 So next up we have Glenn Stewart from the National Circus, so the National Circus in the UK. Someone we've connected with, we've experienced some of his coaching and his expertise is going to bring, there's going to be a practical element to this one as well, so make sure you've got something to juggle. We're going to look at some skill development work and look at some juggling examples. Here we go. How are we doing mate? Hey buddy, good. Good to see you. Can you hear me? Yep, I just haven't done like a full introduction yet. I was just going to set the tone a little bit. Hey buddy, good. Good to see you. Okay, I'm just not sure if you can hear me. Go on the computer or on the... Hang on mate, I've got to X the computer idea. Hang on. There was some double action going on. How are we doing? For people watching, the idea with the podcast line is to make this as interactive as possible. So we've gotten together some of the favourite guests we've had on the podcast. Glenn works at the National Circus. We'll get into a little bit of that in a second. But just if you've got any specific questions, ask those in the comments. We're going to have a practical element where we're going to look at some skill development and using juggling as a tool to bring that to life. So there's a practical element to these and any specific questions that you've got, put them in the comments. It's then my job to try and keep an eye on those and I'll ask those as we go through. Glenn, welcome to the podcast live today. Thanks for joining us again. We've been down a few times, myself and Tim, to the National Circus to visit you there. When we had the first opportunity, the invite to come down to the National Circus, it was like, yes, we're going to go to the circus. We were so excited. The idea of the vast array of different athletes, different skills and different things that you teach was so interesting to us. We were really excited about coming and learning from you. For those that maybe don't know your background, just sort of briefly, you've got personally gymnastics background yourself. And then how long have you been at the National Circus? Do you just make context for what you do there? Sure. Well, thanks for having me on again. Great. I've always think the stuff that you guys are doing is phenomenal. And today, I mean, I've jumped in and out and various people you've had in. I think the quality of guests is phenomenal. So just being a consumer of what you guys have put together today. There's just one of a notch with you on again, buddy. I was going to say, I was going to tear the whole thing down, but... Okay, so, yeah, as you said, I sort of had a gymnastics background. I was born and raised in New Zealand, so it was in the gymnastics scene there, which, you know, on the international scene, we're sort of pretty much down the picking order a bit. So it was a very enjoyable sort of sport for me to be partaking, probably from about the age of eight to about 20. And, of course, had a great base, I think, for all the stuff that we start looking at now. I sort of got into coaching gymnastics as I was sort of getting towards the end of my own sort of competing while I was at university. And what was sort of interesting about it is, okay, we had the sort of the competitive squad and the young sort of, you know, athletes there, but we also had all the recreational stuff. And if I'm really honest, the most useful part of probably what I use nowadays was working with the kids. How do you keep it engaging? How do you keep it fun? How do you, you know, playful and all those things, which actually now full circle layout back in the circus world, those are all the things that are really valuable. So I came over to the UK in 1999. So nearly 21 years ago, I guess, 20 odd years ago. And initially, sort of looking to move away from working with kids because I've done that for quite a while. And actually, what was interesting is that there was a huge pool for adults wanting to do gymnastics. You know, at that time, to be fair, I was in the mindset, look, if you hadn't started this game by the time you're 10 years old, you're out of the picture. And of course, yes, in some ways, if you want to be an Olympian, then it's going to be tough. But it was amazing to see the amount of people that were choosing this as a recreational activity after their day at the office. Well, I think this, Glenn, so just to something interesting, I think that that's one of the really interesting things that me and Tim found ourselves of this, our own sort of organic journey to doing calisthenics. But at the end of the day, like, it's all movement and it's lots of these things of similar elements. If you just take the handstand as one example, like, it wasn't the idea of coming out of rugby and trying to do something a bit different. And the idea of going to, like, a formal organised gymnastics scene really seems like, oh, like, for a number of different reasons. One, too hard. Two, I haven't got the lycra. Three, like, I don't know, just so many different, it just wasn't a place that was, it wasn't a place that we felt like we could gravitate towards to. Because I think, as you said, you feel that, unless you were doing it when you're six, seven, eight years old, you're miles away. So I guess it's open the door for all these different movement options and calisthenics being one of those that's been born at. It seems like, it depends who you follow on Instagram. Obviously, we follow the very similar types of people. It seems like everyone, once they're an adult, once you're an adult, then you try and then ask your handstand. That's about, there's a lot of people that, yeah, that gravitate towards that. And, you know, some of the initiatives you guys are doing around, like, putting on sessions for non, you know, for adults that just want to come recreationally and enjoy some of the benefits of circus, because we can talk, we'll get down into that. I just think is, yeah, it's a great, it's a great thing. Sorry, I just sort of stopped you in tracks a little bit. No, no, but I think that's really important. And I think what I think is interesting, is the thought at some point that we grow out and stuff like that. And, you know, we stop rolling, we stop wanting to hang and we stop wanting to do handstands and cartwheels. But actually, I don't, I actually think, you know, if you go right back into our inner cells, we love that stuff, you know? You've got that room in the circus place where it's like a spring floor, spring walls, and there's just like, bounce, things about, like, you just run in there and then you can see versus adults