From Washingtonpost.com
By Lenny Bernstein,July 30, 2013
Active Isolated Stretching: Raju Mantina practices a stretching technique… (Aaron L. Mattes/Stretching…)
Don’t tell
Raju Mantina you can’t find the time to stretch every day. I tried, and he would have none of it.
Fifteen
to 60 minutes every night before you go to bed, he says in a tone that
leaves no room for argument. “People tell me, ‘I don’t have time to
exercise and to stretch,’ ” he tells me in an accent still heavy with
the tones of his native India. “I am not one who will listen to this.
It’s a total lie.”
There are a lot of massage therapists and
trainers out there. I’ve met quite a few in the more than four years
that I’ve written this column. Not many approach their work with
Mantina’s missionary zeal
“Movement is an opportunity, not an inconvenience,” he tells me. “That [should be] the mentality of our entire life.”
Stretching
and massage are not part of my fitness routine, but I went to see
Mantina, 57, last week at the practice he maintains in his Rockville
home. I was just back from a vacation that included four days of
strenuous hiking in southern Utah, and my legs, which are always tight,
were particularly stiff. A friend at The Post whom Mantina has stretched
and massaged for years recommended him.
When
I learned that Mantina had worked on athletes at the 2000, 2002 and
2004 Olympics and at four U.S. Olympic track and field trials, I decided
to give him a try. My skepticism waned when I saw photos of Mantina
with
Kenenisa Bikele,
the Ethiopian world record holder in the 5,000- and 10,000-meter runs
who is widely considered one of the greatest distance runners in
history, and
Hicham El-Guerrouj,
the Moroccan who holds the world records in both the mile and the
1,500-meter races. Mantina’s walls are adorned with photos and posters
of other Olympic athletes and with his credentials from those games.
Mantina,
once a university-level track and field athlete in Hyderabad, India,
volunteers that he was secretly an alcoholic the entire time, for most
of his adult life in fact — a bottle-a-day drinker who had previously
worked as a gardener and run a liquor store. After he injured his back
working in his garden and received massage therapy himself, he decided
to change his career. He trained at the
Potomac Massage Training Institute and opened a practice. He says he has been sober for 10 months.
I’ve
booked a 90-minute session of total body stretching and massage, but by
the time Mantina and I finish discussing his philosophy of movement,
stretching and massage, there are only 30 minutes left. I suggest
Mantina just work on my legs. I describe the wall stretch I do before
and after every run, the one you can find depicted in every gym in the
land. I am careful to mention that I warm up first.
It doesn’t
matter; Mantina is not happy. “You are just putting a load on those
muscles,” he tells me, not stretching them. I lean over and try to touch
my toes but fall about six inches short. This has always been the case,
even when I was young.
Upstairs on his massage table, Mantina
gets to work. His fingers quickly find the sore spots in my
gastrocnemius muscles, and he begins to stretch them in every direction,
explaining that he can’t do anything about my hamstrings until he
loosens my calves.
“How
are my hamstrings, compared to the average person’s?” I ask at one
point. “Terrible,” Mantina responds. At another he says: “You need to
lose some weight.”
Okay then.
He begins to loosen my
hamstrings, closing his eyes and leaning into them with his shoulder.
“C’mon,” he commands when he wants me to push through the pain and
stiffness a little more. “C’mon.”
After 30 minutes, I stand,
enjoying the loose feeling from my achilles tendon all the way to my
hips. I bend over and am four inches closer to touching the floor. Not
bad for a half-hour’s work.
Now that he’s getting older, Mantina
wants to spend more time teaching, to bring his philosophy of movement,
stretching and massage to as many people as he can. He is looking for an
assistant to take some of the load of his practice. If people would
follow his principles, especially stretching, many would feel so much
better, he says.
“You are using your tools all day,” he says of
the human body. “You are cleaning them and putting them back, so they
are ready for the next day.”
