Gavin's Story

I was born in Bonn, Germany as my father was a diplomat for the Canadian government. We moved from there to Washington D.C. where he served on the board of directors for the World Bank. We then moved to Ottawa where he continued to work in the Canadian bureaucracy before finally settling in Toronto when I was six years old. I didn’t know it then but I had landed smack in the middle of the toughest place in the world to play hockey and I couldn’t wait to get started. My father however did not let me play, at least not right away. To my chagrin he put me in ballet class run by Florence Henderson. Yes I was the only boy.

We worked a lot on balancing on our toes, proper posture, alignment of the spine, flexibility and controlling our bodies. It was pure torture. To top it off he then put me in figure skating while all my friends were already joining hockey leagues. Proper posture, balance, rhythm, timing, neuromuscular control were all taught and I fought it all the way.

Finally I was allowed to go to speed skating and much to my surprise not only was I the fastest kid in the whole class but I could skate rings around everyone. Suddenly I felt pretty good about myself, and years later I would learn through my own studies that a foundation had been laid down for me to be successful in sports. It is an important point to understand because in this country we throw our children into their respective sports without the proper preparation to be successful. They are not taught how to use their bodies and what is necessary to be able to move well before they play any sport and the problem is then compounded by pushing them into weight lifting, which further disrupts the body's ability to control itself properly for sports.

Finally I was allowed to compete in hockey and I joined a house league team in the west end of Toronto. My first year was amazing as I was the team scoring leader and could clearly move better than anyone on my team and in the league. I had developed some real confidence in my abilities and looking back I realize how important that was in my continued success in all the sports that I would compete in. My father proceeded to build a small hockey rink in my backyard and it soon became my second home complete with lights which drove my neighbors nuts. I would skate and skate and skate, learning to stick handle and shoot. I set up targets to practice my shooting accuracy and pylons to skate around as if they were defenders. These little drills became very helpful years later as I advanced to provincial finals for Showdown. Showdown was a competition testing speed, agility and scoring, things I had been practicing since I was six years old. I won for my team, my league, my district, my city, my province and advanced to the nationally televised finals where I came in second to Shane Redshaw in an overtime shootout. As disappointed as I was in losing I had come this far for a reason. I had been patterned for success from the time I was six years old and it allowed my mind to not get in the way of it.

Around nine years old I also started playing organized baseball. My father and I would play catch in the yard where I also learned to hit. Again by teaching me the basic skills that I needed to be able to play he prepared me to be able to compete and excel and that allowed the natural talent I was born with to come out. I played third base and pitched but I could really hit. Not for power but anything that came near me I could put a bat on it. We practiced that. My father was a very accomplished underhand softball pitcher and he used to throw me every spin, curve and speed he could think of. He stressed just making contact–and when I did good things happened. Soon I was picked up by a traveling team, and we went on to capture several Toronto city titles.

Junior high school provided opportunities for me to play basketball, volleyball, soccer, track and field and touch football. I excelled in them all because I could move better than everyone else. Meanwhile I continued to compete on my hockey and baseball traveling teams. My world became engulfed with competing in sports. Unbeknownst to me at the time my body was learning to do so many things in so many different ways. Throw a baseball and football; hit a volleyball and a baseball; kick a soccer ball and football; shoot and control a hockey puck and a basketball; long jump, triple jump and high jump; most importantly every day I was learning how to run faster and jump higher. I was addicted and my athletic confidence soared.

My mother was a school teacher and because education was such an important part of my upbringing it needs mentioning. From the start of grade school I wasn’t allowed to play anything until my homework was done and she provided an environment for me to be successful. So successful that by junior high school I had skipped a grade. I wasn’t the only one in my family; my older sister Karin would be valedictorian of her high school class. My mother’s patience was incredible as she taught students with special needs in our district and they adored her. It was an important lesson in that people need to be taught basic skills in anything they do if there talent is to ever fully mature. Abilities need to be nurtured, molded and guided by people that know what they are doing and who have the right intentions. The intention to help others! My mother taught me that. This website is being developed with that sole intention in mind. I am trying to provide a resource based on science whereby if someone wants to improve their ability to play sports or they just want to have their body feel better or they want to be able to help their own child, through a better method of exercise and nutrition, then they can do that with something that actually works.

High school was a new playing field for me. I was a year younger than everyone with whom I was competing, and thus I rarely enjoyed a size or strength advantage. The success that I enjoyed regardless of this disadvantage grilled into my head that physical size was not the determining factor for sports success, speed was!

My high school career was filled with success in all my sports. I was captain and MVP of my high school basketball and volleyball teams. I was captain and MVP of my traveling hockey and baseball teams, both of which won Toronto city championships–a difficult feat. During this time I had become obsessed with being able to dunk a basketball. I was only 5’8” at the time so it seemed impossible. I started jumping off a bench at my house so I could at least be able to feel what it was like to dunk. As dunking off the bench became easier and easier I started shaving down the legs of the bench. I had no idea what plyometrics or depth jumps were, but I was unknowingly doing a version of both. It took a year and a half before I finally removed the bench entirely. I could dunk on my own… all 5’8” of me. The impossible became possible. What was truly amazing was it was just a few months after this that I was introduced to weightlifting. Within a month of squatting I could not dunk anymore. I had no idea why other than it felt terrible to do it and I trusted my instincts. To make matters worse I damaged my left shoulder doing the bench press. To this day at 43, my labrum still gives me trouble. I had injured it in the weight room without getting touched. I knew there had to be a better way than that so I stopped doing it altogether. It was a different time then; the coaches didn’t question me at all. How could I have taught myself to dunk yet squatting had reversed that ability? It took years to answer.