where everyone stood there. And as an adult, you do an adult thing of like, you're waiting for someone else to do it to make sure that then it's okay. But you just want to go up and someone like me, you just want to go, bonkers just mess about on it and give it your freedom to do that. Like you say, as an adult, it's refreshing because it's so different to what we're supposed to do as adults. That's right. And then unfortunately, because, you know, for whatever reason, and look, I sometimes give gymnastics a bit of a hard time and I actually think this war itself is evolving. There's many elements to it now. It's not all about the coming Olympian, but it tends to be a sort of a selection for the best sort of approach that they weed out through all the recreational kids, those that have the potential to go on and be competitive, which is fine for making sport of gymnastics, but I think then we tend to sort of lose some of that just doing it for fun element, because actually you're not seen as being successful, so you move on to something else. And then you have this gap from the age of about 12 years old where most people sort of think about dropping out of gymnastics, and then maybe, you know, now that the world is offering all this sort of stuff, you go, God, it's been 20 years since I've done it, and then you've got the fear problem, and I haven't been loading my wrist for 20 years, so all the stuff is painful. So these big hurdles to overcome when you get back into it as an adult, although inside the love of it is there, like you say. We want to throw ourselves around, and we just want to make sure we're okay when we land. Yeah. And then so your role at the National Circus now, and how long have you been there? Yeah, so I started just as a freelance teacher, doing a bit of teaching, and again, really it's been a massive learning curve for me. Like I went in with the knowledge I had from gymnastics, which is a certain amount of that was transferable to the circuit board, but really lacking so much of the stuff that circus artists need, like that real playful element. Thankfully there was that exposure I had to the kids in the fun side of it. The sport of gymnastics doesn't really help that much actually with trying to create artists, although you can sort of go on and be the clinician, and as long as that's supported by other teachers that are more creative than I was, that sort of you get away with it. But over the years I've sort of, you know, spent trying to learn new disciplines and branch off from what I knew from gymnastics and pick up the sort of the multitude of disciplines there are in circus, and really have to thank a lot of the people that supported me along the way, and the students and the young people that said, okay, this guy doesn't know what he's doing, but we'll give him a chance, and then eventually you sort of evolve your practice. So it's been a good 20 years. My role currently is less about teaching and more sort of thinking about how we teach circus and teaching teachers and trying to support the teachers and that same growth that I went through that took me 20 years, can we sort of speed that up with a bit of support so that happens a bit quicker. So I have less content with the students these days, but I'm still trying to master my skills of teaching teachers and learning about that as we go. Yeah, yeah, and I imagine there's, yeah, coaching the coaches in the circus environment almost because there is an element of that creativity you said, that I imagine that the rules are just, the more rules you have, the less likely someone is to be creative if that makes sense. Absolutely, you know, I mean, that's one of the challenges I think we have. Certainly as we try and get this sort of this precision, high level, like most people, if you think as an audience member, you want to see good stuff, right? And the more specialised and high level they get, it's actually harder and harder to keep that creativity because there's laws of biomechanics and gravity that apply to any athlete. And so, you know, it's trying to balance that. You still want high technical skill level, but actually allow that to be playful so you don't look like every other circus artist where, you know, there's a lot of athletes that start looking a lot like the other athletes because they are narrowing that skill into competing against people that look exactly like them. Whereas as an entertainment or an art form, you want to keep that individuality, so you've got to keep that horizontal expansion rather than just the vertical side. So it's a bit of a balance because you can't just deny all the sports science and all the learning stuff that we know about repetition and precision and it does take time to master some of these skills. But if you get too locked into that, you give up a lot of the other opportunities around individuality and originality. So it's a bit of a balance. Yeah. Well, we're going to want to talk a little bit about skill development. We're sort of, we love talking about skill development, particularly from that, as you were saying, that adult point of view of you trying to then do something brand new. We talk about redefining our impossible school like that's the next because some of these things really do feel impossible. Some of them have like a great strength element depending on what it is, but some of them things like your handstand have a much more skill balance element. And we're going to use juggling as a bit of a tool to, you know, when we went to, so you go to visit these guys, and everywhere you go, there's just juggling balls and the opportunity to just juggle. And I found that there was a number of things that we had a conversation about, the benefits of juggling and what it can give, that I want to ask you about in a second. There was a story that you told us that thought would be nice to open up that conversation with where there was someone learning to do, the skill was a back tuck or back flip up running up a wall and learning it in one environment and not being able to transfer it into the show. I thought that was, I really love that story that you told and it just really sets the tone of why it's important to have a skill development process that allows those skills to be transferable into other environments, but then also, hopefully, other skills so that we're broadening that skill set. Yeah, and I think this is an interesting story that represents a few things. One of the things that has adults is that we're quite impatient. We set goals for ourselves and that's right, I know we just want to get there. And any sort of shortcuts or tricks or