Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance

by Christopher McDougall

  “A shattering experience for all of us,” Hall admitted.

  The Heavenly Twins, so dubbed for their saintly demeanor when not demonstrating how to claw a man’s testicles while dragging a bootheel down his shin, got right to work. They demonstrated thirty-six ways to knock someone cold with an open hand and nifty tricks for turning office supplies into weapons. “A clipboard for example,” said Henry Hall. “You can strike somebody with it across the side of the neck, on the head, on the nose, under the nose, you can hit him in the parts, you can hit him in the solar plexus….”

  The Twins even introduced their own weapons: the icicle-thin Fairbairn-Sykes Commando Knife, which slides in and out of a man’s heart as neatly as a hypodermic needle, and the swordlike “smatchet,” a Bronze Age throwback that can crush through your rib cage and split you to the groin. “We were to be gangsters,” commented new dirty trickster Robert Sheppard. “But with the behavior, if possible, of gentlemen.”

  CHAPTER 10

  It’s craftsmanship over showmanship.

  —DR. THOMAS AMBERRY, a retired and overweight seventy-one-year-old podiatrist, on why he can sink 2,750 consecutive free throws and no NBA player can

  THE TWINS HAD MADE THEIR PEACE with an ugly truth: when it comes to raw weaponry, we’re the biggest wimps in the wild. Humans don’t have fangs or claws or horns or venom. We’re not strong, we’re not fast, we can’t see at night or crush with our jaws. Luckily, we’re really wobbly—and that’s what makes us deadly.

  The best way to learn about wobble power—the same power that helped school principal Norina Bentzel overpower a maniac with a machete—is to strip down to your underwear in front of a bunch of strangers. At least that’s what I discovered in Tempe, Arizona, where I became a test subject for fitness experts from across the country who’d gathered to learn from Thomas Myers, a pioneering researcher in human connective tissue and author of the landmark text, Anatomy Trains.

  “Just relax,” Myers tells me as I strip down to be analyzed. “And stand naturally,” which might be the most useless advice you can give someone whose pants are on the other side of the room. I push back my shoulders and stiffen my back, trying to make it look as if military attention is my everyday posture. About thirty students, including a trainer for pro baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks, gather in front of me in a semicircle and begin jotting notes on their clipboards.

  “Andria,” Myers says after a few minutes. “Would you?”

  An athletic young woman sets aside her clipboard. She strips down to her sports bra and panties and joins me in front of the group.

  “Head: anterior shift,” one of Myers’s students calls out. She checks her clipboard. “With a posterior tilt.”

  Andria juts her neck like a tortoise, and then lifts her chin.

  “Shoulder girdle: anterior tilt,” adds James Ready, the Diamondbacks’ trainer.

  Andria hunches her back as if she’s been punched in the gut.

  The group continues feeding instructions until someone yells, “Freeze!”

  “Perfect!” one of Myers’s students says. She turns to me. “That’s you.”

  I look at Andria. “That’s me?”

  “You to a T,” Ready agrees.

  Yikes. One of Andria’s shoulders is caved, her hips are off-kilter, and her head is jutting like a silverback gorilla’s. That’s me? I was ordering my body to stand Marine Corps straight, but as I look at my reflection in Andria’s body and wince, one thing is obvious: something more powerful than mind and muscle is telling my body what to do. That mystery force, Tom Myers explains, is the unstoppable pull of elastic tissue.

  When it comes to raw strength, muscle is only a minority partner. The real powerhouse is our fascia profunda, the stretchy tissue that encases our organs and muscle. Until recently, fascia was considered no more important than the gooey film around a chicken breast. But in 1999, Myers was assisting in a cadaver dissection when he became intrigued by the “rubbery gunk beneath the skin,” as he describes it. The anatomists he was working with were slicing right through it because they wanted a good, unobstructed view of the muscle underneath. But fascia was everywhere, and getting through it wasn’t always easy. In some spots, it was as tough as a car tire.

