So if you were to teach me, I'll show you so. And I'm at aut Millennium Gym on Auckland's north shore with personal trainer Bailey Garnum. Bailey competed in Olympic weightlifting for years and he's teaching me to do something I've only ever seen weightlifters do on the telly. The clean and jerk.
People have different handricks.
Pretty yeah, what we would do is have a little bit of a gap starting between your shim and the bar.
Bailey has dyspraxia and dysgraphia, neurodevelopmental conditions which make a lot of basic life tasks really challenging.
So what that does is backed up, tight up.
But this is a young guy who thrives on a challenge and he loves lifting really really heavy weights.
If you're doing a snatch and Olympic weightlifting, you're thinking, right, I'm going to put one hundred killers, bove my head and jump under this bar as strong and as hard and as fast as possible. Why the heck would I want to do this? Like a heavy squat, you can feel the amount of weight on your back and you're like, if I don't do this properly, I may get crushed and you think, why am I doing this? And you go,
you know, the nerves kicking. Okay, this is why I'm doing it, just because get that feeling.
The adrenaline rush, the adrenaline rush.
I'm diving into the complex and fascinating world of neurodiversity. I'm not an expert, but my daughter is neurodivergent, and a few years ago I was diagnosed with ADHD. In this series, you'll hear from experts and from many wonderful people who experience the world in a unique way. We're looking at neurodiversity from the inside. Gelda. I'm Sonya Gray, and this is no such thing as normal. Series two. Dyspraxia also known as developmental coordination disorder, previously known as
clumsy child syndrome. My daughter in Nes was diagnosed with dyspraxia as a seven year old. She has challenges with coordination and things like tying shoelaces took her a really long time. But the effect is much broader. Like so many you're a divergent conditions, what we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. Dyspraxic people often struggle with sport and so they opt out of physical activity really early on. But Bailey Garnon wants to change that. He
reckons it's not that they can't do sport. In fact, it's the best thing for dyspraxia, he says, often they just need to be taught in a different way. So you've just taken me through a little bit of the beginning of learning how to do the lean and jerk. It's amazing how much balance plays into it. But for you as a dysprexic, balance can be tricky. So you kind of entered into a sport that you've already got
a disadvantage, I guess. So tell me about that and how hard it was to learn and why you persisted.
The environment of the gym we had was just like it was incredible. You just see these strong girls and guys just lifting these weights and the banging of the plates, and I just love the environment. And I think because Mike was doing it, here's the reason why I stuck it out.
Mike is mike' schofield who's now with High Performance New Zealand. He's the coach of Meddi Witshy, our fabulous shot putterer who won a silver medal at the Paris Olympics. Mike was in his early twenties when he started coaching Bailey, and when he found out about the dysprexia, might learn everything he could about the neurodevelopmental condition.
He went away and researched everything. What is it, what are the symptoms? How have people responded? So he went away and did that, and I was weak, like eleven years old. I was. I was absolutely weak, couldn't do a push up or anything. So my parents said to him, look, can you train Bailey in the gym? So he was my pt and we did two sessions a week.
In the beginning. Mike had his work cut out for him. The just braxia meant that really simple moves that most of us pick up straight away did not come naturally for Bailey, like a basic lunge.
So it took Mike, I think like three or four months to teach me how to do a lunge.
Three or four months.
Yeah, to learn how to do just do a standard body weight lunch. I don't know how he did it. When you think of a lunge, you know, you step out, do you ben your back leave, do you ben your front leg? What do you do you know. I had to break it down and to step. Okay, how far out do I step? Do I step?
This?
Word? It's my foot too close? Is it too far away? I think I used to step too far into my midline, so it causes send a mass to go all wonky. But took me a long time to learn how to do just a simple step out and lunge.
Three or four months is a long time to be able to successfully step forward and be in your front leg without falling over. There are so many movements like this in and out of a gym that are not automatic for many people with dyspraxia, but the extra work Bailey's had to put in over the years give them something that other personal trainers may not have.
It's an awareness that will make him a really great trainer for other people because he will be able to analyze their lunge and if they're struggling with it in some way, if they're losing their balance, then he might have more insight as to why that's happening for them. That's really taxing having to know that stuff.
