Not being known doesn’t stop the truth from being true. You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. Learning is finding out what we already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers and teachers. The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it. Richard Bach
December 14th 8:35PM Foley, Minnesota: 19° F outside.
I had just finished up my workout, my typical mix of movement, plyometrics and some heavy ass lifting.
Shot and feeling accomplished I walked downstairs ready for the meditation and refueling part of my day, something I just know I “need” to perform at my highest of levels….but as I walked down stairs from our homely weight room, my Grandpa was waiting in the living room for me.
From 23 years of knowing my Grandpa, I knew what this meant; he wanted help with some crazy construction project of his…
And I was exactly right.
“Hey, I need your help with something outside, shouldn’t take too long” –Grandpa Ken
I knew better, but being the great grandson I am, I put on my coat and walked outside to the pitch-dark, frigid MN night.
“What was I getting myself into this time,” I thought.
As we walked outside there was a massive trench dug into the ground and a plow ready to go.
“We gotta pull this pipe, before it gets ‘too cold’ outside,” Grandpa Ken says.
I roll my eyes but we get to work and for the next hour we pull the pipe in the frigid MN night.
My Grandpa had been working on this project since 6 in the morning, outside, digging, setting up and getting everything ready. He never came in for lunch and I doubt he took very many breaks during the day.
He is what would be described as a mule.
75 years old, he has worked some sort of manual labor job since he’s been 5.
He is stronger, more jacked and “mentally tougher” than any athlete I have ever came in contact with and it’s not even close.
And he has never lifted a weight in his life because he says “your life should be hard enough.”
This same man cut his leg open with a chainsaw, worked 8 more hours and only got it checked out because my mom noticed blood seeping through his pants. He needed 30 stitches for his little “knick” as he called it.
Now I wish I could say I was coming up with these stories, as it would have made my childhood much easier, but I’m not.
(Like you Really Can’t Make Some Of This Stuff Up)
I’m also not typing this article solely to show you what a superhero I think my Grandpa is.
No, I’m writing this article to hopefully take a deeper look at what it means to “Grind” and our “understanding of overtraining” to hopefully open your eyes to what our bodies are truly capable of….
We all have a little Grandpa Ken in us
(Just Look At Those Forarms!)
The Grind – Your Life Should Be Hard Enough
“Working when you are sleeping!!!! NO DAYS OFF!!! YOU GOTTA WANT IT AS BAD AS YOU WANT TO LIVE!” 15 year-old kid doing his footwork drills
While I respect the words, thought process and motivation behind it, nothing drives me more insane than someone that is GETTING to do something that millions of people in the world and in our past evolutionary history, would trade their entire lives to BE ABLE to do and then is telling the world how hard they are working doing it.
Continuing to preach and understand this as the grind is something I believe is leading us down a scary pathway of building fragile athletes that don’t even begin to scratch the surface of who they could become and what they could do.
In our past life when we’d run, jump and really do anything to stay alive from the Saber Tooth Tiger trying to chase and make us his lunch, we’d always be physically and mentally primed to perform incredible feats…It was quite literally life or death and no one thought anything of it…
Feed yourself and the tribe….or don’t….
However, it is no longer our past life and we have forgotten what we are truly capable of doing…
Not fighting poverty, not being hunted, not having to question when or where their next meal will come from, they have forgotten our not so distant past and in their air conditioned, personal trainer baby-sat, suburban life, this “grind” now becomes their “tiger.”
We have confused what was the real repetitive grind and constant pressure of everyday life with the “fake grind” of gassers, ladders and Instagram posts.
This “fake grind” pandemic not only confuses the athletes but us coaches as well…
Are you really grinding or are you looking for a pat on the back and a way to tell everyone else how “mentally tough” your team is…but more on this later.
When we misrepresent training for what it really is, how does that affect our approach?
How does it affect our athlete’s mindset and motivation?
If we continue to preach that this is all we are capable of doing, will we ever be capable of more?
What happens when we face an injury? Where does our mind go?
How about when we fail? Are we ready to stick it through?
Are we even looking at it this way?
Are we even asking these questions?
Or are we just accepting the status quo and tricking our athletes into accepting the modern-day fragility?
Overtraining – “I’m going to take the day off”
I think as a human species we are unbelievably adaptable, but it’s not just for the better.
