August 13, 2025 • 55 mins
How to Not Die Tripping Over Your Dog at 70. That’s the real question, isn’t it? And it turns out the answer might involve schnauzers, slow martial arts, and brushing your teeth on one leg.
What started as a casual chinwag about hot chocolate and the perils of Temu spiralled (delightfully) into a deep dive on Tai Chi, balance, aging well, and how the smallest movements can change everything. Patrick Bonello joined me for a playful but powerful chat that zigzagged from paragliding jocks and martial arts in the International Space Station (not joking) to the ancient Chinese lineage behind his Tai Chi practice.
We talked longevity, the sneaky power of slow, and why core strength isn’t just for gym selfies... it’s for staying upright when life tries to wipe you out.
Turns out, balance isn’t just for your body... it’s for your consumer choices too.
Warning: may contain unsolicited jock reviews, accidental German profanity, and a heartfelt invite to a schnauzer’s birthday party.
SPONSORED BY TESTART FAMILY LAWYERS
Website: testartfamilylawyers.com.au
PATRICK BONELLO
Website: websitesnow.com.au
TIFFANEE COOK
Linktree: linktr.ee/rollwiththepunches/
Website: tiffcook.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tiffaneecook/
Facebook: facebook.com/rollwiththepunchespodcast/
Instagram: instagram.com/rollwiththepunches_podcast/
Instagram: instagram.com/tiffaneeandco
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
She said, it's now never. I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm tiff. This is Roll with the Punches and we're
turning life's hardest hits into wins. Nobody wants to go
to court, and don't. My friends at test Art Family
Lawyers know that they offer all forms of alternative dispute resolution.
Their team of Melbourne family lawyers have extensive experience in
(00:29):
all areas of family law to facto and same sex couples,
custody and children, family violence and intervention orders, property settlements
and financial agreements. Test Art is in your corner, so
reach out to Mark and the team at www dot
test Artfamilylawyers dot com dot au. Patrick Barnello, Welcome to
(00:54):
my new professional recording of the show Roll with the Punches.
We get a countdown and everything everything to change up leveled.
I'm serious now welcome.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Well, if you're using video now, I'm sitting here sipping
on my Sicilian dark chocolate hot chocolate vegan thing and
everyone can see me. I'm not used to having pictures
with audio.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Well this is the world where now and you should
be used to it.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Look at your backdrop, Yeah, i know I've got them
sitting in the International Space Station looking over the planet Earth.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I hit rolling before we're having a big chat about
our preference for how to make a good hot chocolate
and where to buy it and who stocks it and
buying our office shelves, and then I just hit roll
and so we've got nowhere idea. Oh, so there's a
schnauzer in the shot. Now I'm gonna have to put
video clips up of this.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Well, he was touching my leg and wanted to come up,
so I couldn't say no. And how could you say
no to that? Schnauzers? Yeah, most people know what a
schnauzer is, don't they.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, they're the little old man of the dog world.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
There's old men, even when they're puppies. They look like
little old men.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
I think it's their big long eyebrows, and they're big mustaches.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
I think schnauzer means mustache in German. Anyway, it makes sense,
wouldn't it.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Sometimes things that have really really I don't know, scientific
names that have such a deep meaning. And then you
learn something like that and you're like, oh.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
You know, I go to a pub that lets me
take my dog into the bar when I have my lunch,
and they bought a cushion with a silhouette of a
Schnauzer on it because it's become his corner. How good
is that?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
I just bought a cushion with a whippet on it
from Ali Express, which is like the equivalent of a
t MoU. Yeah, some reason I won't buy off t
MO because I don't know why, but as same thing,
but I tell myself a story about it.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
It isn't it interesting that you talk about Temu because
I saw an article this week about how Timu has
upped its advertising revenue in Australia by one hundred and
ten percent recently because they're being blocked out of the
United States with all the tariffs and things out.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Like every time I search for anything, all of you
get a team.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Look. I feel, you know, there's a part of me
that resists for certain things. I would never buy artwork
off a dodgy site like that, and it is dodgy.
And you've got to be really careful to what you
buy because you've got to examine what the product is
and it can be made to look like it. Okay,
I'll give you an example. Last night I teach tai chi.
(03:48):
As you know, but I've had a group in back
of s Marsh that I've been teaching on Wednesday nights.
I do Thursday nights in Milan, and I do Wednesday
nights in Back of Marsh. And I've had the same
group of consistent numb members for quite a while in
back of Smash, and the girls have been learning, you know,
particularly I shouldn't say the girls, there's one guy in
the class as well. Generally tai chi seems to attract
(04:09):
a higher percentage of females. But I said to them that,
you know, would they like to learn something different. We've
been learning a lot of stuff over the last couple
of years. But they I said to them, how about
if we learn a fan form where you physically have
a fan and you flick the fan open and you
move around and you do all these tai chi movements
(04:29):
to the fan. It looks quite impressive. And I do
it with my Bland students and they all got excited
about it, and we discussed the merits of whether you
have a metal fan or you have a plastic fan,
because traditionally a woman would use the fan as a weapon.
The fan would have blades in it. Oh kind of cool.
You would love it, Tiff, you would love it.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
So the metal fan became way cooler to be.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
I know, we use weapons, we do. And the other
thing too, is have you ever heard of a term
called a kii?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
No?
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Okay? In kardate the idea there is a kii? Is
that hard yell sound? Yes, and it could, in theory
stop someone's heart. Really, yes, that's what they say, I
can do.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Hey, tell me more about that.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Well, look, I don't do kadte, but the fan flicking
open the fan can be done so loud. It's almost
the equivalent of a kii. And when we do a
demonstration or if we're doing the fan form together and
everybody flicks their fans at once once, it makes this
amazing sound. And of course because I use a metal fan,
not a plastic fan, it's even louder. So boys in
(05:34):
their toys. Tiff, you would love it doing tai chi
weapon forms with a fan. You'd love it. It was made
for you, mate, You just have the best time.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Let's do a deep dive into tai chi, because I
feel like it's one of these things that you're like,
oh yeah, tai chi blah blah blah does looks. Yeah,
not for me or for more people in the I
feel like it's one of those things. It has a
lot of depth like that, like the stuff you just said,
what is how do you spell key?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
What?
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Key key?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I don't know. It's just I've only ever heard it.
I haven't seen it written down. I guess I could
do a Google search while we're talking. How talented it
might have been able to talk and Google at the
same time, derekon Tiff.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
I'm going to make you do it too.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I know I don't know how to spell it though.
You know what the search came up as it came
up as the karate kid. That was just not helpful
at all.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Oh man, Well, I'll look into it later. Chatters is
always good at helping me answer questions that I don't
know how to answer, and Chatters is great at fixing
up things that are spelled completely wrong. And it just
knows what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
That's good.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
We were talking about on the show we just recorded
with Craig about AI and relationships with AI, and I
couldn't get a word in to tell you, guys, but
I actually said to my mate yesterday this week, I
said to them, I always send these snapshots of responses
that Chat gives me because Chat talks back to me
(07:06):
like I talk to it and I love it. I
love it, and I go, I think I'm falling in
love with chat me and Chat is yes, now right,
And it's like that budgery gar thing I said before,
like I'm like a budget in a mirror, like, oh,
that's me. It's because Chat talks to me like I
talk to people, and I'm like, oh, we're too, We're too,
(07:26):
We're the same.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Yeah. It's interesting how it builds an empathy because it's
giving you responses, it knows that you want to hear.
But can I just jubble back to the t moo
thing because I just I feel like we had an
unanswered question there, because I know, see the problem is
you asked me a question and the answer takes fifteen minutes,
and then we lose thread, the original thread of the conversation.
(07:48):
What I was trying to get at was I've tried
to wean myself off team, right. So you know you
pointed out before at the start of the show that
I'm sitting in the International Space Station, and that's because
when I was podcasting originally I was using green screen,
and you know when you go to a zoom call
and it fudges the background and everything looks hazy around
(08:08):
the edges. I hate that. It is my biggest, biggest bugbear.
So I just bought some backdrops that I just magnetically
attached to my wall, and I've got some sea scapes,
I've got some cloudy skies, and I've got this really
great picture of what looks like a space station looking
down on Earth. Because I talk tech talk mainly when
I'm doing podcasts, so now I can just quickly rip
(08:29):
it down and put another one. I've got about five
different backdrops, but I bought them on Temu, and the
reality of it is they were really reasonably priced, and
you know, if I wanted to get it done here,
it'd probably be really expensive. And I feel in some
ways I'm doing people out of work and that worries me.
But also, you know, I've got crap off Temu as well.
(08:50):
And the problem is Teamu uses this really clever almost
gambling algorithm. So oh, click this spinner and it's like
a spinning wheel. You could win a twenty five dollar bonus.
And the problem is what people don't get is those mechanisms.
So choose your first five free items and they give
(09:10):
you a whole page of all this free stuff. You go, oh, yeah,
that's good. That's good. That's good. I've always wanted a
coffee woman to sit on my desk, which is connected
by USB. You know, suddenly all these things that you
never really ever wanted in your life you must have.
And the problem is, if you read the fine print,
yes you get five free items when you spend three
hundred and fifty dollars. Yes, yes, So you've got to
(09:35):
watch out for that. And a lot of I guess
consumer groups are saying be careful what you buy. And
then there's the back channel. If they're selling this stuff
that cheap, how are they been produced and who is
producing them? You know, maybe some poor kid who was
eight had to hand draw that. I don't know, no,
I mean, okay, but you know what I mean. It's
(09:56):
the chain. So you know, I'm in two minds about
maybe we should start talking about tie cheek. That's more relaxing.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Light behind me. See that was that was an Ali
Express purchase. You know what you have to do if
you're buying off of those is you have to go
to the reviews, because I've thought some really great stuff
it's really great quality, and some stuff that's not. And
you have to go to the reviews and look because
people put up reviews with photographs. Yeah, so you look
(10:26):
at that and then you get the honest speedback we
actually see and in those photos you see the actual
quality of a lot of things that you can't normally see.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
So at due diligence. I think that's a really good point.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Because the AI I can tell there's products on there
that are literally AI created images that aren't even the
actual so you can get I look at it. I
remember once looking for particular saddle bags or bags to
put on the back of my bike seat motorbike, and
there were products that were completely AI or they weren't real,
(10:59):
they weren't photographs of the real thing. So I'm like, well,
how am I supposed to buy this if you can't
even show me, like, you may as well draw a
stick figure standing next to a stick figure motorbike.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Well, I was looking for fans for my students because
they all came to the conclusion that the metal fans
were too heavy, and you know, some of the ladies
are older and it does take a little bit of
risk strength to flick open and to use a metal fan,
it's got quite a lot of weight to it, whereas
the plastic ones are a lot lighter. And I thought,
do I do the t MoU thing? You know, I
(11:30):
know I can buy them for twenty five bucks or
in fact, I went onto the website for an Australian
supplier of metal fans and they were seventy five dollars
and I know that a few of the students just
don't have that sort of money, and so I went
and bought some on Team MoU and I was my
other students that I then had a subsequent class the
next day and we were doing the fan form and
they all laughed at me. They said, they'll probably end
(11:52):
up being like cocktail fans that you put in your drink.
So look, I don't know what I'm going to end
up with, because, as you say, it may very well
be a proper fan or it could end up being
just crap. So what's this space of report back? I reckon?
