shoulder and hops off—triumph.
“Did you know you were that strong?” Erwan asks.
Sandra shakes her head.
“Now you do. Don’t get into trouble!”
Sandra smiles and starts to head back to her tree. But Erwan has another question.
“Are you doing … yoga?”
Uh-oh.
“Yes, I’m an instructor and—”
“You teach that?” Erwan says. “Have you ever used yoga for anything useful?”
“It’s very use—”
“No, in real life. In an emergency. Has anyone ever shouted, Quick! Sun-salute for your life! Of course not. But you hear Run for your life! Climb for your life! Don’t worry, I’ll carry you out of here! all the time. Humans made yoga up for recreation, not for survival. No animal would ever do it. Changing postures in the same place with your head down? Forget it! In the wild, that’s death. You need the luxury of a no-danger environment for yoga. Everything is controlled—the soft mat, the temperature, some guru telling you what to do. It’s not instinctive or natural. It’s make-believe.”
Yoga isn’t about emergencies, Sandra argues. It’s about finding balance and a mind-body connection.
“Your body will never be more connected to your mind than when something is at stake,” Erwan retorts. “That’s how you measure the value of a movement: by its consequences. Climb a tree, throw a rock, balance on the edge of a cliff—you lose focus for a fraction of a second, you’re screwed. It takes a very affluent and indulged culture to convince itself that standing around in weird poses is exercise.”
Despite Erwan’s rat-a-tat-tat attack, it’s obvious he wants to win Sandra over, not beat her down. That’s enough to make her step once more into the buzz saw.
You’re forgetting flexibility, she offers. Yoga makes you more limber.
“If your muscles resist a movement, it’s because the movement is unnatural. So why change the muscle? Change the movement!” Erwan drops down in the sand and juts a leg out in a hurdler’s pose. “If your hamstring won’t let you stretch like this,” he says, bending forward with his head over his knee “then move like this.” Swiftly, he jackknifes the leg back so it folds under his butt. He’s able to reach much farther forward, and he’s much better balanced.
“Now, which one is a real mind-body connection?”
“I think he’s really onto something,” says Lee Saxby, a physical therapist and technical director of Wildfitness, a London-based exercise program built around an evolutionary model of human performance. Saxby is convinced that true human health has nothing to do with exercise machines and everything do to with hunter-gatherer movements, and when he stumbled across a remarkable video by Erwan, he found Exhibit A in the flesh.