[00:00:05.220] - Tony Roig
Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. My name is Tony Roig, your host of this weekly podcast. This week's podcast, I want to talk about a concept of personal philosophy, and we're going to talk about two different companies or two competing companies and how they approach sport. And then I'll give you some thoughts on which one I think is the long-term engagement with sport and the one that I try to follow. And then you can make decisions as to which one you want to follow for yourself. Before we dive into the podcast, a quick note about the book. The book is ready for pre-orders. So there's a pre-order down in the show notes. There'll be a link where you can pre-order your book. This is a digital version of the book. So it's a PDF that you can read on your computer, you can read on your iPad, if you If you want to print it, you can print it. But that's what the pre-order will be for. And if you pre-order the book, there's a discount available with it. That's the book model system that we're following.

[00:01:11.080] - Tony Roig
So take advantage of that. And then the book itself I anticipate it to be ready. If not at the end of this month, it'll be ready by the first week of October. So you'll be able to get a copy of that. The feedback so far has been very good by the early reviewers and our friend, Coach Peter Scales, the author of the Compete, Learn, Honor philosophy. What's interesting to me is that it's resonated differently with different players, and that's awesome, right? Everybody's finding an angle that it means the most to them from a perspective standpoint, because that's what this book is about. And the book is aptly titled, Pickleball Therapy: The Book. So I think you'll enjoy it. And if you want to get a copy of it soon, go ahead and pre-order it so you can get a copy before anybody else does. All All right, let's dive into the concept here. And the title of this is Sound Mind in a Sound Body. That's a philosophy that the shoe company called ASIX uses. In fact, That's their name. Their name ASIX stands for Anima sana in corpore sano, which is Latin for sound mind in a sound body.

[00:02:25.100] - Tony Roig
Super cool idea, right? I think we all would want that. A sound mind in a sound body sounds Fantastic. And so that's the ASIX name and the ASICs philosophy of how they do things. And then we're going to contrast ASICs with another company, Nike. You've probably heard of them. What's curious is that Nike actually has originating roots with ASICs. So if you want to learn about that, you can Google that. But it's an interesting story between how those two companies came about. What I want to focus on here, though, is the philosophy that undergirds Asics, and then the way in which Asics carries itself in the public, and the way Nike carries itself with its public in terms of how they try and connect with their core mission, which is providing shoes to athletes and others all around the world. So ASICs was founded after World War II by a gentleman named Kiha Chido Onitsuka, and he had come back from War II. It was a very traumatic time, obviously, for everybody, including his country of Japan. And he wanted to give something back to his people. He wanted to help them out with healing through sports and movement.

[00:03:36.220] - Tony Roig
He was a believer in sports and moving as a way of healing, which I think anybody listening to this podcast can understand and would agree with. And he would contribute to that process by striving to make really good shoes. Eventually, Phil Knight learns about the Onitsuka Tiger, that's the name of the shoe, basically becomes a distributor for them in the United States, then later on, finds his own company, which is Nike. Now, Nike's name is totally different than Asics. Remember Asics is sound mind in a sound body. Nike's name literally translates to... It's the Goddess of victory. It's the Greek Goddess of victory. And so that's their imprimatur, not imprimatur, that's their name. That's their whole thing. And if you look at the marketing of each of them, their marketing is very different. So Nike's marketing are things like, obviously, just do it. I don't know if there's another slogan that's more recognizing that one, but just do it. That's in your face, very aggressive, very goals-oriented. They have lines like this one, My dream is to end theirs. Wow, that's in your face. Let's go. Let's party. We're going to dominate stuff. And that's pretty consistent along Nike's marketing.

[00:05:01.240] - Tony Roig
Nike has figured out that that marketing works, and it obviously does. It's been very successful. And so they come at it from a very results-oriented domination type of messaging. Asics marketing, if you look at some of their stuff, it's lines like this: feel comfort, find calm, or comfortable, colorful, capable. Nothing about winning, nothing about dominating. It's all about that type of feeling. Their photos that Asics uses are runners who you don't know smiling and just enjoying the moment. Nike uses champions, LeBron, Serena, folks like that, the best in their respective sports, looking fierce, looking like they're dominating the field and things like that. And so what that leads me to think about is, what does that do to our psyche as athletes in terms of how we evaluate ourselves and our engagement with our sport in this case, pickable? The one thing that concerns me about this is this idea of using the metric of just doing it, right? Because just doing it is basically an idea of winning, really. I mean, you could get philosophical if you wanted to, I guess, and say, well, you could just do it by just doing it and enjoying what you're doing.