Ellen Nathan is an occupational therapist who you might remember from episode eleven of this podcast. She works with many dyspraxic kids, and she says dyspraxia or DCD affects every area of someone's life. It's much more than just not being able to do a lunch. There are so many daily activities at home, at work, and at school that dyspraxic people have to consciously step through.
You know, it's really hard having to think everything through so cognitively. For some people, they just move their body to get to the place they want to get to, whereas there are people out there there's one in every class. You know, every classroom has at least one dyspraxic kid who picking up a pencil and writing their name is not automatic. So it's very hard to pick up your pencil and write your name while you're still trying to plan your story. So they already step behind their peers.
By the end of the day, they're exhausted because they've had to think through every step still at a cognitive level.
The exhaustion is real. I see it in my daughter every day, and it's backed up by research. Brain scans of dyspraxit kids have shown the neural mechanisms are firing twice as fast. These kids are putting in double the energy and focus just to walk, talk, pick up, open, close, throw, and so on. But what's behind these movement difficulties? My daughter is dyspraxic, and when people ask me what does that mean, I'm like, well, it still don't really understand it.
So I guess is it possible to sum up what dyspraxia is.
Dyspraxia is challenges with motor execution, so challenges with movement that you have conscious control over, and it requires conscious control, so it's not something that you're doing automatically. Yet people who have dyspraxia are often struggling with movement and therefore using more cognition around movement. Movement takes three stages to come up with an idea, to plan how you're going
to execute that idea, and then to execute it. And so dyspraxia or DCD, you can have a challenge in any of those three areas or all of those three areas.
And it's not just the planning and execution that's tricky. There's also the problem of sensing and knowing where your body is in relation to everyone and everything else. Allan says that's the job of one of our biggest sensory systems called proprioception. But if you're dyspraxic, the appropriate aceptive receptors aren't always going to give you the right feedback.
People with dyspraxia don't have as much of that information feeding back to them, so they don't necessarily know where their body is is in space and time. So when we don't know where our body is in space and time because the proper aceptor of receptors aren't telling us. That's why dyspraxic people bang into doors, why they drop cups, why they may go to catch a ball and not quite catch it properly, or go to throw it and
it drops before the person. They're not getting the same amount of feedback from their muscles that tell them how much effort or energy to put into the muscle to affect whatever it is that they're trying to affect.
Right, and so then developmental coordination disorder DCD, where does that for them?
DCD is the term that was given to a certain group of symptoms that's a very specific diagnosis. Some people use the two interchangeably, so dyspraxia and DCD mean the same thing. Also, depends what country you're in, so America and the un are very different, and in the larger community of clinicians working in this space, there's not even agreement with these things, which is why it's so confusing.
I see, Okay, Honestly, the more you learn, the more confusing it gets. What's important I think to know is that in al tiodor, the official diagnosis for this condition is DCD developmental coordination disorder. But if you say DCD, no one knows what you're talking about, which is why dyspraxia is commonly used. But most people will hear dyspraxia and think, oh, you mean dyslexia, and it's quite different. However, dyslexia and dyspraxia can co occur. You can see how
this is confusing, can't you. Co Occurring conditions are extremely high with dyspraxia, so chances are there will be something else going on.
I think when p people have multiple diagnoses, the other diagnosis might end up with more airtime because there's either more available, there's more funding, or people understand it better, and so sometimes you end up lumping your symptoms over to the other one that more people understand because it's tiring explaining it all the time.
Bailey Garnum, the twenty four year old Olympic weightlifter and personal trainer, doesn't get tired of talking about dyspraxia. In fact, he's passionate about it. He wants young dyspraxic and neurodivergent kids to know that they can succeed in sport. It's just finding the right sport, the right approach, and the right people. As a kid, Bailey's ultimate dream was to make it big as a cricketer. He loved cricket, but cricket didn't always love him back.