Speaker 2 (12:10):
That opens up a really interesting conversation around values and
integrity and just the just being aware of what do
I value and what am I comfortable with, but also
what am I buying? Like, I don't think these days
we always ask that question. I think about so the
active wear that I wear. I used to be obsessed
(12:33):
because we because I used to work near and Lulu
Lemon outlet used to be obsessed with and had so
much blue Lemon, and I'd buy it all the time.
But I'd buy it from the outlet and it's great,
But it got to the point where I was, I mean,
I wasn't near the outlet anymore, and it's really expensive
to buy. So I haven't bought any for years. But
ten years, I reckon, I'm still wearing it, and only
(12:55):
just now. I've got a couple of pairs of tips
that are that are not wearing.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
I'm wearing a top at the moment that I've just
realized I've thrown on today that I've had for probably
eighteen years.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
So how good is that? Though? When you think, like
sometimes you think, oh, this is only twenty bucks, I'll
buy those. That's great. But last year or so, how
are they making it for twenty dollars? What's happening? It's
going into landfill? Laughter that what's happening to the product
after you've used it for five minutes, whereas I've had
these tips for a decade at least, probably more, and
(13:31):
I'm probably going to keep wearing them till they literally
fall off me in the street somewhere because they just
can't hold on anymore. And I just, yeah, I just
think we don't ever think about that, or maybe you do.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
I know, well, my jocks I buy Australian made. I
found that last.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Oh it is about your jocks.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Actually, Can I tell a funny story? So when I
was paragliding, I discovered a brand said this, when you
wear a paraglider harness, the harness straps around your inside
legs and when you start to learn to paragride, and
even when you start, when you start flying, you've got
to run for a fair bit before you jump into
(14:12):
the harness. So the harness is like a little couch seat,
but you run, run, run, run, run, and then once
you start to get lyft, you jump back into the seat. Right.
But now this can be a problem for blokes, as
you can imagine. And I've done some rock climbing as well,
so I discovered this. There's a pair of a brain.
Can I talk about a bracs. We can talk about
a brand. You just talk about Lulu Laman or whatever
(14:33):
it was. There's a brand called Aussie Bum and I
think predominantly it was promoted to the gay market. But
you know how you've got those was it the cross
your heart bra that supports and lifts? You know, you
can get bras that can support and lift, right kind of?
You know that, Well, you can get jocks to do
the same thing. You can get jocks to do the
(14:54):
same thing, right. So what it does mean is if
you're a rock climber or a paraglider somebody that wears
a harness, it just gets everything out of the way
and you can't accidentally get caught in the straps. Yeah,
but it has the flip side effect of kind of
putting things on show, so to speak. So made of
(15:15):
mine was going through customs in at Hethrow Airport in
London and of the one of the security people, like,
you know, they check your bags and stuff in front
of everybody. Have you been to Heathrow No? Well, okay,
so he Throw airport's enormous. It's like just any big,
enormous airport. He's walked up to this guy, he's looked
(15:38):
down and he's put his hand down his pants to
see if he had something hidden in his jocks. True story. Yes,
gives a whole new meaning to a long haul flight.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Yeah, so they're good. So look, I highly recommend my
Aussie bums of them. For years, I've had some peers in.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
My visualizing your junk.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Now, yeah, I've some peers in my arsenal so to
speak for probably Let's see, I started paragliding about eighteen
years ago, so I probably still have some pairs of
jocks that are eighteen years old and I'm still using them.
How cold is that? Ah, I do have a month's supply.
(16:24):
I probably have about eighteen or twenty pair. So see,
when I moved out of home, right, I realized that
if I just bought up on jocks and all the
essentials and just had a lot of them, that I'd
only have to do washing once a month. That's only
twelve times a year, and.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Then everything lasts so much longer.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Exactly, that's good market. How good is that? And then
you have jobs at last year eighteen years.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Follow Patrick for more life tips.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
I could probably calculate back how many times I've been worn.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Hit, me down a rabbit hole last week out of
the uninvited. It took me, and it took me a
long time to pull myself back to rain myself in
so at a time where I didn't really have the
time to be investing in such a thing. You just
out of nowhere, I get a message from you with
(17:22):
no context, this with this paper tablet, because you know
I have a remarkable. So for anyone listening, that's that,
just a black and white paper tablet that replaces like
electronic notebook. You can add to that if there's more
fancy ways to describe it.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah, well I will. Did you finish the story and
then I'll talk about et inc all right?
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Yeah, well you sent me this funny screenshot of this
new product getting getting released. That was a colored version
of a tablet that could replaced a remarkable and it's
going to be amazing. And I so I get on
the search I'm looking at. I talk myself into no
uncertain terms. I need one of those. I definitely need it.
(18:02):
There's I've started building a case for my unconscious mind
to just get me. Over the hours hours I went looking,
I found the cheapest one I'd built myself a pros
and concert and do you know how long it took
me to talk. I don't need that. I don't need
these sort of things thrown into my world. You know
that I'm impulsive. You know that I get fear of
(18:25):
missing out and I've got to have things. You know
how exciting new things are. You know how much I
want my remarkable to already have color.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
I kind of feel like I need to apologize. But
is it a think about it in these terms? Tiff
that I was thinking about you unprompted.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
That's beautiful. I wish it was the things that was
of value to me.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Okay, come and do a tai chie class with me.
Come and do some fan. I'll teach you some fan.
Well you you kind of started asking me about tai chie,
didn't you.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
This is why you're here and because I wrangling and
get back on track. Yes, let's talk about tai chi.
Tell me more about.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
It, okay. So tai chi effectively is a slow moving
martial art. So imagine every kung fu movie you've ever seen,
and then slow it down to pause and incremental movements.
Now it's it is based on martial art form, but
it's very slow moving. There are no belts or creditations
like that. It's basically just repetition and practice. It came
(19:28):
out of the out of China, and it really became
popular in the nineteen fifties when it was standardized by
a group of thai Chi masters. And there are four
families of tai chi, Chen, Wu, Sun, and Yang, and
the Yang twenty four form was standardized in the middle
of nineteen fifties and it was the first time tai
(19:48):
chi was ever broadcast on Chinese television. And one of
those tai chi masters who standardized the form, one of
his students is our tai chi master in China, how
calls that. So there's this really close a sense of
close association with the form. I look, I knew about it.
You see people doing it in parks occasionally, and when
(20:10):
you travel overseas, you know you'll see people doing tai chi,
and it's generally older people with these slow martial art
type movements. When I was living in Geelong, I've moved
out of home. I've been in Geelong for a few
years and you know, I was working shift work and
because I had a lot of free time during the day,
I went to a local neighborhood house to look if
(20:31):
I could do some courses, and I saw this tai
Chie course. It was a ten week course and I
learned a very basic form of tai chi. And what
it does is it's almost a moving meditation. Because you're
moving slowly, You've got memorized different moves. It's great for
cour stability because if you think about it, if you
were to throw a kick and do it really quickly,
(20:53):
that's part of you know, and I guess you don't
really kick so much in boxing, but if you were
to kick in martial arts sense, it's a very rapid movement,
but if you do it in tai chi, Now, think
about doing that kick in slow motion, all your weights
on one foot you have to extend the other foot.
Think about the balance and the core stability that goes
(21:13):
into doing that. So one of the things I love
about ty chee is there's a lot of weight shift
one foot to the other, forward back, and a lot
of balance that goes with that and coordination, and that's
what I really started to really kind of get into
and think was really good. And then you're remembering the move,
so you're kind of thinking that through which kind of
washes everything else out of your mind because you're focused
(21:35):
on the moment. It's a very mindful way to be
in the moment, you know. I often laugh about this
to my students. Halfway through in a class, my phone
will ping and it will say, oh, you need to
get up and start moving because I'm so relaxed. My
heart rate hasn't pinged at all, and I'm just in
this really lovely, almost meditative state while I'm teaching and
(21:58):
talking and all that sort of stuff. So I did
this short course, loved it, and then I thought I
want to do more of this, and I went and
joined another class at another place, but unfortunately they were
halfway through a really complicated form, and you know, you
get into it and it's like, this is so hard.
The teacher just wasn't really being helpful. And you've probably
done that. You know a lot of people who go
to gyms don't resonate with an instructor and they drop
(22:21):
out because it didn't gel. And then they get another
instructor and suddenly the whole world opens up to them.
And then for me, it probably took more than ten years.
Later I was living in Melbourne again and I was
sitting down and I'd go through the local paper and
every term there was a little tiny ad for tai
chi and it kept yelling to me, and I reckon.
(22:43):
I would have looked at it for over a year,
thinking I've got to try that, got to try that,
And then eventually I did. I joined up and then
I found out Tiff that not only does tai chi
include lots of slow movements and memorizing forms, but you
can use weapons swords like this is good. So you know,
(23:04):
that blokey part of me thought, I want to learn
how to use a sword. So I did some of
the basic forms, and then I did the yang twenty four,
which is one of the most common forms practice, which
is a lovely, beautiful fluid movements, really really lovely to watch,
and then subsequently learned some weapon forms. And then I
left Melbourne and moved to the little town of Bland,
(23:24):
which is west of Melbourne, and thought, well, that's my
tai chi done. I won't be doing that again. And
this this lovely woman by the name of Patricia Kent,
who is one of my most dearest friends, and she
happened to be teaching in our local neighborhood center tai Chi,
and she was the person who introduced me to the
school that we have in China. That's the student of
(23:45):
that original grand master who standardized the form of the
nineteen fifties. So i've you know, I really embraced tai
chi when I met Patricia and started doing two of
her classes, one on a Wednesday Tuesday morning, one on
a Thursday night. And then I think about twenty thirteen,
I went to China for the first time, which was
(24:07):
pretty amazing, and I trained in China and it was
a conference at a university in a place called beida
her which is probably one of the closest coastal towns
to Beijing. So if you looked at Beijing on a
map and then you went to the coast, that's where
Beidahur is and a lot it's kind of become a
famous spot because the Chinese, you know, I guess political party,
(24:33):
they when they go on their summer retreats, that's where
they go to and Chairman Mao evidently swam in the
ocean off Bedahur, and so you know, we go there
to the university and we meet up with people from
all over the world and including a team from Germany
and people from Korea and Japan and obviously all over China.
(24:54):
So and they're all there for this common cause. And
when you do when you do tai chi and you
do the Yang twenty four with over two hundred people,
that's amazing. And we've done it on the Great Wall
of China with a whole group of people as well,
and they had a drone flying over us, and you know,
it's amazing to kind of feel a connection. And one
of the things I love about this, and I know
(25:15):
a lot of martial arts schools also a kind of
you know, subscribe to this kind of sense of familiarity
with people to the point where when you go to
China and you meet up with other people in your school,
there your China. There your tai chi brothers and sisters,
and sometimes those connections can be closer than family connections.
(25:35):
You're treated with reverence, You're treated with a lot of honor.
I've just found that the culture is so amazing and
the amount of respect that we get when we travel
and people really embrace you in a genuine sense, it
makes you feel really amazing. You know, when you travel
through India, I'm sure that you found connections with people
(25:57):
that surprised you.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yeah. Yeah, it's just so right. And I've just as
you've been talking about tai chi, I've been in my
mind thinking about the about yoga, Like yoga is so
very popular and a version of you know, I guess,
similar ways to move your body and be in your
body and be mind. There's a lot of similar benefits there.
