Dr. Ben Braddock

I know exactly what this photo comes from without any research. It’s from the “College of Athletes” in Reims, France. The shot was taken in 2012, maybe 2013 before WWI. Most of these guys had been recruited from the French navy by Georges Hebert, a retired navy officer and creator of the “Physical, Moral and Viril Education by the Natural Method” he formally launched in 1905. He had already written and published a few books about it. His plan was to form many of these PE educators and to send them around the world to spread the method. He was financed by the Marquis De Poulignac, a Champagne magnate. The venue had indoors and outdoors facilities, it was the biggest and most modern gym in Europe back then. They even had filming equipment. But…WWI happens, and Reims is near the border. The facility will be entirely destroyed by war, with trenches running through it. These guys will soon die in war, and the momentum stopped in its tracks. Hebert himself will be maimed, and after the war, people just want to have fun, no train their physicality for a moral purpose; on top of that, English sports or road biking become all the rage. So the method never took off worldwide as it should have. This is why…about a century later, in 2008, I started the MovNat method, to bring this approach to physical training with a purpose back to the world, in a modernized fashion. Almost two decades later, we’re still teaching it!