anything, that's where we're very hungry for that information. And I think actually, this story was a guy that was dancing and singing in the rain at the National Theatre and he's an amazing athlete. He's super like in tap dogs and I was incredible, real master and very athletic and very fit and very strong and very bouncy. He had all the elements there, right? So there's this one famous piece obviously runs up the wall, backs on the wall and they needed that in the show. So they came to the National Theatre. I went in there being super coach and just throwing all the notes and this is how you do it and giving him the quickest route from A to B. And a lot of that was me carrying him through the Somersault, like putting it into him, doing some hundreds and so I could sort of start backing away, backing away. Well, he did it, like super fast. Like I say, he had this capacity to learn because of his physicality. Now, he looks like we've done the job and then we're all... How quickly was that? Well, we probably did maybe three, four sessions. It was super quick. And we probably could have done it in one if it wasn't for the fact that fatigue sets in so we'd have to give him a rest, come back. So it probably took him an hour or so. It was nothing. And then what was interesting, he went back into rehearsals and then sort of already opened the show and I invited along to one of the dress rep runs. And he went in, just coming out to the big party and did it and honestly, it was one of those moments where I thought I'm about to watch someone break their neck on stage. Like, and he crashed to the ground and he said, oh yeah, man, they're just deteriorating. It's getting worse and worse and worse. And what I realized we've missed this big piece of actually his knowledge, his understanding of this. He didn't know, not even first of all, didn't know why it was going wrong, let alone now how do I fix it? Because I had taken all that away from him. I hadn't given him the opportunity to understand each step of the way so that he'd have a chance to modify his own practice. So it was this fast track. Yes, we felt like we'd done something but I hadn't really given him any tools to go away and do anything else with that. You know, and then eventually he got dropped out of the show. So that was my ego about wanting to be the superteacher, his impatience and just both being naive as to what was really required. And of course for me, from somewhere from a gymnastics background, wow, it's years and years of practice they must have knowledge, but he didn't. It was a very superficial level of learning. So I think, you know, that's a really important lesson for all of us. Take the time for all the capacity so that we have options going on. Well, I guess that was potentially quite a pivotal point in your career as a coach of what you learn through that process. It wasn't a great outcome for him, but what you've then used and what I love about you as a coach is when you're such a humble guy, we've spoken a number of times at levels of like, you guys use a lot of brain training techniques and things that we experienced when we were doing some of the work on the balance beam, some really like innovative like different stuff. We can get into some questions about different ways of creating new ranges of motion that isn't just standard stretching, which was what you first sort of came up against, also, you know, passive static stretching. But the... That the... That what you learn through that process allows you to then become a better coach. And off the back of that shapes... It feels like shaped a little bit of like how you would go about like your work after that moving forward. I mean, we get so many questions. People will be able to relate to this. Let us know in the comments because often one of the first questions that someone asks when they interact with us about learning something is, they go, and it's always a little bit of like an alarm bell when the question is, how long will it take me to do X? And you're like, that's a really good example. Well, it can be this long, but then you're actually only going to get this outcome and it might not actually be in the longer term the thing that you want. You know, it was your conversations we had with you around variation in hand balancing that gave us the tools to be able to go, let's have more variety in our training to build a more robust like technique so that you can go and do that anywhere that you want to rather than only on that one bit of ground at your house that you practice on. And just opened up that conversation which has been really beneficial to a lot of people. Before we go into the practical of juggling as a skill I remember you saying give some context of it, it's rather than someone juggling and juggling like moving some three balls around and trying to work out that coordination. I remember you talking about it made me stop at the time we'd only just met so I didn't say anything because I was challenging myself. You were saying basically like it's in a way there's a balance element to it that if I'm standing upright and I move my arm out to the side that count away should make me fall over but reflexively something happens to maintain this in that position and when we juggle we're constantly moving, yes it's hand-eye coordination I think everyone gets that this whole other element that's going on in the background it's almost like subconscious thing but that was one of the things I picked up from you about juggling, is there anything else or just like explain that a little bit and anything else around juggling you talk about his breaks to freshen the mind up from when you're working and those types of things any other benefits of juggling before we get into doing it? Well I think that's a really good point is that we tend to look at this stuff it's impressive and when you think about balancing you think of upside down hand balancing can I walk on a tight wire can I be on tippy toes as a valerina all these things that are really high level balance and of course we recognize that but we forget that just sitting even on the floor is balancing even the ability to sit and not have your head there has to be some level of control just for posture so you're working really hard to deal with all of that and then as you start putting motion or moving your arms doing tasks at the same time as staying upright there's this complex mechanism that's far beyond anything we can really learn because it's so it's reactive and so I think the problem with circus sometimes is it can be really out of reach for most people again I didn't start when I was young