Erwan Le Corre demonstrates the workout the world forgot:
(I can’t help but point out that his Kimura arm-lock could use more hip rotation and less arm movement.)
Le Corre has seen parkour and CrossFit take off, and now he’s branding his system as MovNat — but he admits that it’s an old, old idea:
Haberey’s urban antics helped kick off the parkour craze, but Le Corre, like most of his followers, eventually grew disillusioned. “I supported him for a while,” Le Corre says, “but it turned into a cult of his personality. It became too dark and underground, all about helping him, not others.”
For a few years, Le Corre delved into endurance sports, competing in Ironman-distance triathlons while supporting himself with odd jobs, including making soap and men’s jewelry. But turning himself into a perpetual-motion machine wasn’t his raison d’être, either. Finally, in 2004, he stumbled upon an online comment about Methode Naturelle, an obscure training manual published in 1912 by Georges Hébert, a French naval officer. The book featured black-and-white photos of robust young men in briefs performing all kinds of primal-movement exercises: jumping, running, swimming, climbing, etc.
“I was like What?! This is exactly what I was doing before, but this guy had given it a name,” says Le Corre. “He had systematized it, and I thought, That’s the way to go.”
Hébert’s motto was “Being strong to be useful,” a concept largely inspired by the defining event of his life. On May 8, 1902, Hébert was stationed on the Sughet, a naval ship just offshore of Saint-Pierre, on the island of Martinique, during the infamous eruption of Mount Pelée. In minutes, the blast flash-fried most of the town’s 30,000 citizens, searing them with pyroclastic ash before burying them in tsunamis of mud. Amid the carnage, Hébert and his shipmates were credited with saving some 700 lives, pulling from the sea scalded men, women, and children, some of whom had been blown hundreds of feet through the air by the blast.
Preparing your body and mind for real-world, life-or-death applications is at the root of MovNat. Our workshop activities (throw a rock, climb a tree) may seem random, but they’re intended to cultivate what Le Corre refers to as “selective tension,” a kinetic reaction in which muscles relax and contract in patterns that help you move efficiently, especially in unpredictable situations. To underscore their practical value, Le Corre would often cite imagined modern-day scenarios during our training. “What if you had to pull someone from a burning building?” he asks one morning. “Or a flood,” Verdier adds. “Sometimes survival comes down to who can run up a flight of stairs and who can’t.”