Book review: Natural Born Heroes by Christopher McDougall

Posted In: Fitness January 16th, 2018 divider No Comments »

If the name sounds familiar, it comes from the same author as the international best seller Born to Run. That book was a great inspiration to many people and it really helped solidify my position that everyone can run and do it easily and safely.

The subtitle for this book is How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance. It looks at some resistance warriors who were part of the Second World War on he Greek island of Crete.

This book is quite a bit different but I got almost as much out of it. The first half was slow as it provided a history lesson on the war and the resistance, with an endless bunch of characters that is almost overwhelming. The second part is where it gets good, where it goes into the strength and endurance movements.

Another big aspect was nutrition, where he highlighted the benefits of high fat diets as they are the most efficient around, especially if you want to keep going for hours and hours and you have someone chasing you!

This could be looked at the history of CrossFit and parkour put together. One of my biggest takeaways was to incorporate play into my daily life and try to cross train as much as possible to make me a complete athlete.

One of the things I love about his books is that he looks at one major issue per book but through different angles. In this one, he talks about endurance, orienteering and nutrition. And all the stories are great and they go back to the basics. My kind of book!

He also talks about the importance of nature and all the possibilities that exist here. It’s one of he reasons why I try to spend a part of my day there every single day, especially in forests.

I actually caught a few videos recently that were born out of the book on Outside Online. Some of them inspire some daily movements.

There’s also been some talk about a movie or documentary based on the book so stay tuned.