there's no way I've got poor balance and actually if we can bring back in just standing on one foot and then standing on one foot and throwing and catching a ball it's incredible for balance and that may be a bit underwhelming for people but then there's this scale of you know, can you cover one arm and can you catch one on your back and you can play with the originality of the button, well this is cool throwing and catching a ball can I do something that's a parting trick but actually the complexity of it I'm there as a I'm pretty nifty at this stuff the brain is we know the brain is having to work and the whole thing you can bundle up and it's very scalable and accessible to people that are just rehabbing or haven't done any physical activity at all right through to high level, wow you can do this at an extreme level and that's what I think is lovely about juggling, I'm not a juggler by any stretch but I'm really seeing that I can access juggling or the idea of a juggling ball to make the boring stuff more you layer in the complexity to make it more skill learning and development and progression than what we may have thought and actually today we're going to look at some stuff with one ball it's not juggling we're not doing three balls which everyone thinks is the beginning three balls then you go four, five, seven, eight today we're going to look at stuff with just one and you know it's what I'd recommend, the tricky thing is if you've got a tennis ball you can throw a catch but then you're going to have trouble with some of the stuff where we might want to balance it you've got to be really good if you can manage you're great if you don't have juggling ball roll up some socks and we can do that as well and these are really nice and the good thing about them is that they don't break too many things if they bounce around your house a lot of the stuff we develop for also being at home you're going to have the high ceilings that junglers would need but we're going to play around and see if we can start showing that we can add challenges that can be great as a warmup can be great as just having fun but also we can see improvements in range of emotions and all sorts of other things so hopefully I was just going to give one question for you that we'll have to give people time to take you if you've either got a ball if you've got a juggling ball great but if you haven't take your socks off make sure they're not white boring socks take your socks off roll them up put them into a ball and get yourself ready and then I would just give people one minute to do that to get ready I notice that if I do some juggling before I try and do any more complex handstand work and just for people to just that might be a bit of a whoa like what can just give a little bit of rationale as to why that might be why is that juggling potentially firing up my brain to do a more complex task so again I'm sure there's neurologists out there that can probably say that I'm saying this wrong but the idea is that the base of our brain the cerebellum which is primarily involved with quality of movement and posture and coordination mostly they switched off because it's a very energy hungry part of our brain so it makes sense that it stays off whenever it can do because it was on the whole time we wouldn't be able to do anything except eat we just need so much energy for that so that's really make sense without our day walking and doing day tasks without it switching off but that also means we're relying on having those skills quite well nailed down but what is important is that when we add a little bit of complexity you'll get that cerebellum turning on and when that's turned on and because it's in charge of that posture movement control and all those we get an increase in function and then when we're using our hands we're talking about proprioception movement, hand-eye coordination just building this body map which our brain needs to be activated through these things like sensation and movement and coordination so then I think any skill that you then go and do while you're in that window of being sort of everything switched on you have an enhanced learning opportunity I think have you come across anyone using it in using that or other types of sort of brain stimulation as part of warm-ups in sports that require high level there's no neurology movement obviously as you know through health and places like that they're really sort of taking that neurology which used to be pretty much around brain dysfunction in psychology and now it's becoming into human performance and they're really unlocking so much of what you can do and yes, whether it's a quick warm-up get the brackets switched on we see so many really weird injuries happening in warm-ups and that's obviously we're just not paying attention there's no need because we're asking people to be very mundane and very boring stuff so we see them just doing the motion and there's no need to be alert but as soon as you put someone on a cobbled street they are all of a sudden they're paying attention because they know the needs of others are going to get injured if they're adding on some of the complexity whether it's a juggling aura a coordination task or anything or even saying doing mathematics as we talked about you have to change the brain the rest of the body benefits from the watchtower being fully manned cool let's say we're going to stand up presumably yes, we're going to stand up hopefully you can see I've got a few there's going to be parts, tell me if I need to move my camera so one of the things I think is interesting with this and this is what people do for themselves is that we've got to try and find a way to help them if you just believe in it and just do it and it could be fun and there could be a reason just to do it for that but we want to see are the other benefits beyond just entertaining someone so one of the things that I think you guys have talked about is what can we use to buy the feedback and one of the things we know and in the evening we're going to measure is range of motion so I'd ask anyone watching now to just spend 30 seconds playing around with range of motion so whether it's like a straight legged reach internal rotation or thoracic rotation just things to get a sense of how that feels for you do it two times so it doesn't just get better because we're warming up and then remember how that feels we'll try some of so touch here how's that going with you at the moment it's good when I focus on it I've been sat down all day doing podcast so there's a little bit of sight great so and what we want to do is we want to run some of these