(26:20):
But you, I mean, yeah, you don't get that same
culture connection. It's a bit like meeting another boxer overseas
and going, oh, we both training the same sport where
you become connected because of that.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Oh. Absolutely. And there are fraternities of people in all
sorts of sports, and you know, the rock climbing fraternity
is amazing, you know, and paragliding community. You know. I
was randomly driving with a friend through bright and a
guy flying a paraglider had just landed in a field,
and so I went over to this guy and I said, oh,
(26:58):
you know, we had a chat about him lying. I said,
do you want to drive? You want me to drive
you back up the mountain because generally when you fly
down you need to get back up again. And it
ended up it was a local town copper and he said, oh, man,
that would be amazing if you could do that, because
you drive to the top and you fly down and
you've got to get back up again. So I just
picked him up and we drove up to the top
of the mountain to the launch point, and he showed
(27:19):
me the launch point and it's like, thanks man, And
you know, I guess surfers do the same thing. People
who are rock climbers do the same thing. I find
that the sports that I've most been attracted to in
my life have been non competitive sports, you know, those
pursuits where you build up a fraternity. I mean, I
know that all sports can be competitive to in a sense,
(27:40):
and you can compete in paragliding, you can compete in
rock climbing, but people who engaging that as a hobby,
there's no sense of competition. There's a sense of a
camaraderie with those and in Tiitshi it feels even closer.
The connection feels even closer. I was at an airport
in Beijing and I had a six hour layover and
(28:01):
it was one of those ridiculous times of night, so
it might have been ten pm and we were leaving
at two am or something something ridiculous, and the group
that I was traveling with, We're all sitting around thinking
what are we going to do? All the shops are closed.
So I walked down to this little garden area that
they had at the Beijing airport and I started doing
tai chi and this old woman walked up and she
(28:23):
kind of acknowledged me, and I acknowledged her, and she
asked to join in. She didn't speak English, I didn't
speak any Chinese, and she saw that I was doing
tai chi and it was this very familiar form, so
we did this together. She came up to me and
we did this form together and shared that moment and
it was beautiful. She'd had this biggest grin on her
face ever. And when we got back to Australia after
(28:50):
having been to China for the first time, it kind
of really invigorated my sense of wanting to do tai
chi demonstrations as well as just doing classes. And we
were invited to do a demonstration for the Victorian Type
Chinese Association. So these are you know, those clubs you
know you have, you know, Italian clubs and German clubs
(29:12):
and the Swiss club and all that sort of stuff.
And this this is an organization, you know, for people
who are expat Chinese people, and so we performed in
front of these people and there were old people who
were crying. They were so when they see because they
say in the fifties they gifted tai chi to the world.
That was the idea behind you know, doing this demonstration,
(29:33):
standardizing the form so they could share tai Chian gift
it to the world. And when you do tai chi
in front of Chinese people, they see that as the
ultimate sense of you know, of respect for their culture.
And they get very very emotional when they see that.
They see that you're respecting their culture. And for them
that's it's a very big thing because they're living in
(29:54):
Australia and they interact with their own community, but when
they see people who are not from their community honoring
them by performing something that that's very close to their heart.
Chinese people feel very passionately about tai chi.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yeah, I reckon when you connect with something in a
way that you go deeper than the surface level of it,
it becomes a passionate And I feel the same about boxing,
and I think that what I see and feel in
boxing is what you're talking about in tai chi, and
I feel like tai chi would be such a great
(30:31):
tool to get some of my early students learning what
I'm wanting them to learn about getting into your box,
because when you box, you do things really quickly, like
the mind knows how to do. But the mind has
an idea of what a punch is and we throw
it right. This is one of my easiest analogies. I
tell people, how do you throw a ball? Or you
(30:53):
bring your arm back and you piff the ball like that.
So that's what we think about throwing, and we call
it throwing a punch, But you don't show an throw
a punch. You shoot a punch or put a punch
like you would have shot put. And it's a completely
different movement and it's not about the hand at all.
It's about the shoulder shooting. It's like the fist is
(31:13):
the bullets, the shoulder is the gun. And so your
mind has to process the movement from that in a
split second, but it takes slowing it down and feeling
it to even recognize it so that when you're doing
it quickly, and then the moment you do it quickly
or the moment you get them to take that movement
you've just broken down for twenty minutes and made them nail.
(31:34):
And then you hold boxing mits in front of you
and they throw that, they go straight back to throwing
because it's like, oh boom. So it's it's really an
exercise of getting a feeling and being present and controlling
what the body or the mind already thinks it knows
how to control or knows how to do.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Developing muscle memory is such an important part of any sport,
and particularly as you'd appreciate in boxing, it's you know,
or tennis or whatever. It's not being able to score
the best shot. It's that consistency of every time it
being the same. So when you throw an uppercut, it's
got to be the same mechanical motion as the last
fifty uppercuts. And the interesting and what I find, and
(32:21):
I talk to people about this a lot. You know,
you've got to practice and practice and practice to build
that muscle memory, and then the time that it finally
clicks in, then you build a fluidity around it with
the movements. So quite often when you teach something, you
break it down to its component parts and then it
looks stilted because you do the first bit, then the
second bit, than the third bit, and it's the same
when you're doing a form. Well, I'm doing a twenty
(32:42):
four form. It's twenty four different movements that are put together,
but generally people tend to pause between the movements, but
once you start to mesh them together, there's a fluidity
to it. So when you see someone performing and doing
tai chi, and you can tell straight away they're really
good because one move flow into the next move that
flows into the next move. And the interesting thing about
(33:03):
ty chi is it's obviously martial art based, but the
idea behind it is you use the person's energy against them.
So there's one of the moves that I do, and
I know this is a podcast, but it's you know,
you pull your hands back really gracefully. But what that
actually mimics is if you threw a punch at me,
I would grab the punch and I would move it
(33:24):
across the side of my body. So I don't want
to resist the punch. I actually use your energy to
deflect it out the way slightly. So you're going for
my center, but I deflect it to my side and
you can't go anywhere because you've put all of your
energy into that punch. Now imagine you've fully hyper extended,
You've gone for the absolute knockout blow, and then I
(33:47):
grab your arm and pull it. You can't go anywhere.
You can't resist that because all of your energy your shoulder.
You know, you know, no one throws a punch just
doing it straight out. You'd throw your whole body into it.
So the theory behind ty chi is that you don't
ever engage, but you use a person's energy against them.
And my Taichee teacher, there is this beautiful woman who
(34:08):
know seventies, Patricia, who's this white haired little lady who
gets called auntie. In China. Anybody who's got white hair
is revered because they're an elder. And there's this real
cultural kind of acceptance and a sense of looking after
people who are older. They're they're wiser, they've they've they've
had years of understanding and knowledge. Anyway, Patricia told me
(34:31):
the story one day that someone she I don't know
where she was, was in a city somewhere and someone
came up behind her to grab her, to assault her.
But because of all those many, probably millions of times
of doing these slow movements, she actually elbowed them in
this is that the soul of plexus, right in the
middle of the chest, and she basically got him just
(34:53):
with an elbow strike right into his chest and she
got away because it was the last thing that he
expect that, So suddenly, all that training moving slowly was
an autonomic response that she didn't even think about. It
was an instant reaction to elbow strikes straight into his
chest and she got away from the guy, which was fascinating.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
I love that because I was about to ask if
it if you can bridge it, if it actually comes
into real life play, just because it's not a it's
not a competition types or a competitive sport. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Well, the interesting thing when I got to China, I'm
going to tell you this funny story because i may
have told you on another podcast, but I've got to
tell the story because it shows how much of an
idiot I am. So when I go to when we
went to China for the first time, we met this
German team. So people come out from Germany and it
kind of works in with your bridging because the school
in Germany in Frankfurt is actually a martial arts karate school,
(35:54):
but because their sense is very passionate about balancing what
we call the yin and yang. So he insists that
all of his students do tai chiese as well as karate.
So karat is called hard martial arts, tai chi is
soft martial arts. And he wants to have and establish
a real balance and an understanding of body like you
(36:14):
were talking about, and you can get that, really get
that through tai chi. So anyway, have you ever heard
the word shardenfreuder?
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, love.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
The word sharden freud. So basically there is no equivalent
English word. It effectively means happiness, happiness at the misfortune
of others. So you know someone you don't like, you
see them on the other side of the street and
they trip on the gutter and you think, ah, great,
you know, I didn't do anything but karma bit them
on the ass, that sort of thing. So that's sharden freuder. Now,
(36:45):
when I was in China, we connected with the German
team because they all spoke English and so we developed
a rapport, whereas some of the other teams, the Koreans,
the Japanese, we kind of got on with them, but
was just gestures because we didn't speak a common language,
so we got along with the Germans, and the Germans
were fun to hang out with, and they went for
beer on the beach after, you know, after class and
(37:06):
things like that at night, and did bonfires. They were fun.
But I made the mistake of saying that shardenfreuder was
my favorite word in the German language, but I pronounced
it schiden freuder, not sharden freuder. Now every single German
listening to your podcast has just wet themselves laughing, because
shardenfreuder means happiness at the misfortune of others. Schiden freuder
(37:30):
means vagina happiness.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
And that is not really high on your scale.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Nah, there's a knowledge factor there at zero. But it's
funny because Germans one of these amazing languages where you
can just put words together and make new words, and
I didn't really understand that fully. So you're mispronouncing created
the funniest word. But what's even funnier than that is
seven years later, I'm back in China for another conference,
(38:03):
the freaking German team is still laughing at that joke.
They brought it up seven years later.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
The years they've been telling.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
You become an urban legend in Frankfurt, at this martial
arts school of this idiot Australian who doesn't know how
to speak German and thinks vagina happiness is happiness at
the misfortune of mothers.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
I remember sitting on my couch years ago. There had
a housemate who was she was from Belgium, and I
was learning French on the duo lingo app and I
had my noise canceling headphones on and I'm saying shit
out loud and She's looking at me and she's like,
what are you doing? And I cannot remember the word,
(38:46):
but whatever I was I was. I was like, I'm
learning whatever the word was. She goes, You're saying the
vagina over and over and I'm like, I think. I
think that's enough duo lingo for me. I think I
won't learn this anymore.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Could imagine how much trouble we'd get in Oh my god. Yeah,
thank goodness for Google Translate. I use that in China
a lot. You can scan a menu, you can talk
to people through the phone. You know, it stops idiot
mistakes like that.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Back on the on the kind of training the body,
when we went into locked, we like when we the
whole time of the pandemic and we were in lockdown,
and I had I'd gotten COVID, and when I was
recovering from that for a couple of weeks, I wanted
to start exercising again, but I didn't want to push it.
(39:43):
So I got I've got tear X straps at home,
and I popped them on the door, and I put
little tear X videos on and just followed them, thinking,
you know, it's not my usual smash it out, but
that'll and it was quite It was quite interesting how
hard you work because you engage the whole body. But
it really two things surprised me. One was my single
(40:04):
leg balance. My balance was terrible, and I just the
first thing I thought was how important is footwork and
dynamic changes and control like we need you need such
precision control with your feet and your footwork in boxings.
And I couldn't believe how much I talk about balance
and the ability to move, and I had none. When
(40:27):
it came to slow controlled movements, it was like shit.