It always was, h I'm going to be a black cab. I'm going to be a black cab. And I would try and try and try give him my best. You know, Mom and Dad got me like a cricket coach. And when I want cricket coach, which I did all these things, and friends of mine who didn't take it as seriously would get into the better teams and I was like, I was, Mom and Dad, why am I? Why am I not in the team? And you know, there'd be a lot of anger, lash outs, And try my hardest
every practice and like, why can I do it? Why can I do it? And at the time before he knew dysphraxi and mom and dad were like, keep going, We'll just keep going, We'll keep going. And then when you got the diagnosis it made sense.
For many kids who have coordination difficulties, by the age of eleven or twelve, they've already decided I'm not good at sport, you know, because in those first few years it's all team ball games. They can't catch the ball and stuff. You know, they might get a better jibbing from school friends and they just go, you know what, I don't want to do this. I'm just not sport is not for me. And I feel like that might be a big reason that you are quite an advocate, is it.
I'd be the classic example of not liking team sports or feeling like horrible playing team sports. I did ever then, touch rugby, cricket, water, polo, football, and none of it stuck with me.
So were you always the kid that wasn't quite up?
I was always the kid that marked the team up, you know, Like I got the ball in touch rugby and I ran outside the touchline and thought I was getting to try and I just I never felt comfortable.
So let's say cricket. You played cricket. A lot of cricket is about coordination, like one of the things as a fellow cricket lover, whenever there's a high ball and a player under it, I freak out for them because it's like, I know they've done it a hundred times, but it still don't know what the wind's going to do. There's so much judgment in there. How were you under the high ball?
I think I caught one right, right?
But yeah, you persisted with all these team sports. Did you love sport?
I just loved I think I just loved sports. So when I found weightlifting and I only had to rely on me, my performance outcome was not down to a coach's or other people, and.
There wasn't the potential to let the team down.
No, it was just solely on me.
And it helped having a coach like Mike Schofield, who patiently helped him master the basic lunge and then moved him on to the serious stuff.
He started introducing me into deadlifting, and one day I was about twelve, we'd been doing it for a while, and I did lifted one hundred kilos and he's like, oh, this kid's quite strong. And he goes, do you want to come to at Millennium and I'm coaching people in the Olympic weightlifting.
Dyspraxia or DCD is more common than you might think. An estimated six to ten percent of the population have it. Most have no idea, they never identified, but Bailey was lucky.
It was during a parent teacher interview in like year eight, my art teacher said to my parents, she said, oh, I think your son's got a learning disorder. And they were like, what do you mean and she goes, well, the way your son's hand pattern is when he draws, there's something not correct and there's something not normal.
Yeah, to add to.
Other kids, I recommend you go again on the.
Test, okay. And had they noticed anything up to that point, No.
I think mum and dad had thought there may be something, but even in primary school, teachers to said, oh, he's just the late learner. I find he'll get there in the end.
So Bailey's parents took him for an assessment and he was diagnosed with dysplexia and dysgraphia.
And we're like, what the heck's of this? And then when we started learning about it, it kind of made a lot of it made sense as okay, so this is why this is me happening.
I want to ask you about classic I don't want to say symptoms, but maybe some of the things that dysprexics can struggle with. Tying shoe lasses.
Yes, yeap, huge one for me. It's fine motor skills anything like writing for example, and exams. I'd have to have read to writers, so I wouldn't know what to say, but getting it out on paper, it just wouldn't.
That connection wasn't there.
It would not work.
And this is where dysgraphia comes into the picture. Disgraphia is a specific learning difficulty with writing. It's a cousin of dyslexia, which is officially known now as a specific learning difficulty with reading. But back to dyspraxia. Fine motor skills are often weak in dyspraxics and that makes writing really difficult. So how does dysgraphia fit with dyspraxia? I ask Allan, the occupational therapist, to help me understand the dishes.
Dysgraphia is specifically around translating ideas as written word or as imagery. Can I draw a picture? If I want to draw a giraffe? Can I draw a giraffe? I may have an image in my head, but I cannot translate that onto paper. Dyspraxia is kind of all movement, so gross motor, fine motor, all the life tasks, so getting yourself dressed, doing up zips, brushing your teeth, brushing your hair, throwing a ball, riding a bike, managing stairs,
eating with an life and fork. That's all dysprasak that full. Can I affect the world the way that I want to through motor movement?
