How do animals do it?

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By Jack Blatherwick

Let’s Play Hockey Columnist

As I walked my dog this morning — the usual route along the railroad tracks — the sun was bright, and for the first time in a long Minnesotawinter, the temperature soared well above zero (Fahrenheit). It was one of those mornings that inspired some pretty far-out thinking — questions mostly.

Several rabbits were basking in the sun until they spotted the dog…and the chase was on. This dog’s a fast runner and a slow learner, so after six years of futility, she still thinks she’ll catch one of these speedy critters. But it’s good exercise for the dog and excellent training for the rabbits — real-life preparation for those predators with quicker feet and a higher IQ .

Training. I wonder if that’s what these rabbits were calling it? “Here comes that black lab again. You’d think she’d get tired of training us.”

A weird thought crossed my mind as I watched them bound through the snow: How do animals do it? A gazelle or a cheetah, for example; how do they run so fast — so gracefully you’d like to put music to their movement — yet with such agility that they can change directions on a dime? They haven’t even been taught the fundamentals of sprinting — you know, the ABC elements of the stride.

When Minnesotans get a spring-like day in January, when it’s supposed to be 25 below zero, the mind canplay some tricks. Some weird questions popped up, like: why are gazelles so fast when they don’t even break down the running stride and practice the three parts, A, B and C the way humans do? But, who am I to question the experts? Or maybe the real experts are the gazelles, and they’re trying to tell us something. Perhaps strides (running or skating) aren’t supposed to be broken into pieces.

And those rabbits — how’d they get such quick feet without running through rope ladders and dancing around hop-scotch drills? Or the cheetahs, accelerating from zero to 70 in a couple seconds; how’d that happen without doing Olympic lifts? Come to think of it, they never come to the weight room at all, and if they would, they’d turn into tigers instead of cheetahs. They’d be bigger and stronger, certainly, but not as quick and agile.

How is it that some animals have been known to skip warmup before a sprint workout? I’ll bet those rabbits limped back to their hutch with pulled muscles, because this was an early morning session, and there wasn’t a lot of time for warmup. My dog didn’t seem to be limping, though. I found that interesting.

Core training: now there’s an area where the animal kingdom is totally ignorant. They must think they get enough core training when they sprint and bound through the bushes, twisting, turning, accelerating, decelerating. With all the recent emphasis on “core,” the animals certainly must have heard about the most up-to-date training at our most up-to-date fitness centers — those glitzy gyms where humans are balancing on beach balls and lifting dumbbells at the same time. Animals have a long way to go to match our knowledge about core stability.

But then again, professional hockey players do all that up-to-date core stuff, and the NHL loses several players each day to groin and hip injuries. Maybe this is one area where we should be asking the animals. No, I don’t think so. They’d need to charge a lot more before we’d consider them experts.

What do they know about static and dynamic stretching, even PNF? (That’s proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, in case you want to impress a lion). My dog gets up in the morning and does her stretch as she yawns. She only holds the stretch for two seconds, though; then she thinks she’s ready to chase rabbits!

I had a flashback to a conversation three years ago with Bobby Orr — you remember that Hall of Famer whose skating stride was as beautiful and rhythmical as a gazelle’s — the one with the explosive acceleration of a cheetah. After watching my PowerPoint presentation about off-ice training, he offered this thought, “You can’t teach skating. I mean you can’t teach the kind of skating a player needs in a game — skating combined with fakes and cuts and stickhandling. Kids have to get out on the pond and learn by trial and error — learn while carrying the puck through traffic in a scrimmage.”

Orr’s words came back to me this morning as I walked home from the rabbit training. There was a poem about learning, inscribed permanently in the sidewalk outside St. Mark’s school. Not knowing the author, I  decided to ‘steal’ part of it. The poem was about teaching someone how to balance. Stop for a second and imagine trying to teach that skill. Actually, this poem could be about ‘teaching’ most motor skills:

“I don’t know enough about balance to tell you how to do it; I think learning is in the trying and letting go.”

Jack Blatherwick, Ph.D., is a physiologist for the Washington Capitals.