Unleash your inner animal
Ex-blue Peter host Radzi Chinyanganya’s new book reveals how
WHAT’S your favourite animal? Mine is the nudibranch, a colourful sea slug. My son’s is the star-nosed mole (look it up, if you dare).
But have you ever thought about how animals move?
This week I have been discussing just that with Radzi Chinyanganya whose new book, Move Like a Lion, aims to encourage children to move around like a whole host of animals.
The former Blue Peter presenter is a great believer in the fact that physical activity can boost your wellbeing and is a huge sports fan.
“I’ve done skeleton bobsleigh, I’ve skydived…
For me it’s anything with adrenaline,” he says.
“I’d love to try Formula One or powerboat racing. In the Winter Olympics you see combinations of skiing and snowboarding, I’d love to give them a go. You’ve got to have unbelievable guts!” Radzi, 33, says he was good at sport as a child and found it helped him make friends. But when he became a presenter on Blue Peter, he discovered that not all children have the same relationship with physical activity.
“It wasn’t until I was an adult, doing kids TV and going back to schools that I realised, while sport was a positive experience for me, it has been exactly the opposite for other people. “That was where the idea for my book came from. I thought I’d like to do something which was totally inclusive. “I thought how can I use the power of sport without the limitations of it?”
Radzi says he originally thought of basing Move Like a Lion on superheroes but later changed his mind.
“Superheroes are actually quite limited,” he says. “They have two arms, two legs and move like a human being.
“Then I thought about animals – every kid loves animals – that could be perfect.
“Once the idea came, I had the difficult job of deciding which animals and how many types could be included.
“My favourite animal is the world’s fastest animal – the peregrine falcon. But how do you move like a peregrine falcon? It’s quite difficult.
“I went on this long journey of looking at animals and saying ‘How can I turn that into a human move?’. (Laughs) Ah it was quite a challenge!”
Radzi says his new book is not about exercising to change the way you look but, “hopefully it might be the start of something that could lead people who don’t necessarily see themselves as sporty perhaps taking up a sport”.
Radzi has rated the moves – easy, medium and hard – so there is something for everyone.
“You can do all the animals or just focus on one. If you want to give it a go for 15 seconds or 15 minutes it’s totally up to you. You can’t go wrong.”
Radzi says it’s all about imagination, too, and the illustrations are just for ideas.
“We actually can’t move like a scorpion in reality but we can try to think how a scorpion moves. “However you think a scorpion moves, that’s how a scorpion moves. It’s completely up to you.”
Move Like A Lion by Radzi Chinyanganya (left) is published by DK, £5.99