[00:06:40.620] - Tony Roig
I get that, right? That's certainly not how it's presented, not the font they use, the images they use. The folks who are entitled to say just do it all look very in your face about doing it. It's a whole vibe of just do it, which has a very again, dominating aspect to it. And so when I see Just do it, what I read is basically just win, just crush, just dominate, just own the field. And the problem is Living in a world where we're basically always having to do it, right? I'm guessing they are opponents and everybody else wants to do it, too. So one of is doing it, one of us is not doing it, I guess. It creates this very potentially negative scenario where we feel let down because we didn't just do it, right? I mean, I wrote a little bit about it earlier, and I'm thinking about it like this, saying just do it is like downing a gallon of coffee, right? It's just pure caffeine. There's nothing around it. It's just pure, let's go, do this energy, which can let you down because you're striving to do it, whatever it is, and it's vague, which I think is Nike's genius in using that terminology.

[00:08:19.280] - Tony Roig
You can fit it in whatever you want. But when you've factored all together with what you're seeing, plus all the societal conditioning, where winning good, losing bad, you end up in this really potentially dark place where either your only satisfaction is if you win, and if you don't win, which most players won't win a lot of the time. And if you listen to this podcast, you know that your win-loss ratio at level should be about 50-50. So you're setting yourself up to, I guess, not do it 50 % of the time, and then just do it 50 % of the time. It's just a weird way of engaging with a sport that you love. And when you compare those to do other phrases, it just doesn't compare. Another thing about just do it is that it creates undue pressure on you to always be on. This idea of just do it, just get it done. What happens when you're not feeling 100% or when you're thinking of other things, you have other parts of your life? Or let's say you don't feel like working out a certain day. Are you supposed to just do it that day?

[00:09:27.720] - Tony Roig
Excuse me. It never fails that. The minute I start speaking, I feel like the tingles of the sneeze. So either you don't feel like working out that day, are you a failure because you didn't work out? You didn't perform 100% that day. Are you a failure because you didn't perform? One more time. We're going to keep those in because that's part of this podcast, right? I'm trying to just do it, but I got to sneeze. I got to sneeze. That's just part of life. But I'm not going to feel like I'm less than a podcast host, right? Because I just sneezzed a couple of times. And trust me, I didn't do it. It's not a prop. It just happened. But it's just part of life, right? Life has sneezes in the middle of it. And so the idea that I didn't do it because I had this little glitch in the middle. It doesn't make any sense, and it puts too much pressure. I mean, it doesn't make sense to do that. Now, let's go back to the ones I mentioned from ASICs earlier. Feeling comfort, finding calm in sport, right? Isn't that really cool?

[00:10:32.340] - Tony Roig
It sounds like a way more constructive way of interacting with everything around us than a just do it idea. I'm not chasing anything. I just want to find some calmness, some comfort. I want to feel good about myself, engaging in an activity that I love doing. And here's the thing, sound bites, they're very catchy. And just do it, best sound bite, right? Really good. But just ask yourself, right, if that's what you really want, or is it just that quick dopamine hit of like, let's go, come on, stuff like that? Or is that really what you want for yourself? Is that really what you want when you reflect on your path? And the other thing that I wanted to point out about this just do it slogan is that it's really not genuine. It's not genuine from Nike, because here's the reality for Nike. Nike is a very successful shoe company, obviously, the number one shoe company in the world. They didn't get there just doing it. That's not a thing. You can't just do it. What did they do? They researched, developed, designed, tested, manufactured, shipped, negotiated contracts, everything you can think of. That a company the size of Nike, that has grown to the size of Nike, has to do to be successful.

