405: Austin Jochum on Foundations of Athlete Centered Performance Training

Today's podcast features Austin Jochum. Austin is the owner of Jochum Strength and is a strong proponent of athlete centered, play based, robust physical training. Austin was a former D3 All-American football player and a hammer thrower (MIAC weight throw champion) at the University of St.Thomas. Austin has been a multi-time guest on the podcast, and every conversation with him has been both enjoyable and enlightening. Much of sport coaching and training today takes place in a “fractured” version of ultimate training and performance. The balance point of training is shifted heavily towards “perfect technique”, drill work, and high output, low variability practices that reduce the movement solution potential of the athlete. This mentality feeds into sports performance, where singular physical markers (especially maximal strength) tend to be accelerated as fast as possible, rather than tending the patient, purposeful growth of the entire athletic library of skills and physical abilities. On today’s episode, Austin gives his take on the foundations of athlete-centered development model that prioritizes joy, the learning process, and long-term development. We discuss the role of play and exploration in achieving both one’s ultimate athletic performance, as well as enjoyment of the process. Austin goes into his take on games as a pre-cursor to prescriptive training measures, highlights the importance of confidence and emotional aspects of training, and much more. Today’s episode is brought to you by TeamBuildr and the Plyomat. TeamBuildr is an online software for coaches and trainers. Use the code “JUSTFLY” for a free 30 day trial of the TeamBuildr software at https://teambuildr.com. The Plyomat is a functional, intuitive, and affordable contact mat for jump and plyometric training and testing. Check out the Plyomat at www.plyomat.net Sign up for Austin and Joel’s live 1-day seminar in Cincinnati, Ohio on June 8th, 2024 View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Main Points 1:30- Rock Climbing Lessons and Athletic Performance Enhancement 7:27- Enhanced Performance Through Enjoyable Movement Practices 13:59- Athlete-Centered Coaching for Optimal Performance and Success 17:03- Athlete-Centered Coaching for Enhanced Performance 22:00- Joyful Training for Enhanced Athletic Performance 24:24- Athletic Success through Mental Fortitude and Confidence 40:35- Play-Based Warm-Up for Athlete Development 43:13- Optimizing Skill Development Through Varied Environments 48:33- Psychological Influence of Coaches in Sports 54:10- Balancing Creativity and Structure in Athlete Development 1:00:35- Empowering Athletes Through Training Autonomy 1:04:14- "Peak Performance through Passionate Pursuit" Austin Jochum Quotes " So how can you make things harder to get a stimulus to the body at a very, very low cost? And that is the complexity model that you were talking about. It's like hop on the (rock climbing) wall instead of just doing more pull ups with more weight. You're going to have to continually add so much more stress (in pull ups) to get the same level of stimulus that you could just do climbing a wall because there is so much going on there.." - Austin Jochum "We're just prescribing strength, we're just prescribing hypertrophy, whatever it is. We're just throwing that out there. Use the play to drive the prescription. What do they need? What are we finding out when they are playing? What do we see? Then you go prescribed”.- Austin Jochum "So, in fourth grade, we had an under the lights football game, and me and my buddy Luke, we scored a touchdown in that game, and it was the only touchdown scored in that game, and we were the only two to end up playing college football. And at that time, and never once were we the most athletic. Never once were we the highest. But in fourth grade, we scored a touchdown. He passed it to me. I caught the ball. We scored in fourth grade. It was terrible football, whatever, but we scored, and we talked about it from fourth grade until we graduated, about that moment of scoring that touchdown and having that belief." "I'm going to take them back out to the general aspect to again try to get more data points. And that that's really where I find the value in the variety approach with these games is what data points am I getting from that? Because if I just throw them in the same things over and over again, and that's what a lot of football practices I find out the same things over and over again and we're just going to continue to brash our head against the wall." "One of the easiest ways to think about this is hardcore, okay? You jump over a low hurdle, you have 400 different options to jump over a low hurdle. As that hurdle goes up, you start to have one option to jump over that hurdle and you're just going to have like, you don't have a choice anymore." - Austin Jochum" “And as we get to practice, and this is what a lot of football coaches do, they drive up pressure, they drive up output to where the only option that athlete has is to throw the perfect ball in the perfect slot over and over again. Rather than putting them in environments where variability can be high because pressure is low” "The more you understand each node in the whole system, and the more each node can kind of fit with some of those principles in nature. The better the total result can be." - Joel Smith "I think we could also mix prescriptive with exploratory, and there's so many implications with that that I think is, again, there's infinite possibilities and we're all different parts and nodes of what the athlete is going to be experiencing in their sport journey." - Joel Smith Show Notes Frank Forencich movement class https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2bcq3769ps&t=390s 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,