I was 14 years old and it was June. My mother found a lump in her right breast. She was soon diagnosed with malignant cancer. Her mastectomy removed her right breast and I could see the fear in her eyes. There was a glimmer of hope as her color and energy returned through better nutrition. This was immediately reversed when her surgeon convinced her and my father that she should do chemotherapy just to be sure. Not once did any doctor ever discuss why she at 42 years old had developed malignant cancer but here take these chemicals and it will kill it. I read everything I could find, asked anyone who would listen and stood by helpless unable to help someone who had spent her life helping everyone else. A woman who had been given a 95% chance of survival was dead in just 10 short months.

The cancer has metastasized everywhere and left her ravaged and defenseless. The treatments had fed her cancer exactly what it wanted and I knew it because I watched it happen. I was angry. I vowed then to try and understand why a disease that at the turn of the century affected 1 in 100 people now affects 1 in 2. The answer lies in the increased toxicity in our air, water and especially our food. Compounding the problem is that the treatment protocols of chemotherapy and radiation further increase the toxicity levels and severely damage the immune system. I have made great strides in understanding how the body works and the nutritional information provided here will not only help you perform better but will dramatically impact your health in terms of disease prevention. Remember that I said this. If something isn’t done to change what this generation of children is eating then they will not outlive their parents. The reason being that their body will have been exposed to the poisons in our air, water and food longer than their parents and at a more vulnerable time in their development.

I was fifteen years old and my life was completely turned upside down. I continued on with all my sports but my home life had turned into hell. My father’s true colors began to emerge as he continually and repeatedly emotionally abused my sisters and I. He was heading down a path of destruction and he was taking his children along for the ride. We lost our home, his business and our dog.

You name it he destroyed it. He stopped communicating with relatives, celebrating birthdays, attending church and worst of all started taking us out of extra curricular activities. My younger sister Kathlyn was quite an accomplished ballet and Scottish dancer. By the time I was 16 he had pulled her out of it and amazingly enough blamed her for it. I was next. My 16th birthday in March of 1982 was the last birthday I would celebrate while still playing hockey and baseball. That summer he sent me off to the All Canadian Tennis Academy in London, Ontario for a summer camp even though he never once asked me if I wanted to go and I had absolutely never played the sport. Little did I know how dramatically my life had changed. It was a week-long camp comprised of junior players from all over the province of Ontario. At the end of the camp they had everyone play a tournament and I somehow won it. Had I known then how that would have changed my life I would have tanked in the first round. I got back to Toronto and then was informed by my father that the tennis academy had offered me a scholarship and I wasn’t returning to Richview Collegiate for my senior year. No more hockey, baseball, basketball, volleyball or track and field. Everything I had trained all my life to do was gone in an instant. Everything that I had built my confidence and self esteem on was stripped in an instant. It didn’t matter that I was already getting offers to play Junior A hockey, invited to national camps, scholarship offers to American colleges and it wasn’t just in hockey. You are going to be a tennis player. When I protested he reacted with a rage that became all too familiar. The threats of violence always permeated the message that I better do what I was told. Off I went to the All Canadian Tennis Academy to pursue a sport I had no background in at all. I was going because I was the best athlete they had seen and they thought they could turn me into a star. The academy should have known better, for not only had I not built the biomechanical foundation necessary to excel at tennis at a young age, but I hated the sport with the same passion that I loved all the others.

The academy became my own hell on earth. I was living in a house with 15 other kids and one chaperone. I didn’t know it at the time but I would never again have a home to go back to. We practiced before and after school and played tournaments on the weekends, and I hated how bad I was. I was losing all the time and my confidence was rapidly eroding. The head of the academy, Pierre LaMarche was all too happy to contrast my physical gifts with my supposed mental deficiencies. I apparently didn’t have the mind for the sport and he constantly reminded me of it. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that the fastest and most athletic kid had no idea what he was doing.

The biomechanics of tennis are extremely complex, and require years to master. Andre Agassi, whom I admire tremendously, had a paddle in his hand at six months old. I, however, had no foundation–and I consistently folded under the pressure. After being known for my focus, my intensity and my ability to win, I was now known for the opposite reasons. I was a loser. I would continually challenge the best in the province, but couldn’t even get the ball over the net when it counted.

The periodic times I would see my father consisted of hours of long lectures on why I was a failure, all under the pretense of helping me. His emotional abuse escalated, and eventually he tried hitting me. He tried it once. I was 17, I wasn’t big, but I had grown up fighting and defending myself on the tough ice of Toronto. I was prepared by run-ins against guys like Scott Mellanby, the single toughest person I have ever competed against. Scott played for 20 years in the NHL and his intensity and resilience were unmatched by anyone I have ever seen or met. Scott could fight, and I mean against anyone. You couldn’t beat him but you could survive him, and I did.

