Lloyd Percival, 1913-1974 : Born in Toronto, Canada in 1913, Lloyd Percival was a Canadian sports coach, fitness instructor, author, entrepreneur, and promoter of health and fitness, whose writings and teachings not only influenced the fitness and sport community in Canada, but had a significant impact internationally as well. Percival was very active growing up and excelled in multiple sporting disciplines throughout his youth, most notably in tennis and boxing, in which he made a Canadian Tennis Junior finals in 1929 and was also a Canadian bantam Golden Gloves boxing champion. He also competed in cricket, and enjoyed a tour of England with the Canadian Cricket team in 1936.
As a young adult, his sporting interests shifted to coaching, particularly in hockey, and later in the realm of health and fitness. During the 1939-1940 season, he became a coach for the Toronto Native Sons, a junior hockey team. Percival's experience working with hockey players develop their fitness led him to also train well-known players from the National Hockey League, including legends like Gordie Howe and Terry Sawchuk, among others. He expanded on his expertise in fitness development to help train other high-level athletes in different sports, such as boxing, golf, figure skating, and skiing, with renowned clients ranging from George Chuvalo and George Knudson, to Sandra Bezic and Kathy Kreiner. Percival also branched off into coaching track & field, having founded the North Toronto Red Devils club in 1946. During this time, he introduced new approaches to training in the form of strength development, interval training, diet improvements, massage, mental training, and isometric exercises, some of which were already prevalent in Europe, but were new methods to the Canadian sporting and athletics landscape.
Percival gained national significance as a leading authority on physical health and fitness in Canada during his time hosting the CBC radio program "The Sports College on the Air", a correspondence school of sport for coaches and athletes alike that, at its peak, had an estimated 800,000 listeners, and lasted for 21 years (1944-1965). He also published many of his innovative training programs, techniques, and coaching methods in books, pamphlets, and manuals, the most famous being,The Hockey Handbook (1951), which is considered to be one of the most important books in hockey history, and is often cited as having had a profound influence on the development of the sport internationally. The book itself was used as a training tool by coaches and trainers in the Soviet Union to develop their hockey program, as well as for player development in countries like Sweden, Finland, and the former Czechoslovakia.
Percival's ingenuity and innovation in the realm of fitness training culminated with him founding the Fitness Institute (1963), a state-of-the-art complex at the time that was not only designed for high-performance athletes, but for the general public as well, to help improve and achieve peak physical health and fitness. The Institute is widely credited as having contributed to changing the Canadian coaching landscape, and helped spur the creation of the Coaching Association of Canada (1970). Although he was criticized and rejected for most of his innovative approaches and methods during his career, he nonetheless gained recognition for his groundbreaking achievements later in life, and was posthumously inducted into several prominent Canadian Halls of Fame for his lifetime contributions.
Lloyd Percival died in 1974 in Toronto, Ontario at the age of 61 years old.
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