And then secondly, I've done it, maybe two or three
weeks of this tear Rex at home, and then got
out and got to a boxing class and I'm thinking, oh,
I'm going to be terrible because I've been doing this
instead of that, and I was. I was notably stronger,
and I put that down to just the core strength
(40:50):
translating through because everything you do on the tear X
you basically have to hold a plank because you have
to have full stability through your full body. Everything's engaged
and it doesn't feel hard, but if you are a
heart rate monitor, it is, and I reckon that's it's
worth thinking about because I've got a lot of clients
(41:12):
that are upward of sixty now and behave like they're twelve.
So i still train them like twelve year old like
they're so fit and dynamic and it's great, but I'm
so aware of integrating balance and movements that are important
to keep them moving well, to keep them flexible, to
(41:33):
keep their bodies supple and recovering.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
I spend a lot of time doing balance and core
stability with our warm up exercises. We can spend ten
minutes doing that, and there's even you know, one of
the things we do is we just stand on one
foot and we kick the leg out in front of
us and then we kick it out to the side.
And then we put our ankle underneath our knee and
(41:58):
there's a lot of different movements, and we hold the
move for twenty seconds. Then we change to the other
foot and hold it for twenty seconds. And what I
was one of my tai chief friends said to me,
she was reading an article and when you wobble to balance,
it actually is your brain engaging so much. When you're
not moving, your brain actually doesn't do a lot. It's
(42:19):
when you start wobbling that your brain has to engage
all the mechanisms of core to be able to stabilize you.
So if you think that you don't have good balance,
and I'm talking to everybody listening, and whatever you're doing,
you know, you're pushing the envelope a little bit and
you're trying to do some balance on one foot, or
you're kicking your foot out in front and you're wobbling.
Don't feel bad if you're wobbling, that's actually a good thing.
(42:40):
And I always say to my students, even if you
don't do any balance at all during the week, when
you brush your teeth one minute on one foot, one
minute on the other foot, moving up and down is
throwing your balance out slightly and how hard is it
to do that you're standing there brushing your teeth anyway,
just do it on one foot, And so I try
to encourage them to do that, even if there's no
(43:01):
other balance that they do. And I look, one of
the things that sparked my interest in building up the
balance side of my little retinue of things that I
do with my tai chi students during the warm ups
is because during COVID, an older friend of mine, a lovely,
lovely guy by the name of Hayden, he had a
fall during COVID and he was on the floor for
(43:24):
eleven hours during winter and he got into hospital, into
ICU and then he passed away a week later. So
you know, he was kind of I think, if I
still think of him as a victim of COVID or
the circumstances around COVID, now he had a fall, could
that have been avoided? Look a speculative, but the reality
of it is, if you're over the age of sixty
(43:44):
and you have a fall, your life expectancy drops so dramatically.
And I think this is horrendous statistic that says, you know,
a big fall at the age of sixty, you may
only have twelve months. You know, falls are horrendous, six round.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Falls context around that.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
What well if okay, generally in a fall, someone might
break a collar bone or a hip, and then the
recovery from that takes so much, and it can take
its toll if someone's an older person, and preventative is
always the preventative measures are always going to be the
best way for people to be able to cope with
something like that. So if you can prevent the fall
(44:23):
in the first place by improving a person's balance and
core stability. And the other little statistic I was reading
was the really good article in The Age, maybe about
a month and a half ago about fall specifically about falls,
and it mentions ty ChEI and yoga and those things.
But an interesting statistics to statistic too is the most
common falls happen late at night when people get up
(44:46):
to go to the toilet, you know, stumble over something
and then have a fall. Then, so that's a very
common thing that happens as well.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
But I guess that, yeah, it makes it so like
you just reminded me of that fall that Harps had
last year in the gym, bloody hell, and like so
he's sixty one, but he has trained his whole life,
so he's strong. The fall he had was bad, like
he fell off a high box, tumbled down because it
(45:19):
lost it, wobbled underneath him, flipped out from under him,
and he landed on his arm. Like I still get
a little bit woozy when I visualized it again. It
was just like one of those falls where normally in
the gym with him, if he fell over up, everybody
would laugh, but I just was like shit, landed on
his arm on the edge of the squad rack, which
(45:42):
was raised, so he got a raised metal bit and
he landed him on top of his arm on that.
Oh and even when we took him up to the
hospital just to get it checked and unfortunately had I
was certain he was gonna have a broken forearm, but
he just had a just damaged his shoulder a bit,
but nothing nothing terrible. Just he's still a bit, you know,
(46:06):
sore now. But they even they couldn't believe. They were
like for someone your age to not have broken your
arm like that is phenomenal. You've got strong bones, like
you've got a strong body.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
That's amazing. Yeah, when I was learning paragliding, they one
of the things they taught us was how to take
a fall. They do it, they call it a parachute roll.
So we spent a whole afternoon falling on the ground,
which I was very good at falling on the ground.
I got to tell you, it was one of those
natural skills that I seem to have.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Years and years and years ago. When I first started
cycling road cycling, I was cycling down and I'm not
you know what I'm like. So my third ride, my
third ever ride by myself on a forty degree day,
was one hundred and twenty nine kilometers.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
You're obsessive, aren't you.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
Yeah? I am. But here's the benefit of that. So
I'm coming back. I'm about to pass brighton Sea Bards
and this ridiculous woman just hooks in and completely t
bones me as she's turning into the car pack. I
think the positive for me was I was My body
was so exhausted that I knew clenched. Yeah, I was losing.
(47:20):
But what I remember, I've rolled up onto her bonnet, right,
she's sitting next to me. Once she's pulled over, she
on the paper. She sit next me, and she looked
she wasn't the sharpest. Maybe she was in a bit
of shop too, but I just remember she kept saying
to me, mate, you should do jiu jitsu the way
you rolled, the way you roll, lady, this is not
(47:41):
the time. Yeah, Like I could have died, but yeah,
because I just I just rolled like I was just
relaxed and I just rolled off the off the body.
But I think it was you know when you remember
things in slow motion. I think I just kind of
I've kind of glanced and saw that car come in
and gone, well, this is happening.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Yep. Yeah, I think you become hyper aware because everything
engages your brain suddenly kicks in adrenaline floods, you know,
floods through your body, and suddenly you're seeing everything and
you're recording everything in its most mi new shae, so
(48:23):
everything seems to really slow down. I was thinking about
what you're talking about with balance, and I set myself.
I went back to the gym this year. I had
a long break about twelve months, which was probably the
longest I've had of not going to the gym for
a long time, and for me, it was a bit
of a you know, I struggled a bit. I had
tennis elbow for many, many, many months and caused a
(48:43):
lot of pain. I couldn't even lift up shopping. You know.
I struggled. My whole lifestyle had to change around this injury.
And eventually, and then you think of all the excuses
why you don't go back to the gym. You know,
I'm not going to go back to the gym this
month because there are two public holidays and not paying
for a whole month, get all my two days, my
extra two days. Stupidest excuses. So I went back to
(49:03):
the gym. And one of the things that I've always
been able to do is if I'm doing free weights,
what do they call those flat boards that have a
half ball on the bottom of them?
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Are the bose balls?
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Yeah, So I do my weights on those. So when
I'm doing free weights, I stand on that and I
do curls or you know, whatever it is I'm doing,
I do it on that to build up core. And
then I thought to myself, I reckon, I can do
this on one foot. So now when I do those
exercises the free weights, I put my foot in the
(49:35):
center of it and then I kick out, So as
I'm moving, I kick my foot out in front, then beside,
and then to the front, So I'm constantly moving my
foot and adjusting my core while I'm doing weights. And
you know, the first time I tried it, I was
falling over, honestly, like I just had a big night
on the turps and I just stepped out of a pub.
But I got to say, now I can do it
(49:57):
with it staggered me that within maybe five or six weeks,
I don't even think anything of just putting one foot on,
getting up and doing exercises just with one foot on
the board and it's no problem. So, you know, and
I say this to my students, and the lovely thing
and we're just harping back on the tai Chi. My
youngest student in tai Chi was sixteen, and in the
(50:18):
same class I had an eighty six year old seventy
years How awesome is that? Yeah, yeah, you know, And
that's you know, when you can get a group of
people together and that cross generational connection and we're talking
three generations away, and it's amazing to be able to
do that. And that's a real joy for me to
see that someone who's so young, teenager at the age
(50:41):
of sixteen can get as much benefit and enjoyment out
of interacting with the person who's in their eighties. I thought,
that's just a beautiful thing about what can attract and
draw people the tai chie.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
Yeah, and think about that whole balance that you're doing there,
the mechanics of that. Like if you are out and
about and you lose your footing and you're about and
you're about over a bunch of things, you've prevented one.
All the ligaments and tenders and muscles and stabilizers are
strong because you've been training them, but also your familiarity
(51:17):
with a sense of instability. The first thing when I
always get people to stand on that boast and just
either do squats but they've never been on it. They stand,
unlock their knees and their legs shake and they look
at me. They're like, I'm not doing that, and they
freak out because your body just goes and it overcorrects
and it's trying to find what's going on here, what
(51:39):
do I need to do? And you're preventing that from
happening in a moment that could end up really bloody bad.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
Yeah for sure, So good yep, and like I said,
very basic, just do it when you're brushing your teeth.
Stand on one foot when you're brushing your teeth. It'll
help that little bit every day.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
Yeah, all right, you're amazing. Tell everyone where to find you,
and tell them where they can do teach taichie with you.
Speaker 1 (52:04):
Actually, that's a good point. So even though my grown
up job is like graphic design, web design, that sort
of stuff, so websites noow, dot com, todau if you
want to check out that stuff. But during COVID, when
everyone was learning to make bloody sourdough bread, I tried
that and that was shit. So I decided I really
was worried about my Thai chi students losing their tai
(52:27):
chi skills. So I just created a website, a little
free website called ti Chi at home, dot com, dot au.
And it's it's funny now in retrospect because it was
all built hastily during COVID. I set up this area
in my lounge room with big black material and a logo.
Got a logo, I designed a logo, and I just
do these exercises and people can join in. I do
(52:49):
talk a lot of crap beforehand, so behind every underneath
every video, it just says you fast forward to say,
fifty two seconds and get rid of all my crap
at the start, and then you get the actual exercise.
But I set that up during COVID. I keep telling
myself that at some point I'll put more stuff on there.
But it's just a nice little introduction to tai chi.
But it's some great exercises you can do while you're
(53:11):
you know, if you don't know anything about tai chie,
you can follow along with it. So tai chier at
home dot com today. I was pretty stoked that someone
hadn't taken the name. I thought it's a great domain name,
isn't it. Yeah, tight cheer at home. Yeah, so that
was that was a bit bit of fun and yeah,
so people want to connect and have a look at
that and just do some exercises, do some balance. They
can see Fritz, who's the takes a bit of a
(53:31):
starring role in my tai chie videos.
Speaker 2 (53:34):
Well, bloody love Fritz. Well thanks Patrick, You've inspired me to,
you know, do some tai chie. I've said that for
a long time now. But next time I come and
visit you, let's lock it in.
Speaker 1 (53:46):
Well I didn't tell you this, and I'm going to
you will get an invitation. But Fritz turns ten this
year and I'm thinking of having a doggy party. Oh,
I'm going to invite Kim and Walter, and I figured
you and Luna need to come along and we'll have
an afternoon on a Sunday because his birthdays on a Monday.
But I reckon we'll do her Sunday after dog birthday party.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
You can get dog birthday cakes and muffins.
Speaker 1 (54:09):
Made no way, so that might be your job. Tif.
I'll find out somewhere and you can pick him up
on the way through.