drills and just for your own sake like keep testing your range of motion after each of these things and you may say it makes no difference and then there's a whole reason for that and I'm not pretending that it's going to work for everybody but it might be interesting that you see some people go oh my god how can I now reach further to the floor just because I've been mucking around with a struggling ball so give yourself some feedback and then you build up every what works for you and then it's a great thing to use as a warm up drill or you know Maggie Magina is saying there's a formula on dry which can't remember is the juggles before racing it makes sense and ties in what you're saying JD Sands has got a satsuma instead of a juggled ball I've actually got a Kiwi and that might be better for might yeah see there you go great you can use something find some sort of find some sort of something you can throw and catch I'm going to run through a bunch of stuff and I'm not really going to necessarily make it have any sort of continual sense to it but ideas that people can play with to show that it goes in all sorts of directions and like I say every time you want test and retest and see this works for me you may find it makes it worse for you and then that's an interesting thing to use as feedback I probably need to work on that because my body doesn't like it so if you're very very confident you could use an egg absolutely a baby right so we're going to start with a juggling ball in the palm of the hand and we're just seeing if you can pat the ball up and down and we have a bruised Kiwi good and then can you switch to the other hand good now most people are probably going to be relatively comfortable with that this is quite good stuff for teaching kids how to catch you know the motor skill how to have a Kiwi yeah pro Kiwi it's definitely going to be a Kiwi juice by the end so already again people can do that but what we want to do is find that point where it's challenging but not completely impossible so we want to keep scaling it up a little bit see if you can find you might find that for yourself or for clients that you're working with that's good enough and actually that there's a lot of balance practice just going on there it's a pretty good skill for people to do already just see if you want to retest does anybody have anyone noticed just from doing like 20 repetitions on each hand did they find my toe touch my toe touch is better literally just up to that great so let's scale it up a bit now we do palm up for one hit palm down for one bit so you're going to flip flip-flop the hand and already we know this is a drill we use the neurological testing you know like how well can someone make this action so when you're a logical drill with a jumping ball and then switch hands and you'll probably find you've got one hand obviously that feels a little more comfortable than the other great little three so you're going to scale it up retest again yeah you went so far down you went out of shot it was amazing okay next one we're going to palm up palm down fist punch so one two three and so you've got to there's a sequence now you need to remember and it gets a little challenging so again see how you do it and can you get about 20 repetitions and then switch hands and how successful it will be good and then all of this stuff you can take on to standing on one foot like so straight away you can scale up to one foot and you'll really see the balance that goes on when you've got this complex movement pattern happening on with the coordination with the membering the sequence and trying to balance on one leg so you know have a go at doing it on one foot and then see if that really switches up the biofeedback into a positive place so you can ask people to play around with different leg positions could be forward could be out the side could be to the back so you can scale it to everyone's point where they go now I'm struggling but it's working so go on to that switch point and the thing is that people can get really good and then you need to mix it up again you want to keep moving the goal post so they're working in that sort of just out of that comfort zone and see what we get with that good and then again go back and retest so it's always is this a good thing for me if it's not working and if it's great then I can put it in my back pocket and use it when I want it pre-training I'm now having not strapped I'm just my retest is trying to touch my toes because I was tired from having sat that up I could touch my toes with my finger tip on the floor whereas now after what five minutes of no stretching is just this my palms nearly flat on the floor it's cool isn't it I mean it's really cool really really great so another one that's similar idea and again this is just so there's a bit of variety in it is to try and hand on top of the ball and can you open the hand completely and keep the ball float okay and we want to see then can we touch touch your own shoulder so the same shoulder is the hand you're using what go back to the ball whoa good can we have the other hand on standby here and clap and go for the ball and the good thing is that they aren't baby so if you do drop them it's completely fine that's a good thing this is just fun, that's the other hand and then try the other hand my left hand's not going to be the camera's not going to smell that hands have been alternately right we can take that down all the way down to the floor okay if you just take a second so now it makes you you know like things you can just do automatically and when you give us something a new task to do that doesn't feel automatic it feels so weird like I'm thinking I'm thinking so much about like my hand it's like I want to clap before I let go and it just doesn't because it just feels so unnatural it's like really challenging I can literally feel like the cogs turning in my head and then you get a rhythm and then it feels like oh okay I'm making progress here like I can feel the difference whereas watching you do it because you've obviously done them before and you've got that skill development and you just can just transfer it it's whatever thing you're going to do and it makes you initially think I'm just going to do it and then you're like it's like before you do it your brain is thinking and it's too slow I think is what I'm trying to say and I think it's probably where it's most powerful you know when you really have to work on it and so and what I want people to do is like this stuff is just made up this isn't you know there's no more benefit from one exercise to the next unless it benefits you more than