EXPERT CELEBRATES VALUE OF MOVEMENT
Families urged to promote multiple sport as way to equip athletes with skills to excel
Don’t tell Dr. Chris Raynor you don’t have an athletic bone in your body. He doesn’t want to hear it. “As far as I’m concerned, everybody is a freaking athlete,” Raynor, an orthopedic surgeon and former Western University football player recently told a sport and fitness conference at the RA Centre.
Raynor, who operates the Human 2.0 training centre in Ottawa, encourages everyone to get moving, regardless of background or age.
“I have 72-year-old grandmothers (as clients),” Raynor said. “I put them under the barbell and they’re doing ass-to-grass squats like everybody else. I may need to scale it down — they’re maybe squatting an empty bar. Doesn’t matter.
“Everybody is playing a sport all the time — and their sport may be chasing their grandkids.”
Movement, the value of sport and risks of sport specialization were top of mind at the first annual Athlete Success conference. It was organized by Rob Saric of Athlete Builder and former Ottawa Rough Riders player Tom Pullen.
A range of panellists and speakers shared their views on the evolving world of sport and coaching — from legendary Riders lineman and kicker Moe “The Toe” Racine and his sons, Thom and Bruce, to longtime football coach Rob Hamm, his son, Jack (Queen’s University football), and Olympic champion synchronized-swimmer Carolyn Waldo. And several more, including former NHL defenceman Brendan Bell, Pullen, broadcaster Terry Marcotte and Scott Hunter of OTUS Group.
Ontario judge Hugh Fraser, a champion sprinter as a youth, told the story of a leg injury that would have kept him out of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal were it not for a coach who encouraged him to accompany the team, as a cheerleader if necessary. Ultimately, he rehabilitated the injury enough to compete and reached a sprint final — a moment that became more significant in his life when the 1980 boycott robbed him of a chance to compete in a second Olympics.
Raynor, headlining a panel discussion on “Movement For Life” held court with his philosophy of learning athletic motion in the same way we learn language: with baby steps.
It makes no sense, says Raynor, to expect someone to instantly learn to speak Russian.
“This is what we’re doing to our children in sport,” Raynor said. “If you look at how you teach a child to speak, we teach them the letters, the sounds, then we teach them the words.
“Then we put them into phrases and sentences. Only then can we start to have a conversation.”
Raynor preaches “movement fluency, movement mastery.”
The letters, sounds and words equate in physical movements to core strength and spatial awareness.
Echoing the words of Senators strength coach Chris Schwarz in a recent Citizen series on child’s play and sport specialization, Raynor pleaded with families to promote multiple sport as a way to equip athletes with the movement skills needed to excel at any particular sport.
Learn to track a ball in space, to run backwards.
“Multiple sports allow the body to maintain all those ranges of motion,” Raynor said. “We want to create people able to deal with unpredictable circumstances.”
Raynor works with many Canadian university athletes and CFL Ottawa Redblacks players. They train away from their sport-specific activities, but use and develop techniques they can bring to their sport.
A disciple of the international movement theorist Ido Portal, Raynor uses a lot of gymnastics techniques with his athletes.
“We’re teaching them how to move in space … so they can learn how to manoeuvre themselves,” Raynor says.
Accompanied on the panel with physiotherapist Mathew Pulickal, Raynor and Pulickal encouraged athletes and weekend warriors to work on the areas where they are weakest.
And by all means, get in motion.
Sitting is the new whipping boy for fitness gurus. Recent studies suggest that even a strong workout can’t overcome hours of sedentary behaviour. Raynor advocates getting up from a chair to move, stretch or have a “walking meeting” instead of a sit-down conversation.
“Incorporate activity into your day so you are moving every 20, 25 minutes,” Raynor says. “That’s what your body needs. Your body is craving and asking for nourishment.
“We have to get people to understand activity is a way of life.”
I have 72-yearold grandmothers (as clients). I put them under the barbell and they’re doing ass-to-grass squats like everybody else.