Speaker 2 (54:16):
I'll find you because because Coach the whippet, Remember Coach
my last whippet, she went to her best friend's birthday
and I've got photos of her eating this beautiful bloody cake.
I'm trying to find them too long ago.
Speaker 1 (54:35):
You've got to send it through to me. I'd love
to see that. Yeah, So that's the next So I mean,
I hope we'll catch up before that, but definitely, you
guys are on the birthday list.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
Can't wait. Thanks a million. Everyone go visit Patrick. He's
amazing and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 1 (54:53):
She said, it's now never. I got fighting in my
bloo les.
Speaker 2 (55:02):
Garded trip to.
Speaker 1 (55:03):
Call a coast guard. True gust scared all the coast
Garde
She said, it's now never. I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm tiff. This is Roll with the Punches and we're
turning life's hardest hits into wins. Nobody wants to go
to court, and don't. My friends at test Art Family
Lawyers know that they offer all forms of alternative dispute resolution.
Their team of Melbourne family lawyers have extensive experience in
(00:29):
all areas of family law to facto and same sex couples,
custody and children, family violence and intervention orders, property settlements
and financial agreements. Test Art is in your corner, so
reach out to Mark and the team at www dot
test Artfamilylawyers dot com dot au. Patrick Barnello, Welcome to
(00:54):
my new professional recording of the show Roll with the Punches.
We get a countdown and everything everything to change up leveled.
I'm serious now welcome.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Well, if you're using video now, I'm sitting here sipping
on my Sicilian dark chocolate hot chocolate vegan thing and
everyone can see me. I'm not used to having pictures
with audio.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Well this is the world where now and you should
be used to it.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Look at your backdrop, Yeah, i know I've got them
sitting in the International Space Station looking over the planet Earth.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I hit rolling before we're having a big chat about
our preference for how to make a good hot chocolate
and where to buy it and who stocks it and
buying our office shelves, and then I just hit roll
and so we've got nowhere idea. Oh, so there's a
schnauzer in the shot. Now I'm gonna have to put
video clips up of this.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Well, he was touching my leg and wanted to come up,
so I couldn't say no. And how could you say
no to that? Schnauzers? Yeah, most people know what a
schnauzer is, don't they.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, they're the little old man of the dog world.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
There's old men, even when they're puppies. They look like
little old men.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
I think it's their big long eyebrows, and they're big mustaches.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
I think schnauzer means mustache in German. Anyway, it makes sense,
wouldn't it.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Sometimes things that have really really I don't know, scientific
names that have such a deep meaning. And then you
learn something like that and you're like, oh.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
You know, I go to a pub that lets me
take my dog into the bar when I have my lunch,
and they bought a cushion with a silhouette of a
Schnauzer on it because it's become his corner. How good
is that?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
I just bought a cushion with a whippet on it
from Ali Express, which is like the equivalent of a
t MoU. Yeah, some reason I won't buy off t
MO because I don't know why, but as same thing,
but I tell myself a story about it.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
It isn't it interesting that you talk about Temu because
I saw an article this week about how Timu has
upped its advertising revenue in Australia by one hundred and
ten percent recently because they're being blocked out of the
United States with all the tariffs and things out.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Like every time I search for anything, all of you
get a team.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Look. I feel, you know, there's a part of me
that resists for certain things. I would never buy artwork
off a dodgy site like that, and it is dodgy.
And you've got to be really careful to what you
buy because you've got to examine what the product is
and it can be made to look like it. Okay,
I'll give you an example. Last night I teach tai chi.
(03:48):
As you know, but I've had a group in back
of s Marsh that I've been teaching on Wednesday nights.
I do Thursday nights in Milan, and I do Wednesday
nights in Back of Marsh. And I've had the same
group of consistent numb members for quite a while in
back of Smash, and the girls have been learning, you know,
particularly I shouldn't say the girls, there's one guy in
the class as well. Generally tai chi seems to attract
(04:09):
a higher percentage of females. But I said to them that,
you know, would they like to learn something different. We've
been learning a lot of stuff over the last couple
of years. But they I said to them, how about
if we learn a fan form where you physically have
a fan and you flick the fan open and you
move around and you do all these tai chi movements
(04:29):
to the fan. It looks quite impressive. And I do
it with my Bland students and they all got excited
about it, and we discussed the merits of whether you
have a metal fan or you have a plastic fan,
because traditionally a woman would use the fan as a weapon.
The fan would have blades in it. Oh kind of cool.
You would love it, Tiff, you would love it.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
So the metal fan became way cooler to be.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
I know, we use weapons, we do. And the other
thing too, is have you ever heard of a term
called a kii?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
No?
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Okay? In kardate the idea there is a kii? Is
that hard yell sound? Yes, and it could, in theory
stop someone's heart. Really, yes, that's what they say, I
can do.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Hey, tell me more about that.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Well, look, I don't do kadte, but the fan flicking
open the fan can be done so loud. It's almost
the equivalent of a kii. And when we do a
demonstration or if we're doing the fan form together and
everybody flicks their fans at once once, it makes this
amazing sound. And of course because I use a metal fan,
not a plastic fan, it's even louder. So boys in
(05:34):
their toys. Tiff, you would love it doing tai chi
weapon forms with a fan. You'd love it. It was made
for you, mate, You just have the best time.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Let's do a deep dive into tai chi, because I
feel like it's one of these things that you're like,
oh yeah, tai chi blah blah blah does looks. Yeah,
not for me or for more people in the I
feel like it's one of those things. It has a
lot of depth like that, like the stuff you just said,
what is how do you spell key?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
What?
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Key key?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I don't know. It's just I've only ever heard it.
I haven't seen it written down. I guess I could
do a Google search while we're talking. How talented it
might have been able to talk and Google at the
same time, derekon Tiff.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
I'm going to make you do it too.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I know I don't know how to spell it though.
You know what the search came up as it came
up as the karate kid. That was just not helpful
at all.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Oh man, Well, I'll look into it later. Chatters is
always good at helping me answer questions that I don't
know how to answer, and Chatters is great at fixing
up things that are spelled completely wrong. And it just
knows what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
That's good.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
We were talking about on the show we just recorded
with Craig about AI and relationships with AI, and I
couldn't get a word in to tell you, guys, but
I actually said to my mate yesterday this week, I
said to them, I always send these snapshots of responses
that Chat gives me because Chat talks back to me
(07:06):
like I talk to it and I love it. I
love it, and I go, I think I'm falling in
love with chat me and Chat is yes, now right,
And it's like that budgery gar thing I said before,
like I'm like a budget in a mirror, like, oh,
that's me. It's because Chat talks to me like I
talk to people, and I'm like, oh, we're too, We're too,
(07:26):
We're the same.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Yeah. It's interesting how it builds an empathy because it's
giving you responses, it knows that you want to hear.
But can I just jubble back to the t moo
thing because I just I feel like we had an
unanswered question there, because I know, see the problem is
you asked me a question and the answer takes fifteen minutes,
and then we lose thread, the original thread of the conversation.
(07:48):
What I was trying to get at was I've tried
to wean myself off team, right. So you know you
pointed out before at the start of the show that
I'm sitting in the International Space Station, and that's because
when I was podcasting originally I was using green screen,
and you know when you go to a zoom call
and it fudges the background and everything looks hazy around
(08:08):
the edges. I hate that. It is my biggest, biggest bugbear.
So I just bought some backdrops that I just magnetically
attached to my wall, and I've got some sea scapes,
I've got some cloudy skies, and I've got this really
great picture of what looks like a space station looking
down on Earth. Because I talk tech talk mainly when
I'm doing podcasts, so now I can just quickly rip
(08:29):
it down and put another one. I've got about five
different backdrops, but I bought them on Temu, and the
reality of it is they were really reasonably priced, and
you know, if I wanted to get it done here,
it'd probably be really expensive. And I feel in some
ways I'm doing people out of work and that worries me.
But also, you know, I've got crap off Temu as well.
(08:50):
And the problem is Teamu uses this really clever almost
gambling algorithm. So oh, click this spinner and it's like
a spinning wheel. You could win a twenty five dollar bonus.
And the problem is what people don't get is those mechanisms.
So choose your first five free items and they give
(09:10):
you a whole page of all this free stuff. You go, oh, yeah,
that's good. That's good. That's good. I've always wanted a
coffee woman to sit on my desk, which is connected
by USB. You know, suddenly all these things that you
never really ever wanted in your life you must have.
And the problem is, if you read the fine print,
yes you get five free items when you spend three
hundred and fifty dollars. Yes, yes, So you've got to
(09:35):
watch out for that. And a lot of I guess
consumer groups are saying be careful what you buy. And
then there's the back channel. If they're selling this stuff
that cheap, how are they been produced and who is
producing them? You know, maybe some poor kid who was
eight had to hand draw that. I don't know, no,
I mean, okay, but you know what I mean. It's
(09:56):
the chain. So you know, I'm in two minds about
maybe we should start talking about tie cheek. That's more relaxing.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Light behind me. See that was that was an Ali
Express purchase. You know what you have to do if
you're buying off of those is you have to go
to the reviews, because I've thought some really great stuff
it's really great quality, and some stuff that's not. And
you have to go to the reviews and look because
people put up reviews with photographs. Yeah, so you look
(10:26):
at that and then you get the honest speedback we
actually see and in those photos you see the actual
quality of a lot of things that you can't normally see.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
So at due diligence. I think that's a really good point.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Because the AI I can tell there's products on there
that are literally AI created images that aren't even the
actual so you can get I look at it. I
remember once looking for particular saddle bags or bags to
put on the back of my bike seat motorbike, and
there were products that were completely AI or they weren't real,
(10:59):
they weren't photographs of the real thing. So I'm like, well,
how am I supposed to buy this if you can't
even show me, like, you may as well draw a
stick figure standing next to a stick figure motorbike.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Well, I was looking for fans for my students because
they all came to the conclusion that the metal fans
were too heavy, and you know, some of the ladies
are older and it does take a little bit of
risk strength to flick open and to use a metal fan,
it's got quite a lot of weight to it, whereas
the plastic ones are a lot lighter. And I thought,
do I do the t MoU thing? You know, I
(11:30):
know I can buy them for twenty five bucks or
in fact, I went onto the website for an Australian
supplier of metal fans and they were seventy five dollars
and I know that a few of the students just
don't have that sort of money, and so I went
and bought some on Team MoU and I was my
other students that I then had a subsequent class the
next day and we were doing the fan form and
they all laughed at me. They said, they'll probably end
(11:52):
up being like cocktail fans that you put in your drink.
So look, I don't know what I'm going to end
up with, because, as you say, it may very well
be a proper fan or it could end up being
just crap. So what's this space of report back? I reckon?
Speaker 2 (12:10):
That opens up a really interesting conversation around values and
integrity and just the just being aware of what do
I value and what am I comfortable with, but also
what am I buying? Like, I don't think these days
we always ask that question. I think about so the
active wear that I wear. I used to be obsessed
(12:33):
because we because I used to work near and Lulu
Lemon outlet used to be obsessed with and had so
much blue Lemon, and I'd buy it all the time.
