I’ve always wondered how people can be so sure of their answers.
How there is no doubt in their minds that they have the solution.
Was it just confidence and ego?
Or did they actually have something completely mapped out, in every little way?
Listening to some teachers, textbooks, and “experts” talk about our field you’d think we’d have all the answers.
The “Facts” that are pushed about the body, the way we should train it and the answers we are given would make you believe that there were no more questions.
Yet every year we see athletes get hurt.
Every year we see the best survive and the others get broken by the system.
So we can continue to accept these facts, accept everything the “textbook gods” write for us and beat each other off over the next great set and rep scheme or we can decide to take a deeper, and outside look at things.
At what is actually happening.
At what we actually understand and better yet what we don’t.
Maybe it’s time to accept our body is way more connected and complex than we can even begin to understand?
Maybe it’s time to accept that our athletes know a little more about what they are feeling, going through and processing than we do?
Maybe it’s time to stop teaching “birds how to fly.”
Maybe it’s time to give the athletes a ball and let them play.
There are many times in my life where I wish I went into this field with a blank slate, no formal education, no textbooks, no degree, no CSCS. THINGS THAT MUDDY THE WATERS. Things that to me make us focus on the small and minute and miss the glaring, obvious things we witness daily. Watch your athletes, do they operate like the textbook says? Do they move one muscle at a time, completely separated? Does the +600 muscle breakdown of the body even matter or is it all just a front to make us feel like we know more than we do?
What if we looked at the body in the way we see it in real life, without the muddied waters of textbooks and expert knowledge? One muscle, one organism, completely connected and controlled by the conscious and unconscious actions of the brain, all governed by the soul and spirit that’s in you?
I don’t want us to burn down the entire foundation, I just want us to realize there’s more, that there are no experts 😉 that we need to KEEP DIGGING.
“What you know could be your enemy and what you have yet to learn could be your best friend.”
The Race to Drink The Poison
Why do I think we need to keep digging you ask? Why do I think we are totally missing the bigger picture of what’s happening in our field? It’s because we all race to drink the poison. Case in point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrVxqBCEniI&feature=youtu.be
Per Rugby Strength Coach this was:
- A top longest run by a QB in the last 25 years
- Fastest speed hit by a QB in the last 3 years
Yet as soon as it happened (and I remember watching it live and knowing this was going to happen!) The entire world of sports performance “experts” jumped onto their social media platforms to sell their poison.
“He needs to work on his mechanics”
“His hip flexors were too tight and that’s why he fell”
And my favorite
“His conditioning was bad that’s why he gassed out”
JESUS CHRIST! MY EYEBALLS ARE BURNING!
HOW FAR UP OUR OWN ASSES ARE WE?
The guy breaks a once in a career run out and you think we should waste more time out of our day working on something that most likely wasn’t the issue in the first place?
Come on!
Stop selling poison….
And better yet… Stop lining up to race and drink said poison.
“Fight me”
And just like that, the 24-year-old wanna-be philosopher stuck in a meatheads body is back…So LET’S DIVE IN.
The Zombie Apocalypse
So how do we start? I think it starts with opening up what controls us all, the mind and the spirit. How little this is talked about blows my mind, maybe it’s because it’s woo-wooey or because it’s for the hippies and big strong coaches shouldn’t talk about these things, but to me, it’s absolutely where we need to start.
Think of your athlete’s day…
Wake up, go to class, be told to follow instruction a to point b, be told to follow the rules, be told to be quiet, be told to fit in, be told….. Go to practice, be told where to line up, be told what drill to run, be told what play to call, be told….Go to lifting session be told to follow instructions, be told to have perfect form, be told to listen, be told…..
When do they get to speak?
When do they get to create?
When do they get to be themselves?
When do they get to express what their soul wants to say?
This is what I call the start of the zombie apocalypse….the lifeless and passionless approach to training and life… Glued to their phones for an escape, for control, for the ability to express…
But what if we could give this to them for at least one hour a day? What if as coaches we could have a say in how they express who they are? What if we allowed them to create?
This is my goal with my “warm-ups”
Put 10 minutes of the clock: Give them an opportunity to express what they want to express with their bodies.
Maybe it’s playing catch. Maybe it’s a flow series. Maybe it’s some parkour.
Maybe it wakes them up. Maybe we get them into way more positions than a normal warmup would. Maybe we connect the mind, body and spirit for a bit. Maybe it gets them to say, “This is my favorite part of my day.” Maybe it lasts the entire session some days. Maybe there’s something to it.
Jump the box as many different ways as you can. Add a ball to it. Add a net and a ball to it. Play a game of PIG with it. Watch the inner athletes come out.
The Ground Is LAVA! Touch it and perish. Watch the shoulders, hands, core and hips be exposed to more positions in ten minutes than they have most of their lives. Watch them thank you for it.
Stay in a squat, or maybe a bear crawl or maybe a crab or maybe you ask the athlete what they want to do. Use your hands, or paddles. I promise you I get my athletes to hold a bodyweight squat longer this way…if that were even the point.