  Maybe this is more than just sausage casing, Myers thought. There was one way to find out. “All I had to do was turn my scalpel sideways,” Myers recalls. Instead of slicing through the gunk, he sliced along it, gently freeing it from skin and bone. By the time he’d finished, he was looking at a full-length body sleeve that resembled a lumpy wetsuit. Myers was intrigued to see that the flesh suit wasn’t simply a slick sheet of tissue; it was more like a crisscross of fibers and cables, an endless circulatory system of strength. Under magnification, the fascia was so latticed, it seemed to have the tensile strength of storm netting.

  Myers’s twist-of-the-wrist technique revealed another surprise: internally, your body is shaped like your DNA. Fascia connects muscle to muscle, forming two continuous spirals from your feet to your forehead, which twirl around each other like the strands of a double helix. Meaning? Your body is rigged like a compound archery bow. Superstretchy tissue links your left foot to the right hip, the right hip to the left shoulder, and it’s much tougher than any muscle.

  “Think of a ladder twisted on itself,” Myers explains. The spiral line of fascia crisscross your abdomen, drop over your hips and down your shins to your foot, where it loops under the arch like a stirrup. So next time you watch LeBron James blast off the paint for a dunk, observe him with Tom Myers’s eyes. While everyone else is focused on the ball in LeBron’s outstretched hand, Myers is zeroing in on how LeBron’s trailing arm stretches wide behind his body; how the toes of his lead leg point upward; how the fingers of his idle hand splay wide. Individually, they’re details. Together, they’re fused elements in the same explosive act, all as crucially connected as match, fuse, and gunpowder.

  Hold on. The part about the fingers. I get how they’d improve balance—maybe—but vertical leap?

  Absolutely, says Steve Maxwell. And with the little device in his pocket, he can prove it. Steve is a former world champion Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighter and now a strength-and-conditioning coach who specializes in recovering lost innovations. “The old-timers knew what was up with fascia long before we even had a word for it,” he explains. “You’ll always be safe if you go back to the mighty men of old, the guys before the 1950s. Look at the old gyms, with their Indian clubs and medicine balls. What’s that all about if not balance, range of motion, being fluid, using elastic recoil?”

  Steve could have stepped out of a vintage fight poster himself. He’s over fifty but still has the build of a bare-knuckle boxer, all menace in motion with no meat to spare. If an eccentric billionaire were hunting humans for sport on a desert island, you’d put money on Steve to get away. Every morning, even in subfreezing winters, he begins the day with the ancient Hindu wrestlers’ tradition of stepping outside in the nude and dumping a five-gallon jerrycan of cold water over his head. Back when he was a star wrestler at West Chester University, Steve had such reverence for the sport’s ancestry that he once staged a throwback Olympic Games, complete with naked events. He managed to graduate anyway and went on to found Maxercise, a Philadelphia gym that became one of the country’s most respected conditioning centers for mixed martial arts fighters. Even the Gracie clan, the Brazilian dynasty that rules Ultimate Fighting, sent up-and-comers to Maxercise to be burned into shape.

  One thing Steve is always searching for is elastic-recoil energy, because fighters have no margin for error. You can be the strongest He-Man ever to enter the ring, but if you run out of gas before your opponent, you’re cooked. That’s why even human mountains like heavyweight boxing legend Sonny Liston spent as much time skipping rope as they did hitting the heavy bag. “Jumping, bouncing, skipping—it’s all free energy that comes from fascia, not muscle,” Steve explains. Get that bounce right and you can pogo-stick around while barely using
any muscular force. Liston weighed 220 pounds and was powerful enough to win three out of every four professional bouts by knockout, but he learned to move his feet as rhythmically as a schoolgirl, usually to James Brown’s “Night Train.”

  “Strength is a skill,” Steve says. “In the old days, every Celtic village used to have its ‘manhood stone.’ You didn’t pass into adulthood until you could move that stone. But it wasn’t about brute force; strength was knowing how to use all the tools inside your body. Here, this will blow your mind….”