But I'd buy it from the outlet and it's great,
But it got to the point where I was, I mean,
I wasn't near the outlet anymore, and it's really expensive
to buy. So I haven't bought any for years. But
ten years, I reckon, I'm still wearing it, and only
(12:55):
just now. I've got a couple of pairs of tips
that are that are not wearing.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
I'm wearing a top at the moment that I've just
realized I've thrown on today that I've had for probably
eighteen years.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
So how good is that? Though? When you think, like
sometimes you think, oh, this is only twenty bucks, I'll
buy those. That's great. But last year or so, how
are they making it for twenty dollars? What's happening? It's
going into landfill? Laughter that what's happening to the product
after you've used it for five minutes, whereas I've had
these tips for a decade at least, probably more, and
(13:31):
I'm probably going to keep wearing them till they literally
fall off me in the street somewhere because they just
can't hold on anymore. And I just, yeah, I just
think we don't ever think about that, or maybe you do.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
I know, well, my jocks I buy Australian made. I
found that last.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Oh it is about your jocks.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Actually, Can I tell a funny story? So when I
was paragliding, I discovered a brand said this, when you
wear a paraglider harness, the harness straps around your inside
legs and when you start to learn to paragride, and
even when you start, when you start flying, you've got
to run for a fair bit before you jump into
(14:12):
the harness. So the harness is like a little couch seat,
but you run, run, run, run, run, and then once
you start to get lyft, you jump back into the seat. Right.
But now this can be a problem for blokes, as
you can imagine. And I've done some rock climbing as well,
so I discovered this. There's a pair of a brain.
Can I talk about a bracs. We can talk about
a brand. You just talk about Lulu Laman or whatever
(14:33):
it was. There's a brand called Aussie Bum and I
think predominantly it was promoted to the gay market. But
you know how you've got those was it the cross
your heart bra that supports and lifts? You know, you
can get bras that can support and lift, right kind of?
You know that, Well, you can get jocks to do
the same thing. You can get jocks to do the
(14:54):
same thing, right. So what it does mean is if
you're a rock climber or a paraglider somebody that wears
a harness, it just gets everything out of the way
and you can't accidentally get caught in the straps. Yeah,
but it has the flip side effect of kind of
putting things on show, so to speak. So made of
(15:15):
mine was going through customs in at Hethrow Airport in
London and of the one of the security people, like,
you know, they check your bags and stuff in front
of everybody. Have you been to Heathrow No? Well, okay,
so he Throw airport's enormous. It's like just any big,
enormous airport. He's walked up to this guy, he's looked
(15:38):
down and he's put his hand down his pants to
see if he had something hidden in his jocks. True story. Yes,
gives a whole new meaning to a long haul flight.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Yeah, so they're good. So look, I highly recommend my
Aussie bums of them. For years, I've had some peers in.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
My visualizing your junk.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Now, yeah, I've some peers in my arsenal so to
speak for probably Let's see, I started paragliding about eighteen
years ago, so I probably still have some pairs of
jocks that are eighteen years old and I'm still using them.
How cold is that? Ah, I do have a month's supply.
(16:24):
I probably have about eighteen or twenty pair. So see,
when I moved out of home, right, I realized that
if I just bought up on jocks and all the
essentials and just had a lot of them, that I'd
only have to do washing once a month. That's only
twelve times a year, and.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Then everything lasts so much longer.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Exactly, that's good market. How good is that? And then
you have jobs at last year eighteen years.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Follow Patrick for more life tips.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
I could probably calculate back how many times I've been worn.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Hit, me down a rabbit hole last week out of
the uninvited. It took me, and it took me a
long time to pull myself back to rain myself in
so at a time where I didn't really have the
time to be investing in such a thing. You just
out of nowhere, I get a message from you with
(17:22):
no context, this with this paper tablet, because you know
I have a remarkable. So for anyone listening, that's that,
just a black and white paper tablet that replaces like
electronic notebook. You can add to that if there's more
fancy ways to describe it.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah, well I will. Did you finish the story and
then I'll talk about et inc all right?
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Yeah, well you sent me this funny screenshot of this
new product getting getting released. That was a colored version
of a tablet that could replaced a remarkable and it's
going to be amazing. And I so I get on
the search I'm looking at. I talk myself into no
uncertain terms. I need one of those. I definitely need it.
(18:02):
There's I've started building a case for my unconscious mind
to just get me. Over the hours hours I went looking,
I found the cheapest one I'd built myself a pros
and concert and do you know how long it took
me to talk. I don't need that. I don't need
these sort of things thrown into my world. You know
that I'm impulsive. You know that I get fear of
(18:25):
missing out and I've got to have things. You know
how exciting new things are. You know how much I
want my remarkable to already have color.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
I kind of feel like I need to apologize. But
is it a think about it in these terms? Tiff
that I was thinking about you unprompted.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
That's beautiful. I wish it was the things that was
of value to me.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Okay, come and do a tai chie class with me.
Come and do some fan. I'll teach you some fan.
Well you you kind of started asking me about tai chie,
didn't you.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
This is why you're here and because I wrangling and
get back on track. Yes, let's talk about tai chi.
Tell me more about.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
It, okay. So tai chi effectively is a slow moving
martial art. So imagine every kung fu movie you've ever seen,
and then slow it down to pause and incremental movements.
Now it's it is based on martial art form, but
it's very slow moving. There are no belts or creditations
like that. It's basically just repetition and practice. It came
(19:28):
out of the out of China, and it really became
popular in the nineteen fifties when it was standardized by
a group of thai Chi masters. And there are four
families of tai chi, Chen, Wu, Sun, and Yang, and
the Yang twenty four form was standardized in the middle
of nineteen fifties and it was the first time tai
(19:48):
chi was ever broadcast on Chinese television. And one of
those tai chi masters who standardized the form, one of
his students is our tai chi master in China, how
calls that. So there's this really close a sense of
close association with the form. I look, I knew about it.
You see people doing it in parks occasionally, and when
(20:10):
you travel overseas, you know you'll see people doing tai chi,
and it's generally older people with these slow martial art
type movements. When I was living in Geelong, I've moved
out of home. I've been in Geelong for a few
years and you know, I was working shift work and
because I had a lot of free time during the day,
I went to a local neighborhood house to look if
(20:31):
I could do some courses, and I saw this tai
Chie course. It was a ten week course and I
learned a very basic form of tai chi. And what
it does is it's almost a moving meditation. Because you're
moving slowly, You've got memorized different moves. It's great for
cour stability because if you think about it, if you
were to throw a kick and do it really quickly,
(20:53):
that's part of you know, and I guess you don't
really kick so much in boxing, but if you were
to kick in martial arts sense, it's a very rapid movement,
but if you do it in tai chi, Now, think
about doing that kick in slow motion, all your weights
on one foot you have to extend the other foot.
Think about the balance and the core stability that goes
(21:13):
into doing that. So one of the things I love
about ty chee is there's a lot of weight shift
one foot to the other, forward back, and a lot
of balance that goes with that and coordination, and that's
what I really started to really kind of get into
and think was really good. And then you're remembering the move,
so you're kind of thinking that through which kind of
washes everything else out of your mind because you're focused
(21:35):
on the moment. It's a very mindful way to be
in the moment, you know. I often laugh about this
to my students. Halfway through in a class, my phone
will ping and it will say, oh, you need to
get up and start moving because I'm so relaxed. My
heart rate hasn't pinged at all, and I'm just in
this really lovely, almost meditative state while I'm teaching and
(21:58):
talking and all that sort of stuff. So I did
this short course, loved it, and then I thought I
want to do more of this, and I went and
joined another class at another place, but unfortunately they were
halfway through a really complicated form, and you know, you
get into it and it's like, this is so hard.
The teacher just wasn't really being helpful. And you've probably
done that. You know a lot of people who go
to gyms don't resonate with an instructor and they drop
(22:21):
out because it didn't gel. And then they get another
instructor and suddenly the whole world opens up to them.
And then for me, it probably took more than ten years.
Later I was living in Melbourne again and I was
sitting down and I'd go through the local paper and
every term there was a little tiny ad for tai
chi and it kept yelling to me, and I reckon.
(22:43):
I would have looked at it for over a year,
thinking I've got to try that, got to try that,
And then eventually I did. I joined up and then
I found out Tiff that not only does tai chi
include lots of slow movements and memorizing forms, but you
can use weapons swords like this is good. So you know,
(23:04):
that blokey part of me thought, I want to learn
how to use a sword. So I did some of
the basic forms, and then I did the yang twenty four,
which is one of the most common forms practice, which
is a lovely, beautiful fluid movements, really really lovely to watch,
and then subsequently learned some weapon forms. And then I
left Melbourne and moved to the little town of Bland,
(23:24):
which is west of Melbourne, and thought, well, that's my
tai chi done. I won't be doing that again. And
this this lovely woman by the name of Patricia Kent,
who is one of my most dearest friends, and she
happened to be teaching in our local neighborhood center tai Chi,
and she was the person who introduced me to the
school that we have in China. That's the student of
(23:45):
that original grand master who standardized the form of the
nineteen fifties. So i've you know, I really embraced tai
chi when I met Patricia and started doing two of
her classes, one on a Wednesday Tuesday morning, one on
a Thursday night. And then I think about twenty thirteen,
I went to China for the first time, which was
(24:07):
pretty amazing, and I trained in China and it was
a conference at a university in a place called beida
her which is probably one of the closest coastal towns
to Beijing. So if you looked at Beijing on a
map and then you went to the coast, that's where
Beidahur is and a lot it's kind of become a
famous spot because the Chinese, you know, I guess political party,
(24:33):
they when they go on their summer retreats, that's where
they go to and Chairman Mao evidently swam in the
ocean off Bedahur, and so you know, we go there
to the university and we meet up with people from
all over the world and including a team from Germany
and people from Korea and Japan and obviously all over China.
(24:54):
So and they're all there for this common cause. And
when you do when you do tai chi and you
do the Yang twenty four with over two hundred people,
that's amazing. And we've done it on the Great Wall
of China with a whole group of people as well,
and they had a drone flying over us, and you know,
it's amazing to kind of feel a connection. And one
of the things I love about this, and I know
(25:15):
a lot of martial arts schools also a kind of
you know, subscribe to this kind of sense of familiarity
with people to the point where when you go to
China and you meet up with other people in your school,
there your China. There your tai chi brothers and sisters,
and sometimes those connections can be closer than family connections.
(25:35):
You're treated with reverence, You're treated with a lot of honor.
I've just found that the culture is so amazing and
the amount of respect that we get when we travel
and people really embrace you in a genuine sense, it
makes you feel really amazing. You know, when you travel
through India, I'm sure that you found connections with people
(25:57):
that surprised you.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yeah. Yeah, it's just so right. And I've just as
you've been talking about tai chi, I've been in my
mind thinking about the about yoga, Like yoga is so
very popular and a version of you know, I guess,
similar ways to move your body and be in your
body and be mind. There's a lot of similar benefits there.
(26:20):
But you, I mean, yeah, you don't get that same
culture connection. It's a bit like meeting another boxer overseas
and going, oh, we both training the same sport where
you become connected because of that.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Oh. Absolutely. And there are fraternities of people in all
sorts of sports, and you know, the rock climbing fraternity
is amazing, you know, and paragliding community. You know. I
was randomly driving with a friend through bright and a
guy flying a paraglider had just landed in a field,
and so I went over to this guy and I said, oh,
(26:58):
you know, we had a chat about him lying. I said,
do you want to drive? You want me to drive
you back up the mountain because generally when you fly
down you need to get back up again. And it
ended up it was a local town copper and he said, oh, man,
that would be amazing if you could do that, because
you drive to the top and you fly down and
you've got to get back up again. So I just
picked him up and we drove up to the top
of the mountain to the launch point, and he showed
(27:19):
me the launch point and it's like, thanks man, And
you know, I guess surfers do the same thing. People
who are rock climbers do the same thing. I find
that the sports that I've most been attracted to in
my life have been non competitive sports, you know, those
pursuits where you build up a fraternity. I mean, I
know that all sports can be competitive to in a sense,
(27:40):
and you can compete in paragliding, you can compete in
rock climbing, but people who engaging that as a hobby,
there's no sense of competition. There's a sense of a
camaraderie with those and in Tiitshi it feels even closer.