the other one and that's the thing you want to just relate it to your own personal level so another one if we're doing this if we go back to the claw catch one from left to right if you've got another object so for me the red and white ball is going to be the one I keep changing the other one I'm going to keep in one hand but if I want to swap hands I'm also going to swap the other ball you what so I've got one hand just doing this but because I've got the other object in the hand when I let go of this one I have to get rid of that one so the same ball stays in front and the kiwi goes back and forth between them it might be having kiwi juice so see like my brain is like what yeah now one of those things that this isn't finishing this live isn't finishing until I've done this yeah yeah I can't quite say you're a little bit out of shot with your hands but I can sort of hear the thumping on the ground so I know you're still dropping yeah the thumping means I'm definitely dropping it right um that that's fine that's perfect kiwi kiwi is going to come across oh you've got a ninja that's amazing I'm throwing it I need to work on this I need to work on it I love it cool great okay and then we've been playing around a little bit with some range of motion stuff so taking the ball or the kiwi or the sock if you think about going to full shoulder flexion and then so external rotation so we've got to tip the ball off the back this is great stuff for handstands as well then we're thinking thoracic extension so just opening up here the opposite hand is going to go into extension and internal rotation and I'm going to see if I can drop the ball from the top into the hand at the bottom right here yeah and actually just running through that a few times going back and forth is what I'm really exploring some interesting ranges of motion and this is tough for me I'm rubbish at this internal rotation extension bit and then my thoracic extension is pretty rubbish so this is what I'm really enjoying it's got a bit of a fun element to it as well so I would drop the backhand down a bit so it's maybe done by your belt line so you're not up here straighter straighter yeah straighter arm lower down there you go maybe there's no in there there's my backhand good job there you go I think you've got some of the sort of extension problems that I have so you want to throw a little throw into that so start with your hand up think about keeping your arms stuck to your head put the hand down like a shower head or a dress head or whatever you're going to take the ball and you're going to look up at this hand and you're just going to throw your hand okay so try and think about it coming in underneath rather than it going up and then you're catching it so boom once you catch it then you can go into our drop down the back and go ahead and get it yeah that's fine boom behind the back I think one of the things I like about this plan is we talk about we talk about it because a lot of people talk about it because it's true giving the brain a reason to have the range of motion that you're after is one surefire way of like the brain letting you have that brain so the more I've joked before like a workshop saying if I spent, or rather than spending all day on a computer like this I spent all day walking around like this then the chances are my brain would be happier with me being in that shoulder flexion position so that just fun things like this is giving me then switch sides and go down the way boom boom my throwing is a bit of a problem throwing it too far I'm not throwing it up like you were saying up to the hand I'm throwing it forward and then like catching it yeah but the good thing is you can get some feedback like every time that this is you think okay it was to the left I need to go a bit to the right or it was too high or too low and you can just use that feedback so I think that's a really good point that the other thing we're doing on this is that give yourself a reason to do it and we will go into a little bit more yeah I'm getting better I think can have we lost can people still hear me can you still hear me we'll try and get Glenn back in let me know in the comments can you still hear me is the connection okay yeah okay yeah so we're getting him back in just a potential Wi-Fi connection back cool maybe now looking at some stuff that's a bit more juggy related we're going to look at taking the ball in the right hand we're going to pass it behind our back and throw it over our left shoulder to catch in the left hand so around over their shoulder right there's alternating from one side to the other and again any of this stuff as soon as you add it onto one leg you've got a much more intense balance challenge to be going on so what we tend to do we've seen for so long this whole thing about wobble balls and sorts of things of removing stable surface and we think we're training our balance actually we're better off training balance with a stable surface adding movement from our from our body so you know standing one foot and doing these tasks of throwing and catching is a far better balance training skill than standing on a wobble ball well I think I'm thinking of any of these ones where you're going extension internal rotation for thinking about a ring muscle up for example how many people lack that shoulder extension and that good internal rotation and some of these things where we're just getting used to being in those shapes in a completely different and novel way it's going to be beneficial for your range of motion and access to it the Tim had Ollie Frost the movement mobility specialist on this morning and one of the things I caught one of the conversations they had and one of the things that Ollie said was he doesn't have this as part of his thing but one of the things he did say was having as many different like inputs to the joint as possible so as many different reasons and varieties for it to move it's going to help nurture it or nourish it with the nutrients that it needs so this is just another variation of you're going to go into extension internal rotation because the output I'm asking you to do is throw the ball over that shoulder and the fact that it's fun like I think is that we have this intention of throwing over our shoulder and the first time we try it it just goes basically as soon as we get into this position neurologically we're blind like our arm disappears as far as our brain is concerned so the fact is so misaligned with what we think we're doing and what we are doing is got to be something that feedback that there's a problem and if we've got any sort of anxiety around having lack