  Steve roots around in his pocket and comes out with a rubber band. “Put this around the fingers of one hand, right up there near the fingernails. Now spread your fingers as wide as you can. Really fight it. Good. Close them and open again.” It’s so easy I’m getting a little embarrassed for Steve, and that’s when he pulls his big reveal.

  “It would be stupid to throw an arrow, right?” he says. “Better to use your muscles to pull back the string and let the string do the work.” He tells me to strip off the rubber band, drop to the floor, and get ready for push-ups. But instead of lowering my chest to the floor and straining my way back up, I’m to reverse it: I’m supposed to spread my fingers as wide as they were with the rubber band, mash my palms hard into the floor, and pull myself down. When I do, I surprise even myself when my elbows straighten with barely any effort.

  “See?” Steve says. “You tightened the spring on the way down, then it popped you right up.” I try it again, and it feels like I’m being sprung from a toaster. I’m not sure how it’s working—I’m not even sure if Steve knows—but those were the easiest twenty push-ups of my life.

  —

  “What if everything we thought we knew about muscles was wrong?” Tom Myers concludes. “Are there really six hundred muscles, or only one?” Bruce Lee always said his best punch came from his big toe, and now it seemed he wasn’t kidding. Lee could position his fist a finger length away from a 250-pound man and with the tiniest flick, he’d send the guy flying. Left toe triggers right hip; right hip pulls back left shoulder; left shoulder catapults right fist, all that power building like a tiny ripple at sea until—wham!—it crashes down far from where it started. Martial artists call Lee’s punch “long-distance ging”—strength from afar.

  “For many people, fitness is still all about lifting weights to build bulk,” Myers says. “But what does that make you fit for? I’d argue that this”—he taps a key on his laptop and brings up a slide—“is a much more physically fit human than a bodybuilder.” On the screen is a photo of a baby rolling on its back, drinking from a bottle held between its hands and feet. Like Bruce Lee, the infant used fascia to solve a problem its muscle couldn’t. “You are fit if you can adapt to the demands of your environment with ease and imagination,” Myers says.

  Your mind rebels against the image—a baby more fit than a bodybuilder—but by 2007 it wasn’t even the most jarring statement about fascia. Imaging technology had caught up with Myers’s scalpel, and Dr. Robert Schleip, head of the Fascia Research Project at Germany’s Ulm University, had discovered something remarkable: your fascia isn’t just taking orders—it’s giving them.

  —

  Dr. Schleip is a ponytailed, hipsterish professor and about as different from Steve Maxwell as possible, except for one thing: he also keeps his best tricks in his pocket. When I meet him in the training room at a London medical clinic where he’s come to present fresh fascia research, he goes into one side of his jacket for a fat bunch of keys and the other for a spring. He hooks the keyring to the end of the spring and sets it bouncing. Up and down, effortlessly and endlessly—until Schleip shifts his hand a fraction and the keyring goes wild, flying in all directions till it slows to a stop.

  “Posture and rhythm,” Schleip explains. “Your body operates the same way. When you’re in alignment, your elastic tissue stores that energy and returns it. But when you’re off-balance, it comes to a halt. For health, for strength, this has serious consequences.”

  Schleip is the one who first figured out how to thread ultrasound sensors into living fascia, and there he found something amazing: nerve endings. Your fascia is more than a bunch of wobbly rubber bands, he realized; it’s actually an intricate network of observe-and-report outposts, all of them gathering input from across your body and relaying it back to your brain. Fascia is as rich in sensory input as your tongue and eyes—even richer, possibly, since it’s getting info from everywhere.

  “Fascia reacts and remembers,” Schleip says. Every move you make is a physical experiment; if the experiment works—if, say, you swish a jump shot while sticking out your tongue—that experiment becomes a habit. All those habits get locked in as posture. Over time, posture becomes structure. “Connective tissue is the Saint Bernard dog of the body—it’s slow and loyal,” Schleip explains. “Once it’s formed into position, it’ll stick there.”