The connection feels even closer. I was at an airport
in Beijing and I had a six hour layover and
(28:01):
it was one of those ridiculous times of night, so
it might have been ten pm and we were leaving
at two am or something something ridiculous, and the group
that I was traveling with, We're all sitting around thinking
what are we going to do? All the shops are closed.
So I walked down to this little garden area that
they had at the Beijing airport and I started doing
tai chi and this old woman walked up and she
(28:23):
kind of acknowledged me, and I acknowledged her, and she
asked to join in. She didn't speak English, I didn't
speak any Chinese, and she saw that I was doing
tai chi and it was this very familiar form, so
we did this together. She came up to me and
we did this form together and shared that moment and
it was beautiful. She'd had this biggest grin on her
face ever. And when we got back to Australia after
(28:50):
having been to China for the first time, it kind
of really invigorated my sense of wanting to do tai
chi demonstrations as well as just doing classes. And we
were invited to do a demonstration for the Victorian Type
Chinese Association. So these are you know, those clubs you
know you have, you know, Italian clubs and German clubs
(29:12):
and the Swiss club and all that sort of stuff.
And this this is an organization, you know, for people
who are expat Chinese people, and so we performed in
front of these people and there were old people who
were crying. They were so when they see because they
say in the fifties they gifted tai chi to the world.
That was the idea behind you know, doing this demonstration,
(29:33):
standardizing the form so they could share tai Chian gift
it to the world. And when you do tai chi
in front of Chinese people, they see that as the
ultimate sense of you know, of respect for their culture.
And they get very very emotional when they see that.
They see that you're respecting their culture. And for them
that's it's a very big thing because they're living in
(29:54):
Australia and they interact with their own community, but when
they see people who are not from their community honoring
them by performing something that that's very close to their heart.
Chinese people feel very passionately about tai chi.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yeah, I reckon when you connect with something in a
way that you go deeper than the surface level of it,
it becomes a passionate And I feel the same about boxing,
and I think that what I see and feel in
boxing is what you're talking about in tai chi, and
I feel like tai chi would be such a great
(30:31):
tool to get some of my early students learning what
I'm wanting them to learn about getting into your box,
because when you box, you do things really quickly, like
the mind knows how to do. But the mind has
an idea of what a punch is and we throw
it right. This is one of my easiest analogies. I
tell people, how do you throw a ball? Or you
(30:53):
bring your arm back and you piff the ball like that.
So that's what we think about throwing, and we call
it throwing a punch, But you don't show an throw
a punch. You shoot a punch or put a punch
like you would have shot put. And it's a completely
different movement and it's not about the hand at all.
It's about the shoulder shooting. It's like the fist is
(31:13):
the bullets, the shoulder is the gun. And so your
mind has to process the movement from that in a
split second, but it takes slowing it down and feeling
it to even recognize it so that when you're doing
it quickly, and then the moment you do it quickly
or the moment you get them to take that movement
you've just broken down for twenty minutes and made them nail.
(31:34):
And then you hold boxing mits in front of you
and they throw that, they go straight back to throwing
because it's like, oh boom. So it's it's really an
exercise of getting a feeling and being present and controlling
what the body or the mind already thinks it knows
how to control or knows how to do.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Developing muscle memory is such an important part of any sport,
and particularly as you'd appreciate in boxing, it's you know,
or tennis or whatever. It's not being able to score
the best shot. It's that consistency of every time it
being the same. So when you throw an uppercut, it's
got to be the same mechanical motion as the last
fifty uppercuts. And the interesting and what I find, and
(32:21):
I talk to people about this a lot. You know,
you've got to practice and practice and practice to build
that muscle memory, and then the time that it finally
clicks in, then you build a fluidity around it with
the movements. So quite often when you teach something, you
break it down to its component parts and then it
looks stilted because you do the first bit, then the
second bit, than the third bit, and it's the same
when you're doing a form. Well, I'm doing a twenty
(32:42):
four form. It's twenty four different movements that are put together,
but generally people tend to pause between the movements, but
once you start to mesh them together, there's a fluidity
to it. So when you see someone performing and doing
tai chi, and you can tell straight away they're really
good because one move flow into the next move that
flows into the next move. And the interesting thing about
(33:03):
ty chi is it's obviously martial art based, but the
idea behind it is you use the person's energy against them.
So there's one of the moves that I do, and
I know this is a podcast, but it's you know,
you pull your hands back really gracefully. But what that
actually mimics is if you threw a punch at me,
I would grab the punch and I would move it
(33:24):
across the side of my body. So I don't want
to resist the punch. I actually use your energy to
deflect it out the way slightly. So you're going for
my center, but I deflect it to my side and
you can't go anywhere because you've put all of your
energy into that punch. Now imagine you've fully hyper extended,
You've gone for the absolute knockout blow, and then I
(33:47):
grab your arm and pull it. You can't go anywhere.
You can't resist that because all of your energy your shoulder.
You know, you know, no one throws a punch just
doing it straight out. You'd throw your whole body into it.
So the theory behind ty chi is that you don't
ever engage, but you use a person's energy against them.
And my Taichee teacher, there is this beautiful woman who
(34:08):
know seventies, Patricia, who's this white haired little lady who
gets called auntie. In China. Anybody who's got white hair
is revered because they're an elder. And there's this real
cultural kind of acceptance and a sense of looking after
people who are older. They're they're wiser, they've they've they've
had years of understanding and knowledge. Anyway, Patricia told me
(34:31):
the story one day that someone she I don't know
where she was, was in a city somewhere and someone
came up behind her to grab her, to assault her.
But because of all those many, probably millions of times
of doing these slow movements, she actually elbowed them in
this is that the soul of plexus, right in the
middle of the chest, and she basically got him just
(34:53):
with an elbow strike right into his chest and she
got away because it was the last thing that he
expect that, So suddenly, all that training moving slowly was
an autonomic response that she didn't even think about. It
was an instant reaction to elbow strikes straight into his
chest and she got away from the guy, which was fascinating.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
I love that because I was about to ask if
it if you can bridge it, if it actually comes
into real life play, just because it's not a it's
not a competition types or a competitive sport. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Well, the interesting thing when I got to China, I'm
going to tell you this funny story because i may
have told you on another podcast, but I've got to
tell the story because it shows how much of an
idiot I am. So when I go to when we
went to China for the first time, we met this
German team. So people come out from Germany and it
kind of works in with your bridging because the school
in Germany in Frankfurt is actually a martial arts karate school,
(35:54):
but because their sense is very passionate about balancing what
we call the yin and yang. So he insists that
all of his students do tai chiese as well as karate.
So karat is called hard martial arts, tai chi is
soft martial arts. And he wants to have and establish
a real balance and an understanding of body like you
(36:14):
were talking about, and you can get that, really get
that through tai chi. So anyway, have you ever heard
the word shardenfreuder?
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, love.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
The word sharden freud. So basically there is no equivalent
English word. It effectively means happiness, happiness at the misfortune
of others. So you know someone you don't like, you
see them on the other side of the street and
they trip on the gutter and you think, ah, great,
you know, I didn't do anything but karma bit them
on the ass, that sort of thing. So that's sharden freuder. Now,
(36:45):
when I was in China, we connected with the German
team because they all spoke English and so we developed
a rapport, whereas some of the other teams, the Koreans,
the Japanese, we kind of got on with them, but
was just gestures because we didn't speak a common language,
so we got along with the Germans, and the Germans
were fun to hang out with, and they went for
beer on the beach after, you know, after class and
(37:06):
things like that at night, and did bonfires. They were fun.
But I made the mistake of saying that shardenfreuder was
my favorite word in the German language, but I pronounced
it schiden freuder, not sharden freuder. Now every single German
listening to your podcast has just wet themselves laughing, because
shardenfreuder means happiness at the misfortune of others. Schiden freuder
(37:30):
means vagina happiness.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
And that is not really high on your scale.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Nah, there's a knowledge factor there at zero. But it's
funny because Germans one of these amazing languages where you
can just put words together and make new words, and
I didn't really understand that fully. So you're mispronouncing created
the funniest word. But what's even funnier than that is
seven years later, I'm back in China for another conference,
(38:03):
the freaking German team is still laughing at that joke.
They brought it up seven years later.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
The years they've been telling.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
You become an urban legend in Frankfurt, at this martial
arts school of this idiot Australian who doesn't know how
to speak German and thinks vagina happiness is happiness at
the misfortune of mothers.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
I remember sitting on my couch years ago. There had
a housemate who was she was from Belgium, and I
was learning French on the duo lingo app and I
had my noise canceling headphones on and I'm saying shit
out loud and She's looking at me and she's like,
what are you doing? And I cannot remember the word,
(38:46):
but whatever I was I was. I was like, I'm
learning whatever the word was. She goes, You're saying the
vagina over and over and I'm like, I think. I
think that's enough duo lingo for me. I think I
won't learn this anymore.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Could imagine how much trouble we'd get in Oh my god. Yeah,
thank goodness for Google Translate. I use that in China
a lot. You can scan a menu, you can talk
to people through the phone. You know, it stops idiot
mistakes like that.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Back on the on the kind of training the body,
when we went into locked, we like when we the
whole time of the pandemic and we were in lockdown,
and I had I'd gotten COVID, and when I was
recovering from that for a couple of weeks, I wanted
to start exercising again, but I didn't want to push it.
(39:43):
So I got I've got tear X straps at home,
and I popped them on the door, and I put
little tear X videos on and just followed them, thinking,
you know, it's not my usual smash it out, but
that'll and it was quite It was quite interesting how
hard you work because you engage the whole body. But
it really two things surprised me. One was my single
(40:04):
leg balance. My balance was terrible, and I just the
first thing I thought was how important is footwork and
dynamic changes and control like we need you need such
precision control with your feet and your footwork in boxings.
And I couldn't believe how much I talk about balance
and the ability to move, and I had none. When
(40:27):
it came to slow controlled movements, it was like shit.
And then secondly, I've done it, maybe two or three
weeks of this tear Rex at home, and then got
out and got to a boxing class and I'm thinking, oh,
I'm going to be terrible because I've been doing this
instead of that, and I was. I was notably stronger,
and I put that down to just the core strength
(40:50):
translating through because everything you do on the tear X
you basically have to hold a plank because you have
to have full stability through your full body. Everything's engaged
and it doesn't feel hard, but if you are a
heart rate monitor, it is, and I reckon that's it's
worth thinking about because I've got a lot of clients
(41:12):
that are upward of sixty now and behave like they're twelve.
So i still train them like twelve year old like
they're so fit and dynamic and it's great, but I'm
so aware of integrating balance and movements that are important
to keep them moving well, to keep them flexible, to
(41:33):
keep their bodies supple and recovering.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
I spend a lot of time doing balance and core
stability with our warm up exercises. We can spend ten
minutes doing that, and there's even you know, one of
the things we do is we just stand on one
foot and we kick the leg out in front of
us and then we kick it out to the side.