of control of a position it's going to create tension a brain is going to say if I don't know my arm is in space I'm going to lock this joint up to try and protect it so really once we start managing to master these skills it means we're mastering positional awareness and once we master that we can access greater ranges of motion because there's less threat of injury so I think again how do we look at this there's benefits in it all and it's just a fun way to pass the time and you'd be surprised it's really well done it's like this is like I don't know grams of weight and yet you can play it for one and you can end up sweating because there's a lot of energy stuff going on so it's definitely a worthwhile warm-up activity if nothing else and interesting I think also a really good break from intensity I've sort of find if we've got someone working at really high intensity levels they need a little bit just go and do some simple throwing and catching and just thinking if we can keep the brain on allowing the body to rest a little bit I love the way the explanation you gave there at the end was like perfect around why that to me it's a sound a bit as any like it really struck a chord that when you're when you've lost that positional awareness the brain is going to want to tighten up the joint out of our protection and that gives some really good rationale to me as to why some of these things are going to be beneficial as part of that part of that movement sort of input that you're giving your joints and your brain as you know people are asking about using it in warm-ups like that's totally what we're you're talking about moving the joint getting positional awareness you're talking about hand-eye coordination you're talking about firing of the brain and it's fun that ticks like five different things that are all going to be beneficial as part of as part of warped I think someone else that's like could it be could it be something to do as part of a morning routine I'm assuming the answer would be yes like if that's where it fits into the day for you there's no reason why it couldn't be a two minute break getting out of your chair from if you're working at a desk or whatever it is just to give yourself a physical and mental break from work I'm assuming it as well exactly and I think you know what is interesting that you've given a really good example which I haven't even really thought about is this muscle-up position shoulder extension some people need that because they're well in a muscle-up so how do we emulate that position without the load but increase the awareness around that range so finding something so you could be doing much more stuff above the head like this is great handstand training this drop because that's looking like our handstand position so using it to sort of relate back to what we want to achieve and yeah we're choosing juggling but it could be like you could be trying to write a name on a piece of paper behind your back how well can you create precise movement in a position that you're not that used to that could be a way of unlocking that progress as well and you know like I say your morning routine if it becomes too easy you need to keep moving the goalpost a little bit like what's the next adaptation to make it challenging for you like it was when you first started that principle of progressive overload that transcends anything anyone's trying to ever do ever just like as soon as something becomes easy just add like a small amount of additional complexity to keep that progression moving forward the one last thing for me on this is like my shoulder feels a bit tight actually today in that position I'm already aware of that but for some reason I've got the right handed so throwing it off my right hand feels okay the idea of my left feels easier there doesn't feel as restricted today but the idea of I don't dare throw it because I feel like it's going to go to next door like I literally haven't dared do it with my left hand yet it feels I'll do one so throw it against my back like that what you said of like that blind spot I don't know I've got no awareness of where my hand is when it's there feels there you go throw it at the camera feels exactly what it's but as anything that feels awful when you first do it I know I go and do a few minutes of this that specific one any of that extension internal rotation pattern and now I'm going to get that I can already feel that I'm going to get some benefit from that because I know it's so bad at the moment just from that coordination perspective rather than me just like just sitting and stretching in that position or I know I've got a little bit of feel a bit of like tightness that might with a little bit of self massage might ease off a little bit as well but then giving myself some sort of task to do that's going to want me to use that range and then go and train to get strong in that range well then I've got to talk about different inputs into the joint I've got some freedom to do it and then I've built strength through it and then you're thinking the brain's adaptation it's going to be easier for my brain to maintain that tomorrow and the next day when I go and then challenge it again rather than it wanting to revert back to where it was before because it's trying to make the brain is trying to make life easier for you so it adapts in that way because if you get a good challenge it's going to want to then be better at that so it fits in really nicely rather than if you look at it like from say someone just joined now it's like you're juggling what's that about where does it fit into that conversation but if it's right when you talk about it in that context it fits perfectly in the middle whereas at first glance without the context it's like what's driven you got to do with this exactly so and again this is a great tool but actually it could be a variation you come over the same shoulder rather than crossing the body play around with different ideas or going you're throwing under one leg and then can you throw over one shoulder and catch under one leg and you can start playing it's absolutely endless and you're asking people like how's your hip mobility how's your balance on one foot all the things here you can play with and yeah we're just using juggling but you know they're free to play so the things that we're looking at is doing some of the more taking the static stretching ideas and adding this as a tar so I don't know how much time we've got before we need to jump off but sitting on the floor and say place the ball out with one hand and then go get it with the other hand so sitting in a straight legged