  That’s why you can recognize a friend from a distance before seeing her face. Harvard biologist Francisco Varela liked to call fascia the “organ of form,” because it creates your postural fingerprint; try to straighten your shoulders or change the way you walk and you’ll soon feel not only physically off-balance but emotionally uncertain. Fascia knows where you are in the world; it’s loaded with position sensors that contribute to your sense of balance and feeds those bearings directly to that fear-conditioning corner of your brain, the amygdala. Any movement grooved into the fascia feels soothing, gratifying, efficient; try to unlearn it, as any batting coach or ballet teacher will tell you, and you’re in for a struggle. New movements, no matter how necessary or logical, just feel wrong.

  “Isn’t that a terrible evolutionary flaw?” I ask. Humans are extremely adaptable, so why isn’t our fascia?

  Because it would have killed us, Schleip explains. For most of human existence, consistency is what kept us alive. Before we had bows or spears, we depended on all that springy elastic tissue in our legs, plus the superior cooling of our sweat glands and furless bodies, to run other animals to death. We were able to chase antelope across the African savanna for hours at a time until they overheated and collapsed. In that kind of race for survival, there’s no room for tinkering; you either hit your efficient stride and stuck with it or you died.

  Until, of course, we turned our wobble power into an even deadlier weapon.

  —

  “Close your eyes,” Joe Darrah says as he slaps a tomahawk into my hand. “Keep them shut. Don’t think. Just throw.”

  Joe is a former circus performer and master knifesmith. In the basement of his home in suburban Philadelphia, he’s got old sawmill blades he’s shaping into competition throwing knives. On his front lawn he’s got a half-dozen tree-stump slices bolted to an old table he’s placed uncomfortably close to his neighbor’s swing set. Joe got his start in the flinging arts in kindergarten, when his father, a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger, put a commando knife in his hand and taught him the rules of chicken. By the time Joe was a teenager he was good enough to go pro, and he got hired by a traveling circus to fling knives around showgirls. Now, at age fifty, he’s a seven-time world champion with both knives and tomahawks, and he’s also deadly accurate with the blowgun, bullwhip, and atlatl, an ancient spear-throwing weapon.

  Luckily, Joe lives in the outskirts of Philadelphia in America’s coolest suburb, judging by the fact that none of his Berwyn, Pennsylvania, neighbors seem to care that Joe likes to practice on his front lawn and often spends his afternoons hurling highly tempered pointy things past their cars. They’re not even freaked when he hones his skills on human targets: next to the old door with the bolted-on log slices is a homemade body shield that Joe built by sawing a hole out of another old door and covering it with bulletproof glass. Joe gets friends to step behind the door and press their faces against the glass; it’s a whole different level of nerve control when the target you’re eyeing is eyeing you right back.

  Joe hands me a ’hawk and then stands back and watches. I take my time and run through h
is pointers. Left foot forward; wide stance; easy overhand motion; tap the car keys in my right pocket on the follow-through to make sure I’m staying straight; and…

  Clank!

  The tomahawk shanks off the edge of the target, dropping into the dirt. Joe hands me another. Left foot forward…

  Clank!

  “What am I doing wrong?” I ask.

  “Here comes the Zen stuff,” Joe says. “You’re trying to control your throw, and you can’t.” That’s when he tells me to try throwing with my eyes closed.

  All righty. I squeeze my eyes, wind up, and let fly.

  Thwock!

  My tomahawk is buried in the log a few inches from the playing card.

  “Wow, that’s—”

  Before I can finish, Joe pivots. He windmills his arm and—thwock! thwock! thwock!—buries three ’hawks in three different targets. One splits the playing card right down the middle.

  Joe grins. “You have to enter yourself and let the rhythm come. Once you do that, you can do all kinds of crazy things.”

  —

  “Humans are amazing throwers. We are unique among all animals in our ability to throw projectiles at high speeds and with incredible accuracy.” So says Dr. Neil Roach, of George Washington University, lead author of a 2013 study that tackles the mystery of why, out of all other primates on the planet, we’re the only ones who can kill prey with a lethal throw.