And then we put our ankle underneath our knee and
(41:58):
there's a lot of different movements, and we hold the
move for twenty seconds. Then we change to the other
foot and hold it for twenty seconds. And what I
was one of my tai chief friends said to me,
she was reading an article and when you wobble to balance,
it actually is your brain engaging so much. When you're
not moving, your brain actually doesn't do a lot. It's
(42:19):
when you start wobbling that your brain has to engage
all the mechanisms of core to be able to stabilize you.
So if you think that you don't have good balance,
and I'm talking to everybody listening, and whatever you're doing,
you know, you're pushing the envelope a little bit and
you're trying to do some balance on one foot, or
you're kicking your foot out in front and you're wobbling.
Don't feel bad if you're wobbling, that's actually a good thing.
(42:40):
And I always say to my students, even if you
don't do any balance at all during the week, when
you brush your teeth one minute on one foot, one
minute on the other foot, moving up and down is
throwing your balance out slightly and how hard is it
to do that you're standing there brushing your teeth anyway,
just do it on one foot, And so I try
to encourage them to do that, even if there's no
(43:01):
other balance that they do. And I look, one of
the things that sparked my interest in building up the
balance side of my little retinue of things that I
do with my tai chi students during the warm ups
is because during COVID, an older friend of mine, a lovely,
lovely guy by the name of Hayden, he had a
fall during COVID and he was on the floor for
(43:24):
eleven hours during winter and he got into hospital, into
ICU and then he passed away a week later. So
you know, he was kind of I think, if I
still think of him as a victim of COVID or
the circumstances around COVID, now he had a fall, could
that have been avoided? Look a speculative, but the reality
of it is, if you're over the age of sixty
(43:44):
and you have a fall, your life expectancy drops so dramatically.
And I think this is horrendous statistic that says, you know,
a big fall at the age of sixty, you may
only have twelve months. You know, falls are horrendous, six round.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Falls context around that.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
What well if okay, generally in a fall, someone might
break a collar bone or a hip, and then the
recovery from that takes so much, and it can take
its toll if someone's an older person, and preventative is
always the preventative measures are always going to be the
best way for people to be able to cope with
something like that. So if you can prevent the fall
(44:23):
in the first place by improving a person's balance and
core stability. And the other little statistic I was reading
was the really good article in The Age, maybe about
a month and a half ago about fall specifically about falls,
and it mentions ty ChEI and yoga and those things.
But an interesting statistics to statistic too is the most
common falls happen late at night when people get up
(44:46):
to go to the toilet, you know, stumble over something
and then have a fall. Then, so that's a very
common thing that happens as well.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
But I guess that, yeah, it makes it so like
you just reminded me of that fall that Harps had
last year in the gym, bloody hell, and like so
he's sixty one, but he has trained his whole life,
so he's strong. The fall he had was bad, like
he fell off a high box, tumbled down because it
(45:19):
lost it, wobbled underneath him, flipped out from under him,
and he landed on his arm. Like I still get
a little bit woozy when I visualized it again. It
was just like one of those falls where normally in
the gym with him, if he fell over up, everybody
would laugh, but I just was like shit, landed on
his arm on the edge of the squad rack, which
(45:42):
was raised, so he got a raised metal bit and
he landed him on top of his arm on that.
Oh and even when we took him up to the
hospital just to get it checked and unfortunately had I
was certain he was gonna have a broken forearm, but
he just had a just damaged his shoulder a bit,
but nothing nothing terrible. Just he's still a bit, you know,
(46:06):
sore now. But they even they couldn't believe. They were
like for someone your age to not have broken your
arm like that is phenomenal. You've got strong bones, like
you've got a strong body.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
That's amazing. Yeah, when I was learning paragliding, they one
of the things they taught us was how to take
a fall. They do it, they call it a parachute roll.
So we spent a whole afternoon falling on the ground,
which I was very good at falling on the ground.
I got to tell you, it was one of those
natural skills that I seem to have.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Years and years and years ago. When I first started
cycling road cycling, I was cycling down and I'm not
you know what I'm like. So my third ride, my
third ever ride by myself on a forty degree day,
was one hundred and twenty nine kilometers.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
You're obsessive, aren't you.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
Yeah? I am. But here's the benefit of that. So
I'm coming back. I'm about to pass brighton Sea Bards
and this ridiculous woman just hooks in and completely t
bones me as she's turning into the car pack. I
think the positive for me was I was My body
was so exhausted that I knew clenched. Yeah, I was losing.
(47:20):
But what I remember, I've rolled up onto her bonnet, right,
she's sitting next to me. Once she's pulled over, she
on the paper. She sit next me, and she looked
she wasn't the sharpest. Maybe she was in a bit
of shop too, but I just remember she kept saying
to me, mate, you should do jiu jitsu the way
you rolled, the way you roll, lady, this is not
(47:41):
the time. Yeah, Like I could have died, but yeah,
because I just I just rolled like I was just
relaxed and I just rolled off the off the body.
But I think it was you know when you remember
things in slow motion. I think I just kind of
I've kind of glanced and saw that car come in
and gone, well, this is happening.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Yep. Yeah, I think you become hyper aware because everything
engages your brain suddenly kicks in adrenaline floods, you know,
floods through your body, and suddenly you're seeing everything and
you're recording everything in its most mi new shae, so
(48:23):
everything seems to really slow down. I was thinking about
what you're talking about with balance, and I set myself.
I went back to the gym this year. I had
a long break about twelve months, which was probably the
longest I've had of not going to the gym for
a long time, and for me, it was a bit
of a you know, I struggled a bit. I had
tennis elbow for many, many, many months and caused a
(48:43):
lot of pain. I couldn't even lift up shopping. You know.
I struggled. My whole lifestyle had to change around this injury.
And eventually, and then you think of all the excuses
why you don't go back to the gym. You know,
I'm not going to go back to the gym this
month because there are two public holidays and not paying
for a whole month, get all my two days, my
extra two days. Stupidest excuses. So I went back to
(49:03):
the gym. And one of the things that I've always
been able to do is if I'm doing free weights,
what do they call those flat boards that have a
half ball on the bottom of them?
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Are the bose balls?
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Yeah, So I do my weights on those. So when
I'm doing free weights, I stand on that and I
do curls or you know, whatever it is I'm doing,
I do it on that to build up core. And
then I thought to myself, I reckon, I can do
this on one foot. So now when I do those
exercises the free weights, I put my foot in the
(49:35):
center of it and then I kick out, So as
I'm moving, I kick my foot out in front, then beside,
and then to the front, So I'm constantly moving my
foot and adjusting my core while I'm doing weights. And
you know, the first time I tried it, I was
falling over, honestly, like I just had a big night
on the turps and I just stepped out of a pub.
But I got to say, now I can do it
(49:57):
with it staggered me that within maybe five or six weeks,
I don't even think anything of just putting one foot on,
getting up and doing exercises just with one foot on
the board and it's no problem. So, you know, and
I say this to my students, and the lovely thing
and we're just harping back on the tai Chi. My
youngest student in tai Chi was sixteen, and in the
(50:18):
same class I had an eighty six year old seventy
years How awesome is that? Yeah, yeah, you know, And
that's you know, when you can get a group of
people together and that cross generational connection and we're talking
three generations away, and it's amazing to be able to
do that. And that's a real joy for me to
see that someone who's so young, teenager at the age
(50:41):
of sixteen can get as much benefit and enjoyment out
of interacting with the person who's in their eighties. I thought,
that's just a beautiful thing about what can attract and
draw people the tai chie.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
Yeah, and think about that whole balance that you're doing there,
the mechanics of that. Like if you are out and
about and you lose your footing and you're about and
you're about over a bunch of things, you've prevented one.
All the ligaments and tenders and muscles and stabilizers are
strong because you've been training them, but also your familiarity
(51:17):
with a sense of instability. The first thing when I
always get people to stand on that boast and just
either do squats but they've never been on it. They stand,
unlock their knees and their legs shake and they look
at me. They're like, I'm not doing that, and they
freak out because your body just goes and it overcorrects
and it's trying to find what's going on here, what
(51:39):
do I need to do? And you're preventing that from
happening in a moment that could end up really bloody bad.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
Yeah for sure, So good yep, and like I said,
very basic, just do it when you're brushing your teeth.
Stand on one foot when you're brushing your teeth. It'll
help that little bit every day.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
Yeah, all right, you're amazing. Tell everyone where to find you,
and tell them where they can do teach taichie with you.
Speaker 1 (52:04):
Actually, that's a good point. So even though my grown
up job is like graphic design, web design, that sort
of stuff, so websites noow, dot com, todau if you
want to check out that stuff. But during COVID, when
everyone was learning to make bloody sourdough bread, I tried
that and that was shit. So I decided I really
was worried about my Thai chi students losing their tai
(52:27):
chi skills. So I just created a website, a little
free website called ti Chi at home, dot com, dot au.
And it's it's funny now in retrospect because it was
all built hastily during COVID. I set up this area
in my lounge room with big black material and a logo.
Got a logo, I designed a logo, and I just
do these exercises and people can join in. I do
(52:49):
talk a lot of crap beforehand, so behind every underneath
every video, it just says you fast forward to say,
fifty two seconds and get rid of all my crap
at the start, and then you get the actual exercise.
But I set that up during COVID. I keep telling
myself that at some point I'll put more stuff on there.
But it's just a nice little introduction to tai chi.
But it's some great exercises you can do while you're
(53:11):
you know, if you don't know anything about tai chie,
you can follow along with it. So tai chier at
home dot com today. I was pretty stoked that someone
hadn't taken the name. I thought it's a great domain name,
isn't it. Yeah, tight cheer at home. Yeah, so that
was that was a bit bit of fun and yeah,
so people want to connect and have a look at
that and just do some exercises, do some balance. They
can see Fritz, who's the takes a bit of a
(53:31):
starring role in my tai chie videos.
Speaker 2 (53:34):
Well, bloody love Fritz. Well thanks Patrick, You've inspired me to,
you know, do some tai chie. I've said that for
a long time now. But next time I come and
visit you, let's lock it in.
Speaker 1 (53:46):
Well I didn't tell you this, and I'm going to
you will get an invitation. But Fritz turns ten this
year and I'm thinking of having a doggy party. Oh,
I'm going to invite Kim and Walter, and I figured
you and Luna need to come along and we'll have
an afternoon on a Sunday because his birthdays on a Monday.
But I reckon we'll do her Sunday after dog birthday party.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
You can get dog birthday cakes and muffins.
Speaker 1 (54:09):
Made no way, so that might be your job. Tif.
I'll find out somewhere and you can pick him up
on the way through.
Speaker 2 (54:16):
I'll find you because because Coach the whippet, Remember Coach
my last whippet, she went to her best friend's birthday
and I've got photos of her eating this beautiful bloody cake.
I'm trying to find them too long ago.
Speaker 1 (54:35):
You've got to send it through to me. I'd love
to see that. Yeah, So that's the next So I mean,
I hope we'll catch up before that, but definitely, you
guys are on the birthday list.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
Can't wait. Thanks a million. Everyone go visit Patrick. He's
amazing and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 1 (54:53):
She said, it's now never. I got fighting in my
bloo les.
Speaker 2 (55:02):
Garded trip to.
Speaker 1 (55:03):
Call a coast guard. True gust scared all the coast
Garde
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.