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

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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 onl...