Piano Video Lesson: 5 Things Piano & Ping-Pong Have in Common

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, Robert Estrin here with such a fun subject. Can you guess five things that piano and ping pong have in common? I thought of this subject and the last one is the original one I thought of, so stay to the end so you can check that one out. But you know there are so many things that they have in common and one of the things, and this isn't one of the five, but one of the things is that there are two things that I particularly love that I've been doing almost my whole life. I remember getting a ping pong table when I was a kid, as a matter of fact there's a crazy story about that. It was holiday time and I went with my good friend Marty and we went up to Sears which is maybe over a mile away and I thought I would surprise my family with a ping pong table and we bought it and then we're trying to carry this thing home, a ping pong table, and it was like a mile and a half away. Well I did have to call my dad and so it wasn't as much of a surprise. So we grew up with a ping pong table and of course we had lots of pianos in the house so there are two things that have been very close to me and up to this day I still play ping pong on a very regular basis and of course piano is my life. So let's come up with the five things that these two activities have in common. Well one of them is pretty obvious. They both involve motor skills in a very, very deep way, slightly differently from one another. Of course piano you've got the finger coordination, the arms and you have to coordinate with the sounds and the visual of the keys as well as the sheet music. There's so many aspects of motor skills in piano. Ping pong though also the trajectory of the ball you've got to judge and the footwork being exactly the right place to get the ball. So there's obviously a tremendous amount of motor skills to both these activities. What else is there? Well believe it or not they both involve aerobic exercise. Now you might be thinking well obviously ping pong has aerobic exercise and as a matter of fact if you've ever watched professional ping pong matches and they're ten feet from the table and they're running around it's unreal and you know it's mildly aerobic even if you're playing casually but the great thing about it is it's not so exhausting that you can't play for hours either unless you're you know out of shape and that's what's great about ping pong. Now what about piano? Is piano aerobic? Well there are some things on piano that certainly are aerobic when you're jumping around like for example the coda of the Chopin G minor ballade.

You're going all over the place and whenever you have leaps like that you know it's mildly aerobic but you know it's definitely more exercise in sitting and reading a book or something of that nature. You're getting a bit of a little bit of a raise in your metabolism so they both provide some level of aerobic exercise. What else? Now here's a really important one is that they both keep your brain sharp. You know there was a study that was talked about in an article in New York Times Magazine years ago and it was an article about the brain, an in -depth article about the human brain and in that article they cited the piano playing as being the single most complex activity of the human brain. Think about all the things involved in piano playing. I mentioned earlier the coordination of your fingers but the sound, the sights and you know the short -term memory, long -term memory. You've got so many aspects in being able to take what you hear and what you feel and so it's an incredibly complex human activity for the brain. But ping pong also you have to make split second calculations moment to moment. There's strategy involved trying to get the player off their kilter by where you place the ball.

There's all aspects of spinning the ball to try to throw them off and you know hitting corners so you have the greatest distance trajectories, the arc of the ball, there's where you're standing. These are all great activities for the brain. As a matter of fact it can help to prevent cognitive decline because you're exercising your brain which is terrific. So that's another thing. Now here's another big one for you, stress relief. Think about this. Obviously playing the piano you get done with your busy day at work or whatever you're doing and you can just let your mind completely erase everything and just focus in on the beauty of music and your brain is occupied 100 % with something other than survival and all the things involved in relationships and work and chores and you can just focus in on beautiful music. Well it's much the same thing with ping pong. When you're playing ping pong you let go of everything and you get into a state of flow and you're just enjoying the game and you let go of all the other worries in the world and just focus in and these are ways that you can definitely discharge from the worries and relieve stress in your life.

Finally the last one was something that occurred to me which is the reason was the impetus for doing this video which is both piano and ping pong are immensely popular in China. You know in China there are something like some estimates 50 million piano students. In fact like a hundred years ago in this country when there are hundreds of piano companies there are hundreds of piano manufacturers in China that you don't even know about because they service the domestic market only a handful of companies export because there's such a huge market there. On our trip to China we saw all kinds of piano brands with some of the the oddest names you could ever imagine. Companies that you know probably wouldn't be able to export their products because they're not up to international standards but price point pianos for the massive number of people who play piano in China.

Well ping pong is of course very very popular it's even supported by the government and you know international competitions and Olympics and it's popular with people about one in four Chinese play ping pong and it's readily available just about everywhere. So these are two things that I love that happen to be popular in China and I do everything to keep piano popular here in the United States and around the world with my videos my concerts and my pianos. So any other ideas that you have leave them in the notes here at livingpianos .com and on YouTube. Thanks again for joining me Robert Estrin here at livingpianos.com your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/5-things-piano-ping-pong-have-in-common/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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