It did not go well for my father that day and he never tried it again, at least not on me. He chose someone weaker: my little sister. I didn’t find out about it for another two years, and although I put a stop to it, by then the damage was done. She has never recovered. It is something that I will never forgive myself for not stopping sooner. I tell you all of these things because of their importance in helping others become successful in whatever they do. To have success in sports and in life it is imperative that you prepare yourself both physically and mentally. Only then will your real talent flourish. Only then can you develop the self-confidence to produce under pressure.

It applies to everything. If you don’t do your math homework you won’t pass your test. In sports, competition is your test and your how you prepare is your homework. It is imperative that the people around you nurture that, mold it and guide it. You must be allowed to fall down and figure out how to get back up without being put down. Only then will true confidence emerge that can sustain the pressures that any level of sport brings to the table. In sports you cannot bluff it, you have to be able to produce it, and do it when it matters most. That’s why we all tune in to watch them because there is always the chance that we will witness something great, something special, something that does not seem possible! This website is dedicated to helping people achieve what they never thought possible. It is designed to give real information to provide the proper foundation for sports so that anyone can maximize their potential. I was fortunate enough to not only have it done the right way for me, but also the wrong way. It’s given me a unique perspective that I hope helps others pursue their own dreams or helps them help someone else pursue theirs.

Believe it or not I was offered a scholarship to play division one collegiate tennis at the University of Nevada, Reno even though I had only played the sport for two years. My career continued with some mild successes and I transferred to the competitive San Jose State University, and was soon playing the best the country had to offer from Stanford, UCLA, Pepperdine and USC. I hated every minute of it, and I never felt good at it.

I finished my collegiate career there and graduated with honors in my major: economics. I started teaching others to play and soon realized that I was pretty good at it. I was playing professional tennis at the lowest levels and going nowhere with it. However my lifelong habit of watching the best perform in all sports had paid off as I had an uncanny ability to teach the proper mechanics in any sport, as I had played them all. It was easy for me. I had a simple saying for success: If you want to be great don’t do what everyone else does. I also trusted what my body told me. If it felt good then I would bank it. If it didn’t then I would dismiss it. So now I had to learn how to train the human body. Again I started trying to find the best and devour as much information as I could. What was shocking was how little information was actually out there. Kinesiology studied human movement but didn’t tell you how to train anyone’s body. Exercise science focused more on the physiology of the human body and again did not tell you how to train or prepare an athlete for sports.

The Russians, however, did have programs in place to train athletes and were having world wide success in multiple sports. During the communist years they had poured money into exercise and nutritional research to prove their prowess as a nation and the results were obvious. There was not a lot of published literature but I did find some very important pieces. Supertraining by Verkoshanksy was very important because it was the second time that I had heard anyone talk about the importance of the central nervous system–the first being from my ballet teacher Florence Henderson when I was just six years old. Perhaps I hadn’t come that far after all.

The human body is controlled by the central nervous system. It sends out impulses telling some muscles to fire, some to help and some to do nothing at all. It does this through the kinesthetic sensory systems in the body. Our ability to see, feel and hear are the dominant sensors used when we play sports. Our body’s ability to interpret and process that information at tremendous speeds determines our success or failure in sports.

This training system is designed to improve your bodies ability to control itself in space at the highest speed possible. While conventional training systems focus on larger muscles as a method of improving sports performance, they ignore the importance of firing the proper sequence of muscles needed in the various dynamic movements in sports. In fact, conventional training systems train the incorrect firing sequence of the muscles used in running, jumping, throwing, kicking or lateral movement. They also train the central nervous system to engage in tension when trying to produce force in an unlimited amount of time, when in fact it is the ability to store and use elastic energy and heat in a state of relaxation that allows the body to produce true speed strength in a very short amount of time.

This entire training system is designed to help you become a better athlete. I could care less how much weight someone can lift because it has nothing to do with movement.

The last thing I want to pass on is this: Conventional weight training has caused an epidemic of injuries around this country. All physical structures have weight limitations, and the human body is no different. Once muscular capacity is exceeded the only thing that can continue to provide resistance to the load is the connective tissue. Once the connective tissue is stretched, it can no longer be correctly tightened, and this leads to weaker joints (and thus an increase in injuries).

The common defense of this argument is that if an athlete sustains an injury, it’s because their form was incorrect. There is a better way to train than predicating the need for perfect form in order to avoid injury and achieve results. Sports demand that you be able to move in all different directions, ranges of motion, and planes of movement from whatever body position you may be in at the time. You are constantly asked to do things from a position of imperfect form and you need to train your body to be able to do just that.

Sport Science Lab is a product of studying all known sports science, human biomechanics and nutrition and is dedicated to helping others improve their fitness, sports performance and their health. It is constantly evolving. I don’t pretend to know everything; the idea is to produce the best possible resource to help others improve.

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