[00:11:50.920] - Tony Roig
They didn't just put a slogan on top of the door that said, Just do it, and then, grow to be the biggest shoe company in the world. So what What Nike has done is Nike has embraced the process, not the result. That's how they've been successful. So if you want to be successful as a pickleball player, It's not about the result. It's not about doing the it at the end. It's about doing the steps, and doing them in a way that makes sense for you. But more than that, it's about enjoying the moments in the middle. And the way that I think about it is like this, right? Going back to the thing about the sound bites, and Nike knows this. Nike's marketing is very good at this. They know that you're going to have a more visceral reaction to the statement, My dream is to end theirs, and looking tough, right? My dream is to end theirs. Very visceral, very get you in the gut. It's going to be way more more exciting for you than something like this. Success is driven by paying attention to the small steps along the way. And even if you do not, open quote, succeed, close quote, for who's the judge of that for you other than you?

[00:13:15.000] - Tony Roig
Make sure to enjoy the journey because the journey is where it's at. Now, that last couple of sentences make a lot more sense to me. As a rational adult thinking about myself and my well-being. It doesn't fit on a poster. And the good news is, you're not limited by the number of characters that reasonably fit on a poster. You get to pick what's right for you. You get to pick the way that you engage with pickleball and engage with life. As you probably have a guess by now, I'm a fan of pursuing the sound mind in a sound body idea, and I hope you will as well. I'm going to come back in a second for the RIF and tell you a little bit more about my shoes and the shoes that I wear in my shoe history. But first, I got to take care of the sneezzing. All right, I think we've handled the sneezzing. So let me give you a brief little history on shoes. I actually used to wear Asics When I played tennis, that was my shoe of choice, particularly for hard courts. And I had no idea that it was...

[00:14:22.240] - Tony Roig
Sound mind in a sound body was the name of the shoe I wore. But I just thought it was a really well-made shoe, and it is a very well-made shoe. Now for Pickleball, I use a shoe named Tyrol, T-Y-R-O-L. I'll put a link in the show notes. You can also go to betterpickleball.com and get a link to their site. And I like the story of Tyrol because I think the story of Tyrol is very similar to the story of ASIX, which is a story of the founder of Tyrol, Kevin, who saw a need in pickleball back in the day. We're talking about years and years ago before everybody else jumped on the pickleball bandwagon. His wife had started playing pickleball. She couldn't find a shoe that was working well for her in pickleball. He came from shoes. He had a long career in shoes and was retired. And he looked at the sport, looked at the way she played and the way she moved. And then he said about designing a shoe specifically for this sport. So this is not... I could wear A6 and play pickleball. No doubt about that. And they would probably be fine.

[00:15:27.440] - Tony Roig
But would they be the best shoe for pickleball? I don't know the answer to that question. I'm not a shoe scientist, but I can tell you that Tyroll is not a shoe that was designed for another sport that they then embroidered pickleball onto. Tyroll is a shoe that was designed specifically for the movements in pickleball, the type of kinetic movement that we have in pickleball. It helps protect the Achilles heel. There's other details like that. But the shoe itself was specifically designed for this sport. And having known Kevin for a number of years, we've been He's been using his shoes for a number of years and recommending his shoes for a number of years, because if I use it, I'll recommend it. I can tell you that it's a company that is founded along the lines of the ASICs mentality, which is, it's a husband creating a shoe for the woman he loves to help her enjoy the sport that she has started playing and loves playing in a way that protects her body and allows her many years of enjoying the sport. So if you'd like to check out the shoe that I wear, that CJ wears, and that several others on the team wear, again, you go down to the show notes and check it out, or go to our website and use the link.

[00:16:45.880] - Tony Roig
You'll get, I believe there's a discount. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure, but no matter what, it is a code that lets them know that you came from us, and that helps them know that we're sharing the love that we have for Tyrell with you. So that's this week's podcast. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope you're in the middle of our fall clinic. If you're not, I don't know if it's still open for registration. That's outside of my pay grade. But you can go to betterpickleball.com and certainly find out. I know this weekend, tonight, this drops on Friday. So tonight, on this Saturday, Sunday, I'll be at the live trainings. Hopefully, I'll see some of you there. We'll be answering questions and giving you additional information about pickleball, as well as the system enrollment that's open, or will be open this weekend at some point. So I hope to see you there. If I don't see you there, I will see you in the next episode of pickleball therapy. If you have a second to rate and review the podcast, that would be much appreciated. And as always, consider sharing with your friends, particularly one of those friends of yours that is a Just Do It.

[00:17:48.200] - Tony Roig
Maybe they'll think about it a little bit differently after this podcast. Be well, and I'll see you at the next episode. Bye.