We adapt to comfort as much as we do challenges.
And with the constant influx of comfort, we have adapted to see our modern day life as the “grind.” We have adapted to think we aren’t capable of more and we have adapted to being fragile and thinking it’s always been that way.
I believe this little mental adaptation has confused us all.
Coaches and athletes alike.
Bringing it back to my Grandpa’s story, imagine him working 10+ hours a day, every single day, carrying large objects, swinging a hammer 1000’s of times, bending, grabbing, sawing, walking, etc.
As “Sports Scientist” we’d look at one day of his work and throw our hands up in the air.
“Volume is too high, CNS fatigue is crazy, motivation and output will be low, he’ll have to take tomorrow off to recover for the next big day.”
But I promise you he never once walked into his Foreman’s office and asked for the day off because he worked hard the day before… and that’s in 70 years of “training.”
Imagine what we could accomplish with an athlete that was that resilient.
Bringing it back to my own personal life, when I was 15 years old and I had no driver’s licenses, my day looked something like:
- Bike 6 Miles to School.
- Lift and Sprint at SAPQR Classes for 2 hours.
- Go to Summer Football Practice for 2 hours.
- Bike 6 Miles.
- Get home, throw on work clothes and go and work with my dad’s underground sprinkler company where we would dig holes all day until sunset.
Again, I’d look at that and cry if I had to do it today; not enough recovery, too much volume, etc. etc.
But I didn’t know any better and I never once felt “overtrained” or “unmotivated” and I loved all of it (besides maybe getting yelled at by my Dad for not digging holes fast enough).
(Just One of Our Many Fun Summer Projects)
And again, if we really want to go back in time to the days of being the hunted as well as the hunters, we can really start to put everything into perspective.
Capable! Adaptable! Not broken! Not burnt out!
We didn’t have the choice of high and low days, and we never got to choose whether or not we got the day off.
We just did.
And adapted and survived.
Belief and Spirituality – Get to The Point Hippie
Alright, alright…So what does this mean for us as strength coaches or as athletes reading this?
I’m not saying we go back to the dark days of sports performance (or are we still in them?) and start yelling, running and doing up downs until everyone pukes and start to get “mentally tougher.” Trying to prove, rather than trying to move…
You know the coach and athlete that is looking for every opportunity to tell you what they did today and why you should be proud of them? The same ones who at the first sign of failure seem to mentally break, expect things to happen and quit? Confusing amount of work done for accomplishment. Yelling about participation trophies while expecting one of their own because they “worked really hard.”
The ones Grandpa Ken would laugh at saying, “You think this is hard, you should try war.”
Yeah that is not what we are going for…
I wrote an entire article on why the “grind” isn’t the answer titled There Are No Experts.
What I am saying is maybe we have lost a little bit of understanding, when it comes to what we are capable of doing. What if our technology, that was created by humans, that don’t fully understand humans, whose data, we drool over like it’s the holy grail, does not tell the whole story of who we are.
Maybe we are more than just muscles, tendons and ligaments. Maybe just maybe we are capable of unbelievable things, if we just didn’t know any better or was driven by something inside of us that did. Maybe we are tricking ourselves into adapting to comfort?
Maybe we all have a little Grandpa Ken in us…if we so choose.
As coaches are we really allowing our athletes to understand what they are capable of doing?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an athlete come in fearful and scared of movement, training and pushing too hard. As the pendulum swings from the meathead strength coach, making everyone puke and not be able to walk, we have become the “sports performance specialists” that have created scared and fragile human beings.
Measuring, calculating and fixing everything we see, we create tiny robots. Robots that depend on you as a coach. Robots that only know what they have been programmed to do. Trying to outsmart and control mother nature, when we can’t even control ourselves and then wondering why burnout rates and injuries are so high.
This past month I got to visit Dr. Tommy John’s performance center and hanging on his wall was this sign of the 8 Essentials of Healing and Performance
The 3 that really grabbed my eyes were:
- Belief in Something Greater Than Yourself
- Purpose
- Prayer/Meditation
These three things are something that can completely change our athletes’ life, abilities and mindset, yet are rarely talked about in the world of sports performance, for fear of wandering into the woo wooey world of hippies and spirituality…never to be talked to again by the prestigious sports scientist that run our world.
