A quick overview

Before I start moving on to the various QM exercises, I thought I'd spend some time explaining a few details about this blog (not Georges Hébert talking, here. Not Georges Hébert either in the other posts, by the way. Keep that in mind).

The way I've worked so far is to provide a condensed summary of topics from the book along with pictures of some interesting drawings of my choice. I think that's pretty efficient, i.e. I don't spend hours laboring over the text and you still get a lot of information.

About the pictures, I made high resolution photographs so that you can read the text if you wish (try right-click and "view picture" or "open in other tab" or something like that: you should get the full resolution image). Most of the text should be straightforward via google translate or some other engine, once you have the context information from the summary (or so I hope).

Of course, there's many details missing, so if you have questions on any of the topics you can put a comment and I'll do my best to answer at least before I put the next post up.

Now, so far we have covered parts of the introduction, describing general aspects of QMs. Those are basically what to keep in mind when doing any form of QM exercise. Next come the exercise chapters, describing various modes of QMs and related exercises (the book covers QM static postures first, then walking, running and jumping, then crawling, and finally falling). In these, many of the actual exercises are described more in detail in the illustrations than in the main text, so I recommend you look closely at them if you're interested in the moves.

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I do!

What is this about?

I have had the good fortune to acquire a copy of Georges Hébert's book on "Quadrupédie", the art of movement on four limbs, which is part of his master works on physical education with the natural method, published in 1946 in French and sadly never re-edited or translated.

I already did some fan dub translation on a earlier book which appeared on Google Books, so I thought I should at least collect a few notes and excerpts from this new book, which might be the most unusual and overlooked part of his teachings, although it has come back quite a bit with the growth of Parkour. All of this is of course purely subjective (even when I quote Hébert directly, I am still selecting a quote) and incomplete. I'll try to include some of the excellent technical drawings he had made, which tell a lot by themselves.

These quadrupedal techniques are not arranged as a series of exercises or in progression of skill, but rather described logically and exhaustively, grouping together movements of variable difficulty but related form of execution. Be mindful of this if you want to "try it at home", and make sure you understand the potential risks and difficulties involved. That being said, a lot of quadrupedal exercises are very efficient at building strength and flexibility for the whole body, and provide safety mechanisms in potentially dangerous situations.