“One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish,
Black fish, Blue fish, Old fish, New fish.
Some are fast. Some are slow.
Some are high. Some are low.
Not one of them is like another.
Don’t ask us why, go ask your mother.”
Let them explore how to play the game, your job is to bring the equipment and shut up.
Don’t Buy Calloused Feet
“If you got hurt, you died.” As you have probably seen from the first article, I’m a huge fan of the anti-fragile approach to training and life. And when I sat down with Austin Einhorn the other day for a podcast and he brought this point up, my entire soul lit up!
IF YOU GOT HURT YOU DIED!
IF YOU COULDN’T MOVE YOU DIED.
LIFE OR DEATH.
Imagine if we approached training this way. Coach Einhorn calls it the “evolutionary approach” to training (and don’t put anything I’m about to talk about on him, this is my interpretation of what that means to me)
Can we move our own bodies? Are we stable and “strong” where we need to be?
What are our hands like? Are we able to hang? Swing? Climb? How do they interact with our shoulders? Are we able to crawl without pain in either? What about a cartwheel or handstand? What about our spine? Is it able to move and bend in any direction? Are we able to roll? Are we able to segment when and where we want to segment? What about our feet and ankles? Can we walk, run and jump barefoot? Can we stand on them for long periods of time? When we crawl do our toes bend and grab the way we want them to and without pain? If not why? What is that telling us?
Can we control and move our own bodies the way we want to? This doesn’t have to take the entire session and we don’t have to turn into a gymnastics class….but if it’s what is holding your athlete back why aren’t we?
I’ll spend a MINIMUM of 10 minutes per session on these aspects….
If you wanna see it expressed…express it.
Will this exercise or any others make or break you? No. Will the thought process that went into implementing an exercise like this? Maybe.
Not A Movement Yogi
Now I get it, the first half of this article, and a lot of what we have talked about, makes me seem like a movement yogi, something I’m against as much as I am being a barbell meathead and without sounding like a D-bag, big headed strength coach, I know how to get my athletes strong
An extreme example but that’s kinda my point. This is a powerlifter we have been working with for a couple of years now. Kid’s a beast and about to break records, when our goal is to get strong, we get strong…but is that our goal? Is that what we see on the field? Is that what’s demanded of our athletes?
Does this play happen because Khali Mack benches a ton of weight? Or is it because he understands and can feel leverage? Is it more like a slow bench press (or fast one for the westside meat-sticks out there) or is it more like the wrestling we see in the 2nd half of the video?
Do these plays happen because of how much the running back deadlifts? Or is it because they are able to perceive what is happening in front of them, find or create a gap, accelerate, hit max v then score?
Are we teaching birds how to fly…or in this case track?
The Goal of Therapy
“The goal of therapy is #1 to solve your problem and #2 to turn you into a great solver of problems and #2 is way more important.”
And the same should be said about coaching, but is it?
When we are looking at our training sessions, are we creating great problem solvers or are we solving problems for our athletes to get pats on the back? When you train are your athletes always looking to you for answers and if so, do you give them? Are you allowing your athletes to explore, fail and succeed?
When I approach my training sessions, I look to accomplish 1-3 things on the day and I keep it simple. For example
Invade, Bend, Brace
Speed, Catch, Flow
Create, Score, Defend
Then I put my athletes in environments that allow them to express these traits.
- Can they bend?
- Can they invade space?
- Do they have speed?
- Do they know when to use said speed?
- Do they know how to brace? Better yet do they know when to brace?
- Do they know how to play zone?
- Do they know how to play man?
- Is the reason they are getting beat because of speed, agility or lack of understanding of one of those two concepts?
- Are they “strong”? Do they know how to express their strength?
- Is the reason they get beat because of lack of strength or lack of understanding, the inability to process, the inability to flow?
- Is it lack of ability or is it the pressure of 1v1?
- How does this change when they are together with teammates?
- What happens if we take away space?
- What happens if we add space?
These are the questions I ask myself when I look at my athletes compete and when I find what I believe to be a deficiency we set our environments up even more to attack these things.
Athletes aren’t fragile. Athletes want to win and athletes figure things out much quicker than we give them credit for…if we allow them to.
Here is a basic 1v1 drill with multiple options…. When we have the cones close do you score? What about when we spread them wider? What about when we give you 4 goals? What about when we put a ball in your hands? What about different starting positions?
As we look at these drills we can expand and condense as much as needed. I have athletes that struggle in 1v1 situations but are just fine making someone miss when they are in a team setting. Why? Let’s put them in these situations and find out. If the cones are close and they make the opponent miss but get caught when the cones are more spread out maybe we need to expose that athlete to more max velocity situations. Maybe the athlete can make the opponent miss in all situations except when being passed a ball. Then we expose them to more ball drills. The list goes on and on and changes with each athlete, with each day, with each environment.