But maybe there’s something there…
Again, lets go back to my grandpa’s story. Why was he able to “grind” so hard? I think part of it had to do with not knowing any better, but also when you lose both of your parents at a young age and have to run a farm with your brothers to continue to feed the family, your purpose tends to be pretty clear. The sets/reps/hours and days matter way less than the outcome and production.
If your life or others is at stake, you’ll adapt. Otherwise you die.
Now what does that mean for the modern day athlete and coach? Do we have to go through a tragedy to make everything make sense, or do we just have to put things into perspective? What if we spent a little time with our athletes, ensuring they understood what the real “grind” is or very well could have been if they didn’t grow up exactly when and where they grew up.
Can we take some time out of our “precious” training day to explain to them the importance of belief?
Better yet, can we be someone that they can believe in?
If as coaches, we are robots, ignoring a huge side of what it means to be human, what do we expect our athletes to be like?
What do we expect our training sessions to be like when technology and data are the only things we are looking at?
Imagine if athletes understood their evolutionary background, what their ancestors have conquered and what the grind really was. Could we create more capable athletes, that look at the challenge of sport, training and life as a small mountain that the human species was quite literally built to climb. Imagine if we had athletes that understood what the body is capable of healing from, capable of adapting to and learning from.
“From Thinking to Doing to Being.”
Dr. Joe Dispenza describing how our brain works!
He shows how you can literally re-wire your brain to think in different ways. To be someone completely new over time. How we can process stressors completely different than we did before if we become aware of what those stressors actually are?
Specifically in the video he brings up the example of dealing with your mother-in-law, that nags, is mean and that you don’t like…and describes how looking at it in a different light can change your perspective of how you interact with her. Seeing some of yourself inside of her, understanding why she is the way she is, putting this problem into a grand scheme perspective. Being aware, thinking differently and acting differently around her starts to physically rewire your brain’s pathways and your reactions. No longer is she the evil mother-in-law you can’t stand, but she is now the mother-in-law that has good traits that you love being around. Imagine how much that could help your family dynamic.
Now apply that to training.
From seeing your workload as a grind, something that has to be done. Something maybe you dread doing or have no reason to do, or maybe seeing the athletic feat as something you can’t do. It’s too big, to fast, too scary.
Now what if we worked on this rewiring process? We started to believe, we started to understand what we were capable of doing, we started to put our training in perspective, we started to view training as something we enjoyed, we started viewing failure as a lesson, we stopped fearing…we quite literally changed who we are as an athlete?
To take this out of the metaphysical world and bring it into reality (something I normally hate doing, but Joel says I get “too out there” sometimes LOL) I could tell millions of stories of how being blessed with the Grandpa Ken approach has helped me in my life but my journey to dunking was the most recent.
For years and years I told myself, or was told, I had short arms, no bounce, played sports that required me to stay on the ground, never play basketball, hurt my knee, wasn’t athletic enough, was too big etc. etc… Pretty much every excuse in the book. Then the legend, known as Jake Tuura, walked into my podcast studio and I was put in my place very quickly.
Slightly shorter than me, with the same huge meathead look, Tuura could throw down with the best of them and I could barely touch rim. No longer in my brain did I have an excuse, and the journey of dunking started.
On the day I dunked I was three hours into attempting and failing. This was the average length of my “dunk” sessions leading up until this point from the previous 3 months of training (I get very obsessive).
Physically my ankles/shins and knees probably hated me and my CNS was most definitely destroyed, but yet I felt none of it because I had a purpose, was able to put what I was doing in perspective and had a text from Jake that said something along the lines of “don’t be soft, do it.”
And I did.
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I was told not to play football for similar reasons but I did…
I was told not to open a gym for similar reasons but I did…
I was told to stop writing for similar reasons but I did…
What if we took a step back and realized we could?
What if all of our athletes understood these things?
What if they knew they could accomplish amazing feats, recover from unbelievable workloads?
What if they knew regardless of what the task was, they could?
What If, for just a moment, we stopped tricking them?
There’s a Grandpa Ken In All Of Us…
I Appreciate you for reaching this far…
Maybe there’s a reason you did…
Keep Chopping Wood
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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