348: Austin Jochum on Creating Skill Acquisition Addicts in Athletic Development

Today’s guest is Austin Jochum. Austin is the owner of Jochum Strength where he works with athletes and washed-up movers to become the best versions of themselves. He also operates the Jochum Strength Insider which is an online training platform for people trying to feel, look, and move better. Austin has a diverse athletic background, from being an All-American lineman and MIAC indoor weight throw champion, to regularly pushing his movement capabilities to new levels in arenas such as rock climbing, dunking and slow-pitch softball leagues. An interesting thing about the “athletic performance” field is that traditionally, it doesn’t work on things that are highly “athletic”, as strength training protocols can be some of the more controlled elements in the entirety of an athlete’s training regime. This control and scalable nature is often reflected in the way that rudimentary plyometric, speed and agility protocols are carried out at scale, as per the same nature as a controlled and measurable strength regiment. Having a controlled strength stimulus for an advanced athlete who is already a master of their sport skill is a helpful tool for managing tissue strength and balance, but for developing athletes going into “sports performance” programs, the ability to improve one’s skill building ability in a meaningful, athletic, problem-solving and creative manner is often lacking. In today’s podcast, Austin goes into the breakdown of finding low-hanging fruits of athletic performance in athletes and the philosophy of creating “skill-building addicts”. We get into self-learning concepts, over-coaching, and then the nuts and bolts of his weekly flow of movement and game-speed building methods. We also finish with a lightning round that covers a variety of topics and ideas Austin is working on right now in the training space. Today’s episode is brought to you by Strength Coach Pro and Lost Empire Herbs For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 2:53 – The processes by which Austin shifted his typical, controlled warmup process, into a more dynamic training experience 7:32 – How Austin doing athletic things himself has had a strong impact on his coaching 11:13 – How Austin assesses an athlete from a global perspective, as soon as they walk in the door of his training facility, and how he challenges athletes who can’t handle losing, or haven’t won much in their sport experience 24:31 – The role of confidence gained from the gym, vs. having confidence in one’s sport abilities 31:48 – How Austin looks at how much time he would spend on gym strength vs. play based skills vs. perception work for athletes, based on need 41:15 – How athletes perceive difficult and challenging situations in their environment, and how to break athletes out of their typical athletic, problem-solving world-view 50:23 – Cues, coaching and creating a training environment that helps athletes to self-learn 1:02:03 – Austin’s weekly training setup, including games, speed and strength work 1:09:17 – Austin’s 5 greatest tools in developing movement and agility 1:13:34 – The training topic that interests Austin the most right now 1:17:14 – What “fast” means to Austin 1:18:06 – What Austin thinks about the term “arm care” 1:19:26 – The gnarliest isometric hold Austin is doing right now Austin Jochum Quotes “What makes them athletes is destroying movement challenges” “The worst athletes in the room could A-Skip, and the best athletes in the room could A-Skip” “If it looks pretty, it’s for you, it’s not for them” “I’ll put a guy who is easily triggered by losing, on a team that he knows he is going to lose. The goal is to level the athlete up and challenge them… the athlete who has only been exposed to winning” “I’ve never seen an athlete get more confidence in their pass-rush moves, who didn’t have a pass rush move, by lifting more weights” “I have yet to have a college football player come to me who doesn’t know how to produce force” “What most people need to do is what they are bad at, but nobody wants to do that” “I want to create addicts of skill acquisition, and you really need to create an environment around that” “A person that suffers from trauma, one of the worst things that happens to them is they don’t play any more, and when you don’t play you can’t imagine, and when you can’t imagine you can’t move forward at all” “Go ask a great athlete what they are imagining in their head” “I’m not going to take that (lifting) drug away from them” “If you have students that you’ve created to not ask questions, then that automates your life as coach. They aren’t asking questions and that’s super easy for you” “As soon as my coach started to pay more attention to me, he gave me more cues, and as soon as he gave me more cues, it made me a worse thrower” “I like a med ball if I want to slow down the velocity (of the game) to slow it down, I can use a smaller field, bigger ball” “If you want an athlete to jump higher, give them something high to jump over” “I go to thrift stores all of the time, and the weird sport section of the thrift stores, and I look for something cool I can grab. I grab the cool thing and I force myself to come up with a warmup off of that, and that is where the best warmups come from” “We had athlete jumping over hurdles for 30-40 minutes this morning… I put hurdle hops until disinterested” “The work that you get done during play is so under-rated” “Fast = can you solve the movement problem faster than the person next to you” Show Notes Gnarly spinal isometric hold https://www.instagram.com/p/CmfXukDNSDE/ About Austin Jochum Austin Jochum is the owner of Jochum Strength where he works with athletes and washed up movers to become the best versions of themselves. He also operates The Jochum Strength insider which is an online training platform for people trying to feel, look, and move better. Austin was a former D3 All-American football player and a hammer thrower (MIAC weight throw champion) at the University of St.Thomas,