Do your athletes know how to play zone? Do they know how to score against a zone? Can they work with teammates on the fly to figure this out? Do they succeed in the one-v-ones and struggle when the situation gets more complex? More moving pieces? How can we scale that for the athlete? This is a drill we use to work on playing zone. Have more on offense than on defense and if the defense wants to stand a chance they’ll self-organize into a zone defense. We have played it many different ways but the goal is simple: Break the zone and defend your zone. All without telling them to do anything.
How do they respond to this? What happens If your athlete gets beat? Have they been exposed to that before in training? Do They know how to recover and leverage what they have going for them in that moment? In this drill, the defense starts at a disadvantage (behind the offense on the sprint) and has to react and try and catch up. The defense has to figure out a way to stall just long enough to get caught back up or it’s over.
Can your athletes sift through the chaos that happens on the field? Generally? Specifically? Can they score when everything isn’t clean? Can they track and tackle when there are obstacles in the way? This is a drill we use all the time we many different variations, but the goal of the offense is to score, the defense is to tackle and the dummies jobs are to get in the way. Sometimes the field is set, sometimes they collapse in and sometimes the dummies are on call to be a defender (they are all assigned a #, when the offense runs into the box I’ll shout a # and that dummy turns into a defender)
Create scorers and people that can stop you from scoring and you’ll be In really good shape. And if you tell me, “Just let practice take care of that,” I know you haven’t been to any football practice and actually paid attention to what is happening.
Do your athletes know how to invade space? Better yet are they comfortable doing it? The goal here is to touch certain parts of the opponent lightly. Maybe it’s right shoulder, or maybe it’s the shoelace. If you touch before your opponent does you get a point, play to 5.
What happens if we make it more physical? Can they respond physically? Mentally? Are they getting super tired during these drills? Why? These are some of our grappling drills we use with our football and rugby players to work on understanding these things.
The point isn’t the specific drill, I just included them for examples of what I do.
The point is to expose, expose, expose.
Find the weaknesses, find the strengths.
Make them lose.
The athlete will not be a fan of you in the moment but will love you on game day.
Let them win.
Teach them how to do something without saying a word.
Then do it all over again.
Anecdotal Evidence
I could show you the vertical increases, the laser 40-time increases, the strength # increases but then I feel like I’m feeding into the system, feeding you my poison…
That’s why I value the things that I feel myself and are told to me by my athletes like
“I haven’t had that much fun in a training session in a long time”
Man that’s going to piss off the meatheads that think “training isn’t supposed to be fun it’s supposed to be work,” but I promise you we get a lot of work done…our athletes just don’t hate us for it.
- “My knees don’t hurt anymore when I play”
- “Hey Coach, I used that roll we did in the gym in practice the other day”
- “I feel like I’m moving way better on the field”
- “My coach says I’m playing way lower this year”
- Etc etc.
This stuff means way more to me than many of the things I always see posted about.
Personally…. I dunked a basketball for the first time in my entire life. I robbed a homerun and had three diving catches in a softball tournament. It doesn’t take me 20 minutes to warm up and get out of bed in the morning. I set a new deadlift record for myself.
If you guys knew me before, this would all make way more sense to you….I herniated a disk in my back when I was 16 and was told to never deadlift again. I used to never be able to touch rim on a hoop up until 6 months ago. The last time I attempted to “dive” for a ball I was 18 and broke my ankle because I tripped.
Stiff, rigid and fragile.
Deadlift PR After Herniated Disk
Surviving my own stupidity.
But don’t take my word for it…
I’m not an expert….
Keep chopping wood
About My Writing
To the brave souls that have made it this far, thank you.
I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to write, I’ve always felt that I’ve expressed myself clearer this way than the spoken word. This article and all of my writing are just how I make sense of the world and all of my thoughts that swirl around in my head. I think of it as my art, a poet stuck in a meathead’s body. When I was first given access to a computer around the age of 8 years old, I did what every 8 year old does and I started writing fantasy novels, what a nerd I was. I remember those days, I would walk around in the country for hours at a time completely in a fantasy world. In my head, I could conjure up monsters, elves, dwarfs and wizards and have epic battles with them and then I’d go and write it all down. What I would give for those days to be back.
Then I went to high-school and then college and was told how to write. Was told the process of writing, was told to stay in the lines. And I fell out of love with it. It wasn’t my soul anymore. It wasn’t my art. And for a long time I struggled with this… until one day I went for a walk in the country, 16 years later, and reconnected with everything I felt as a kid and re-established what my soul wanted me to say. When my soul speaks, I write. My mind is always going and always cranking ideas out and I write them in snippets and pieces or in 2020 verbiage Tweets and Instagram. What I struggle with is putting it all together in something like this, into a “complete” piece of art. But that’s what I attempted to do here. I want to thank you for taking the precious time out of your lives to read what my soul wanted you to see, hopefully, it connected with yours.
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 at the University of St.Thomas, where he is now the Strength Coach for the Football Team.
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