Allen says dysgraphia and dyspraxia are distinct diagnoses, but like Bailey, you can have both. And that presented many challenges for Bailey as a child.
So riding the bike was a big one. My granddad taught me how to ride a bike twice. I learned it, forgot it, then he retaught me how to learn it. My parents, when I was younger, they would travel for work in the school holidays, so I would spend a lot of time with my grandparents. They lived in Lake Talpo and there was this set of like monkey bars.
I remember. It took a few holidays and me going every day, and he would go every day with me until we could get it, till I could complete this kind of monkey bar circle.
Just having someone close to you that was patient, oh year. So he wasn't like, come on, Bailey, you're gonna get the baby. Other kid can do it.
No, no, and no at all. But if I didn't have the grandparents that I had, I don't know how or what things would be like.
Now, having the right people in your corner makes all the difference. Allan Nathan understands that well. She works with some very young children. Many of them are really struggling, so she's developed techniques to tease out what might be going on for them.
So one of the things that I do when I go and meet kids and I'm doing various assessments that might be for dispracts or it might not, I will do a task that for their age should be automatic, like catching a ball, and I'll chat to them about their day. What I'm testing is do they have automaticity in those two skills? Can they automatically talk while catching
a ball? Because if they stop talking when they catch the ball, that tells me that they've had to think about that there's no room to talk and think at the same time. It's one or the other. I remember turning up to a school where there was a child that was running away from school and really upset. My teachers were really lost, and it was his first six months at school. He was biting kids and I think
he'd broken another student's arm. That was pretty big. I got in there to do an assessment and I was just walking through the playground with him. Five year old boy. He just could not walk and talk. He'd take a few steps and he'd tell me something about his day and he'd stopped walking. Then when I would start to talk, he'd start walking again. And I was like, gosh, you're five and a half. You're at school. You can't yet walk and talk. These two things aren't automatic for you yet.
So when he comes in after lunch, he's so exhausted. His body is tired and his brain is tired. He wants to do the art activity, but he just can't. He's got no spoons left to do that, and he
can't organize his thoughts into clear ideas. He can't articulate those ideas in language, and then he's getting left behind, and you know, his peers are all doing full pages of work and he's just scribbling through his book because he can't hold a pen He can't hold a pencil, he can't translate his ideas yet, oh my goodness, And no one would see that. They're just saying behavior that's putting other students at risk, which is putting other students at risk. But he needed help.
I know, if you hadn't come in, how many other people are going to pick up on that?
Really?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, it's really complex.
Dyspraxia is really complex because there is so much to contend with every day, and because it can affect so many things, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, perception, attention, and speech. Many of the client's Bailey trains are dyspraxic, and he sees the full spectrum.
I trained one boy at the moment who's had a very bad speech impermit, so he knows what he wants to say, but then everything just gets jumbled up, which.
Must be so frustrating for him because it's all in there. It just can't get it out.
It's just getting it out. So it's a huge spectrum. That's why I think it's so unknown. It is because if you say, looked at me on face value, you'd go, well, when he doesn't have just fraxi up.
It's well hidden, and the well hidden aspect makes it even more difficult to explain to people that you are trying. You have listened to instructions, you want to do it, you just can't. Was there ever a point that you got frustrated and was like, I just can't do it. I don't want to do it.
Yeah, lots of times. Yeah, through everything. Through cricket. You know, if I got out, I'd throw my bat a curse. I'd just pack a huge tantrum and be the same in the gym. You know, just that level of frustration builds up and you're.
Just like, I guess not something we talk about enough because for you, in your mind, you can see it. Like, let's take cricket for example, you're batting. You can imagine where you need to place your bat and you know, placement of all that stuff, but your body is not playing ball excuse the pun, and so the frustration with it. It's like, guys, I am really good. It's just that my body is not caught up with what my brain
wants to do. Occupational therapist Ellen Nathan says one aspect of dyspraxia that isn't discussed enough is the cognitive component. Things like time management and sequencing can be really, really hard.
