Isegoria

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.”

Oregon’s speed-freak football starts on the practice field:

Oregon does no discrete conditioning during practice, no “gassers” — the sideline-to-sideline sprints that are staples in many programs — and no “110s” — sprints from the goal line to the back of the opposite end zone. The practice itself serves as conditioning. Just as they do during games, Oregon’s players run play after play — offensive sets; punt and kickoff returns and coverages; field goals; late-game two-minute drills — but at a pace that exceeds what they can achieve on Saturdays. Nick Aliotti, Oregon’s defensive coordinator, explained that the team can go even faster in practice because the “referees” — student managers sprinting around in striped shirts — spot the ball faster than any real game official would.

Trying to reach (or exceed) competition speed in training is a common goal across a range of sports. I once asked Bob Bowman, the longtime coach of Michael Phelps, why Phelps did not swim the languorous distance sets that were part of some other competitors’ regimens. “We don’t want him to swim slow in meets,” he said, “so why would we have him practice swimming slow?” John Wooden, the legendary U.C.L.A. basketball coach, was known for fast-paced practices that reduced the need for aerobic training.

But in more traditional settings, what slows things down is the impulse of coaches to stop the action and be heard. To instruct and correct. Coaches , after all, get into the business because they love a sport and want to see it played right. They have limited control during a game. Practice is when they can stop time and choreograph perfection.

Imagine the following, which you would see at a typical football practice across nearly any level: An offensive-line coach wades in after a play, puts his hands on the shoulder pads of his big left tackle and tries to correct the angle on his block or some subtle aspect of his footwork. Another play is run, and the coach says, “Better,” but he wades back in to make another small adjustment. That’s how a crisp two-hour practice becomes a three-hour ordeal.

It doesn’t happen at Oregon. Coaches sometimes pull players from the field for quick talks, but first they send in substitutes, and the plays keep on rolling. They look back at the films from each practice — identify mistakes — and then point them out in early-evening players’ meetings, which are also short.

This style has been easier for Kelly’s players to adjust to than for his coaches, most of whom have spent many more years than he has at the major college level. Aliotti, the defensive coordinator, is 56 and in his third stint on the Oregon staff. He has also coached in the N.F.L. “It’s insanity for a coach,” he said when we talked one morning after practice. “You’ve got the music blasting, you look around and your kids are dancing and you don’t want to stop the fun. But when you’re an old-school guy like me, it takes patience and change, because you want to make yourself heard. I want to correct a guy, but we’re already on to the next play. Don’t get me wrong. This has been good for us as a team. But I have to be real with you. It’s still hard for me.”

This lets them push the pace on the playing field:

College-football offenses have become more wide open in recent years, but the highest-scoring attacks tend to rely mainly on the forward pass. They are aerial circuses, like Texas Tech under former Coach Mike Leach, whose celebrated spread offense from 2000 to 2009 was so pass-first that his quarterback, in 2003, averaged about 60 pass attempts and 486 passing yards per game. By contrast, Oregon was leading the nation in scoring through 10 games this season with an attack almost evenly split between passing and rushing attempts. The run plays — because receivers are not spread all over the field at the end of a play — allow the Ducks to scramble back to the line of scrimmage and quickly snap the ball again. And Oregon sequences its plays and formations in such a way that it can push the tempo even after pass attempts. The running-backs coach, Gary Campbell, told me that if a receiver on the right side of a formation is sent on a crossing pattern to the other side of the field, Oregon coaches have already planned a formation for the next play that keeps him on the side of the field where he finished.

Kristina Dell calls it the little racket that changed tennis:

Today, thin is in. Skinny grips and lighter frames that carry more weight in the head rather than the shaft help baseliners generate more racket-head speed so they can use their wrists and forearms to roll through their shots. Updated polyester strings only add to the effect, as players finish their swings with their rackets up around their ears to get crazy amounts of spin.

“If you give Nadal a heavy racket with a big grip, it’s impossible to do what he does,” said Roman Prokes, part of the team of U.S. Open stringers handling Mr. Nadal’s sticks.
[...]
Aside from treating his rackets kindly, what Mr. Nadal does is put a lot of action on the ball. A maneuverable frame lets him execute his signature lefty forehand: instead of following through over his right shoulder, Mr. Nadal snaps his racket back after hitting the ball. (Kind of like a ping-pong player.) The result is a hyper-rotating spin with the ball jumping high off the court.

Rafa’s racket weighs a flimsy 10.6 ounces unstrung, plus an extra 0.4 ounce he adds to the head, for a total of 11.5 ounces with strings, practically pixie dust in the hands of a 6-foot-1 hulking guy. By contrast, the 5-foot-10, 128-pound Caroline Wozniacki, the U.S. Open’s top seeded woman, plays with the same Babolat Aeropro Drive as Mr. Nadal; her frame is just two ounces lighter than Mr. Nadal’s.