pike stretch but playing around with placing the ball or balancing two balls on top of each other so you've got your tasks to do and of course yes with range of motion but you're doing it because you've got a job to do not because you're here to get long hand strings you know it's like that's a key there's two key things there that you've touched on one is the creativity that be creative and like find different ways but do it as a problem solving thing so if you want to work on like there you went if you went under one leg and I was like but then you went because it might be if you're trying to create external rotation at the hip do that as part of that task to create space to get under there you can match the task to the range of motion that you're trying to create and the fact that it's task based is like a different input or different impulse that you're asking the brain to do rather than purely go into this end position we're playing around with stuff again dropping ball on the ground look at it then close your eyes and go and get it it's just this thing about well you can you remember positions in space but then if you throw it a little bit further away and then look at it you're going to have to take a step and reach which looks a lot like preparation for a handstand right so you're stepping and placing your hands towards the ground and you can control that movement with your eyes closed it makes sense to me that when you've got your eyes open you're thinking about a handstand well at least I've got the control I need going in you know just tackling the handstand I can build up some capacity in my longevity and it arranges emotion and control and all that sort of stuff so you just add some silly little task and it's easy with juggling because it's a thing but anything can work you know so yeah like I say the juggling just adds well juggling is a catching task but it's just it's a task you know as you said it could be you gave one example you could be writing your name behind your back or whatever it may be I think the thing about the ball brings in the hand-eye coordination which I think is beneficial and it's super accessible and super versatile because you can think of anything in terms of throwing that ball and you can do it really quickly really easily anyway and you and I we've played around with eye drills and stuff but if you know if you can just think about throwing and catching and you've got two objects and you can just you're doing eye drills straight away you know so you can take benefit of all these other things we know but now having to explain to people why am I doing an eye drill just because you're juggling you're going to be doing it and I know what I'm like I'm going to do the juggling I'm not going to do the eye drills on their own there's an eye drill on its own it's just it's just not exciting enough for me and that might be that's a flaw on my part because training your eyes is a good thing but if I can train my eyes whilst doing that well then that's something that I can buy into and wanted it because it comes down to adherence and being consistent with stuff the more times the more regular we do things the more benefit you're going to have of it and you need to we all need to find things that we like doing and we're going to be consistent at doing for it to have its benefit rather than going this one thing over here that's the right thing to do but if it's not something that you get excited about doing and you are going to do consistently it's not the right thing for you so we need to that's a conversation I'm pretty, I'm passionate about having and it's something that's come up with a few of the other conversations throughout the day about understanding ourselves, understanding what works for us and finding the right things that work for us and what I'm finding is going for that non-athletic population you know like even some elderly and we know one of the big things is can you get down and back up off the floor and actually can you do a triangle and catching you've got one hand taken out of the equation so you've only got one and actually can you keep doing it, can you get down to the floor without using your hands and getting back up and actually for most adults that becomes a challenge you know and then I've got people that can juggle three quite comfortably and they can try and figure out getting down to the floor and back up so we've got some of these life skills that are actually really important and you're just disguising it and like hey here's a challenge for you know and so yeah I spice up the boring stuff a little bit you know even though it's essential we'll just add some fun element and I think we can break through some of that TD and something. Well it feels we need to wrap things, we'll get cut off after only last 60 minutes but it makes me the thing that my mind jumps to is how simple how accessible and how easy those things look to do it's not intimidating to do some of those things and when we're thinking about longevity of our bodies and being able to use them and there you talk about being able to get up and down off the ground I was 38 this year that's not one of my necessary concerns right now but the idea of going like will I be able to do a human flag when I'm 80? Maybe not the idea of you've got to train this hard until you're 80 to manage to do something like that is that beneficial for you whereas all of this stuff we've just shown there if that's part of my routine or my warm up and just part of something that I do and you can totally imagine being able to throw and catch some balls behind your back when you're 80 that doesn't feel intimidating at all so in terms of the longevity question or conversation it's a massive benefit there's a lot of people saying a lot of good things about already feeling the benefits thank you for this live someone I think when they said big I was assuming it means that their ball was hitting their bum when they were trying to throw it behind their back don't worry I had that same problem as well but thank you so much Glen for taking the time out of your days to join us for today's live I know that I've every time I've had a session with you I've been inspired to incorporate more stuff back in but like anything sometimes stuff slips I've not done that much juggling for a while but there's a few of those ones particularly behind the back that shoulder extension there's going to be some stuff that I'm going to play with because I feel the benefit already great well there's no other ideas share them it's cool it's been a pleasure man, always great to talk to you thank you so much thanks mate