Whether it's morning or night, whether it's the weekend, tomorrow or yesterday.
You're lost.
You just lost in space and time with other people saying hurry up, it's a school day, and you're like, but what school day like? Am I at the start of the week? Am I at the end of my week?
I get it.
It must be very discombobulating, very discombobulating, but people often don't recognize that.
I've interviewed Ellen a few times now. She's a practitioner who really knows her stuff. But what I didn't realize until this interview is that her expertise comes partly from personal experience.
I have dyspraxia, and my child has dyspraxia. It makes everything that much harder.
That's crazy that you are dyspraxit That will allow me to ask you what it feels like. What's the experience of being dyspraxic.
A dyspraxia is all gross motor and a little bit of fine motor with handwriting. I remember doing a whole class writing backwards purposefully, and then I I came up
with my own font, which was curly. I knew i'd fall off the line or my lenness would be big and small, so I just created this really creative curly font in all different ways, like draw a circle and write my name inside the circle, because I can't write my name in a straight line, so I would end up writing it inside rainbows and on a unicorn's horn instead. So it's kind of like I knew what I couldn't do, so then I had to become creative to make what I can do look good.
And that creativity piece is strong for dyspraxics, it has to be. They are constantly developing workarounds just to get through life. Daniel Radcliffe, famous of course for Harry Potter, has dyspraxia and he wears the badge proudly. He acknowledges the struggles and he still can't ride a bike. But the positive side, he says, is that always having to find solutions has honed his imaginative skills. Of course, real world it's the practical skills or lack of that are what people notice.
One of the things that I think makes dispraxia quite hard for teachers and for parents is that you can have a skill one day and it's gone the next. You can have it in one setting and it's not in the next setting. It often doesn't generalize or translate, and that's one of the challenges. So it's like learning
the task all over again. Playing basketball outside with the hoop your dad's put up on your garage is going to be super different to the hoop in the gym, So those skills will not translate as well as they would for a non respectit person, And they're getting feedback from the adults in the room saying things like, you can do this, you can do better, this is not good enough. You know this, No I don't.
It's easy to get frustrated when kids are inconsistent in their abilities, but it's not a choice. It's part of the dyspraxic profile, and Bailey Garnum wants people to understand that with the right support, the unique talents of these kids can shine.
When you get a distractic kitddle someone with a learning condition, when you get them into something they're passionate about because they've had to persevere through so many things. They will push the boundaries more than maybe a child who doesn't have a learning condition, because that child doesn't know what it's like to have to push so hard to just
be good at something. And then when you find something that you're good at for a distractic kid or anyone with a learning disorder, you go, oh, I'm actual, you're already good at this. Or I may have a bit of natural ability with this. You pair that with a learnt drive and learn persistence. Yeah, they're away, they're flying.
Bailees is. Much of his success and confidence is thanks to his original Olympic weightlifting coach, mike'schofield. I asked him what it was about Mike's approach that he valued most, being.
Able to be flexible and change things and say things in a different way. But you know, we went to Mike and when I got diagnosed, and we said, look here's what it's happened, and he goes, oh, it makes so much sense. The age I'm at now is the age of Mike, Cause when he met me and I just go like, whoa you know, respect, Yeah, huge respect.
You've had really key people and your life. Haven't you your granddad Mike yeap and does that kind of make you go? I want to be there for kids.
You need someone to believe in you or who can articulate what you see in your head. I try to be not one dimensional how I approach everything, and that's.
The key to life. You've got life right there, I think. I just I want to say, it is so powerful what you're doing because you are like, hey, I've got dyspraxia and I'm doing it. Just when I was a kid dyspraxia, no one need ever heard of it. They were just the unco kids, the kids that wouldn't get picked in Pe, would be picked last for the team, the kids that would get a bit of shit for dropping the ball or whatever. Or they're on co and co was the word. I don't know, that's still the
word now. And now I'm like, oh my god, these kids with the right person, Yeah, it might take them a little bit longer to get it, but once they get it, they can do it as well as, if not better than, someone without dyspraxia.
Yeah.
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