If Mr. Nadal picked up Mr. Sampras’s old racket today, his shots would probably hit the fence. The hefty, unforgiving Pro Staff Original Mr. Sampras used en route to 14 Grand Slam titles is 12.6 ounces unstrung. It was already cumbersome, but Mr. Sampras added lead tape to get more power and control, for a total mass of almost 14 ounces with strings. To manage it, he used a grip with a circumference of 4 5/8 inches.

Mr. Nadal’s svelte handle is but a toothpick in comparison: 4¼ inches around, a size smaller than the grip Ms. Wozniacki and many women use. “A 4 3/8 grip was considered a ladies racket,” said Mr. Prokes, “but now across the board players have gone to small grip sizes, at least one size smaller or more.”

Nate Jackson explains what an NFL training camp is really like — hell, basically — starting with the obvious point that it hurts:

In a strictly physical analysis, training camp brutalizes the body. The N.F.L. is home to the strongest, most explosive athletes on the planet. Being hit over and over again by these men is a painful ordeal, not so much as it’s happening, but after the fact: after practice, late at night, early in the morning. Morning is the worst.

About three or four days into training camp is when the soreness starts to peak, and it sticks around for about a week and a half until your body starts to desensitize itself to misery. During my six seasons with the Denver Broncos, there were days when getting out of bed was so difficult I was sure there was no way I could practice. Of course I was wrong. I found a way to get it done. Football players learn how to push down the pain and make a play. But it hurts later. It hurts a lot.

Then people yell at you:

The verbal haranguing isn’t exclusive to the field. In meetings every day and night, it continues. The decibel level decreases, but it’s no less biting. Every play of every practice is watched on film by the whole team that same day. [...] Being called out in meetings and having everyone in the room watching you fail in slow motion — often with a laser pointer on your two-dimensional body — is demoralizing, and only intensifies the pain. This scrutiny is well intentioned, but often falls flat from overkill, the message trampled by the messenger.

And then there are the cuts:

Realistically, of the 80 guys on each roster, 15 are already cut. Coaches have a pretty good idea of what the final roster will look like. There’s a little bit of wiggle room in the middle of the depth chart. At every position, there are usually two guys competing for one spot. [...] But this is in the middle of the depth chart, meaning that if a team is carrying 10 receivers in camp, receivers Nos. 5 and 6 are battling for a job. Nos. 7 through 10 are camp bodies, there to bolster the numbers, to take punishment, to give veterans an occasional rest, to serve as verbal punching bags for position coaches trying to make a point.

This happens at every position, even quarterback. Players see this happening to them, and there is nothing they can do about it. At the bottom of the depth chart, guys get very few quality “reps” — repetitions, turns to play in practice. Coaches often encourage these players, saying things like, “Don’t count your reps, make your reps count!” But reality sets in. For many, this will be the last football they will ever play.

Promoters are trying to raise the Indian game of kabbadi to international popularity. I’m not holding my breath:

Kabaddi is played on a rectangular court. Teams of seven players take turns sending “raiders” across the dividing line to tag opponents. All the while, they chant “kabaddi” — derived from a Hindi word meaning “holding of breath” — to prove they aren’t inhaling.

If a tagger touches an opposing player and returns to his side without running out of oxygen, the umpire awards his team a point. Opponents get a point if they can prevent him from returning, by wrestling, tackling or body-slamming him until he runs out of breath. The team with more points after two 20-minute halves wins.

A few weeks ago Buckethead mentioned that CoolTools had compiled a list of the best magazine articles ever, and I started reading the then-top article on the list, David Foster Wallace’s “Federer As Religious Experience” — which didn’t especially move me.

Then, today, Aretae mentioned a “beautiful essay on tennis from 1996″ that he came across via Tyler Cowen — The String Theory, also by David Foster Wallace and also on the list. It looks at the very, very good players in the top 100 who still struggle in obscurity:

The realities of the men’s professional-tennis tour bear about as much resemblance to the lush finals you see on TV as a slaughterhouse does to a well-presented cut of restaurant sirloin. For every Sampras-Agassi final we watch, there’s been a weeklong tournament, a pyramidical single-elimination battle between 32, 64, or 128 players, of whom the finalists are the last men standing. But a player has to be eligible to enter that tournament in the first place. Eligibility is determined by ATP computer ranking. Each tournament has a cutoff, a minimum ranking required to be entered automatically in the main draw. Players below that ranking who want to get in have to compete in a kind of pretournament tournament. That’s the easiest way to describe qualies. I’ll try to describe the logistics of the Canadian Open’s qualies in just enough detail to communicate the complexity without boring you mindless.
[...]
The qualie circuit is to professional tennis sort of what AAA baseball is to the major leagues: Somebody playing the qualies in Montreal is an undeniably world-class tennis player, but he’s not quite at the level where the serious TV and money are. In the main draw of the du Maurier Omnium Ltée, a first-round loser will earn $5,400, and a second-round loser $10,300. In the Montreal qualies, a player will receive $560 for losing in the second round and an even $0.00 for losing in the first. This might not be so bad if a lot of the entrants for the qualies hadn’t flown thousands of miles to get here. Plus, there’s the matter of supporting themselves in Montreal. The tournament pays the hotel and meal expenses of players in the main draw but not of those in the qualies. The seven survivors of the qualies, however, will get their hotel expenses retroactively picked up by the tournament. So there’s rather a lot at stake — some of the players in the qualies are literally playing for their supper or for the money to make airfare home or to the site of the next qualie.

You could think of Michael Joyce’s career as now kind of on the cusp between the majors and AAA ball. He still has to qualify for some tournaments, but more and more often he gets straight into the main draw. The move from qualifier to main-draw player is a huge boost, both financially and psychically, but it’s still a couple of plateaus away from true fame and fortune. The main draw’s 64 or 128 players are still mostly the supporting cast for the stars we see in televised finals. But they are also the pool from which superstars are drawn. McEnroe, Sampras, and even Agassi had to play qualies at the start of their careers, and Sampras spent a couple of years losing in the early rounds of main draws before he suddenly erupted in the early nineties and started beating everybody.

Still, even most main-draw players are obscure and unknown. An example is Jakob Hlasek a Czech who is working out with Marc Rosset on one of the practice courts this morning when I first arrive at Stade Jarry. I notice them and go over to watch only because Hlasek and Rosset are so beautiful to see — at this point, I have no idea who they are. They are practicing ground strokes down the line — Rosset’s forehand and Hlasek’s backhand — each ball plumb-line straight and within centimeters of the corner, the players moving with compact nonchalance I’ve since come to recognize in pros when they’re working out: The suggestion is of a very powerful engine in low gear. Jakob Hlasek is six foot two and built like a halfback, his blond hair in a short square Eastern European cut, with icy eyes and cheekbones out to here: He looks like either a Nazi male model or a lifeguard in hell and seems in general just way too scary ever to try to talk to. His backhand is a one-hander, rather like Ivan Lendl’s, and watching him practice it is like watching a great artist casually sketch something. I keep having to remember to blink. There are a million little ways you can tell that somebody’s a great player — details in his posture, in the way he bounces the ball with his racket head to pick it up, in the way he twirls the racket casually while waiting for the ball. Hlasek wears a plain gray T-shirt and some kind of very white European shoes. It’s midmorning and already at least 90 degrees, and he isn’t sweating. Hlasek turned pro in 1983, six years later had one year in the top ten, and for the last few years has been ranked in the sixties and seventies, getting straight into the main draw of all the tournaments and usually losing in the first couple of rounds. Watching Hlasek practice is probably the first time it really strikes me how good these professionals are, because even just fucking around Hlasek is the most impressive tennis player I’ve ever seen. I’d be surprised if anybody reading this article has ever heard of Jakob Hlasek. By the distorted standards of TV’s obsession with Grand Slam finals and the world’s top five, Hlasek is merely an also-ran. But last year, he made $300,000 on the tour (that’s just in prize money, not counting exhibitions and endorsement contracts), and his career winnings are more than $4 million, and it turns out his home base was for a time Monte Carlo, where lots of European players with tax issues end up living.

“Seeing” plays a vital role in tennis:

Except for the serve, power in tennis is not a matter of strength but of timing. This is one reason why so few top tennis players look muscular. Any normal adult male can hit a tennis ball with a pro pace; the trick is being able to hit the ball both hard and accurately. If you can get your body in just the right position and time your stroke so you hit the ball in just the right spot — waist-level, just slightly out in front of you, with your own weight moving from your back leg to your front leg as you make contact — you can both cream the ball and direct it. Since “…just the right…” is a matter of millimeters and microseconds, a certain kind of vision is crucial. Agassi’s vision is literally one in a billion, and it allows him to hit his ground strokes as hard as he can just about every time. Joyce, whose hand-eye coordination is superlative, in the top 1 percent of all athletes everywhere (he’s been exhaustively tested), still has to take some incremental bit of steam off most of his ground strokes if he wants to direct them.

If you’ve played tennis at least a little, you probably have some idea how hard a game is to play really well, Wallace — who played at a pretty high level — says:

I submit to you that you really have no idea at all. I know I didn’t. And television doesn’t really allow you to appreciate what real top-level players can do — how hard they’re actually hitting the ball, and with what control and tactical imagination and artistry. I got to watch Michael Joyce practice several times right up close, like six feet and a chain-link fence away. This is a man who, at full run, can hit a fast-moving tennis ball into a one-foot square area seventy-eight feet away over a net, hard. He can do this something like more than 90 percent of the time. And this is the world’s seventy-ninth-best player, one who has to play the Montreal qualies.

So, how do you get that good?

But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we’ll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way “up close and personal” profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life — outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small.