Building a Fighter

Building a Gym! With an unlimited budget, what would you put in your gym? Garage gym, performance facility, or somewhere in the middle: we nerd out about all things exercise equipment here. Prioritizing space, incorporating MMA practice and movements, some turf and sleds we cover all of this and more in our layout and beyond. Listen to this one as you build out your garage gym and please drop your...

Building a Fighter Ep.128 Building a Brand. Be authentic, be straightforward and business is personal. MMA is an interesting landscape to brand yourself in both the athlete and support service role. It does take some courage, and confidence to put yourself out there in your brand and business but is it worth the effort. We talk about a lot of business lessons we have learned in this podcast and br...

Building a Fighter Ep.127 Take away the guesswork from your training. Going off feel is not always a bad thing, especially if you are experienced in your training or training athletes, however knowing is always better than guessing. A low cost, and low barrier to entry wearable is a simple Polar H10 Heartrate monitor.  This comes with a Polar app that can give you a great read on your Heart rate z...

Gaining confidence from your training! This is the secret sauce if there has ever been any. Confidence is the ultimate key in training. A lot of the time it is less about what you are doing and more about how confident you are in it. We talk about confidence from preparation, confidence from previous success, and confidence in your consistency as well. Another point we touch on is the individualis...

5 BJJ tips! Here are 5 ‘not so’ secret ways to improve your BJJ practice. We articulate 5 actions that will add to your performance, longevity, and enjoyment of the sport. We really harp on the basics and articulate a good approach to each of these 5. We venture into technical practice, support services that will uncover some issues, and a mentality that can elevate your game. This episode is full...

The needs of a BJJ athlete: train technically at your sport, love for the sport, and strength and conditioning. Why strength and conditioning you may ask.. We answer this in the podcast at length. If you want any longevity in the sport of BJJ, and/or to maximize your practice you should definitely add strength and conditioning to your routine. The next key to staying on the mat is to avoid injury....

Caffeine, Addiction, Priorities. That is what we are talking about in this episode. How to actually prioritize your growth, and make a specific skill better. Most of the time it comes down to awareness, accountability, and actualization. We must know what our actual goals are in training, not just talking shit, or wanting to be vaguely ambitious. We have to hold each other, ourselves, and our athl...

We are making a custom App! Biggest announcement on this freestyle episode!  Your BaF remote training programs will be all customized through this training platform. We are super excited to create our own tabs, and fillable content from the app and deliver it straight to you on your terms.  We get into some other various topics talking about mentality training, we talk about marrying basic techniq...

Welcome Austin Jochum! We have followed Jochum Strength for a longtime through social media and our mutual connection with Tim Murray. Austin Jochum is a wealth of information and innovation in the strength and conditioning space. He is truly a self-starter and loves to dive deep in the philosophical and psychological aspects of coaching. We flow through a conversation and touch on so many topics...

What is the biggest influence in your training? Is it the training partners you have? Is it the coach? Is it the gym? We take on these questions and more in this podcast. We step back from the X’s and O’s of training to narrow down the specific parameters to effective training. Your training environment dictates so much of your results. It helps if you have confidence in this environment, it's som...

Welcome Paul Robbins! Paul is a world renown sports scientist. Formerly of Athletes Performance (EXOS), Paul now works in data analytics to create conditioning for the athletes in the NBA, NHL, NFL, and Professional Tennis. Paul is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to conditioning, and analyzing sport movement and data. He supplies his contracted teams with data to optimize their conditioning pr...

Growth Mindset and awareness of mental training. We dig into what a strong mental approach means for mixed martial artists. Consistency and accountability make up two of the key performance indicators for a growth mindset. Being honest and aware of your own consistency is super necessary when it comes to a smart mental approach. We touch on ensuring the right environment for growth, as a coach and...

Workload management. What does that mean? Specifically in this podcast we talk about weekly schedules. Your schedule needs to be balanced enough to ensure recovery from hard training and that you are fresh enough to train hard. When we continually grind we are performing at suboptimal levels constantly. No, you wont feel like rainbows every time you need to train but if we are chronically fatigued...

Quick take on youth sports development and sports specificity. Should we specify one sport? Is there value to branching out and trying multiple sports? We agree that there is value to trying multiple sports and adding movements to your skill set. Ultimately more diversity in movements allows for more physical and mental robustness. This robustness is what is needed if your kid, or you are to make...

Welcome to our live programming session. We talk about building a program for an athlete, and even put on a case study so that you guys can see our process. We go through philosophies, principles of lifting and even get into the weeds of methods for our athletes. We hit on a lot of background questions off the get go, but we bring it completely practical in the end. If you listen intently you can...

Toe spacers!! Lol this is a trend that has caught on in Crossfit, and should catch on in MMA. Take care of yo’ feet! We are Freestylin’ in this episode and we cover some peripheral exercises and supplements, grading your return to play from low back pain, and opportunity cost in strength and conditioning. We hit a lot on “functional” ...

Our Favorite Registered Dietician is back! Christina Chu, Dietician extraordinaire! Follow here @christinaychu on Instagram or reacher her through her website: www.christinaychu.com Nutrition Power Hour! Christina joins us to talk on many nutrition topics for our listeners! We cover a broad range of topics including nutrition for recovery, post workout fueling, quick nutrition tips for fight week,...

Building a Fighter Ep.112    Coaching Philosophy. What is it and is it useful? We brainstorm and talk about our coaching philosophies in this episode. While we do get into the details a bit in this podcast a solid performance approach with a well organized system will enhance your overall coaching game. A coaching philosophy helps direct your attention and progress ...

Training Unilaterally. This training intervention can introduce variability and more athleticism to your workouts! Typically in MMA we are exploding ...

Recovery’s 3 R’s - regulate, refuel, and reflect. You are only as good as you can recover. Each training session cost us - energy, fuel, mental exhaustion. We must come back from that cost even stronger. Here we offer various methods to recover in between workouts and on a constant basis. These methods are not one-off sexy theraguns and ice baths, but rather consistent routines that will have a me...

How do you approach training? What is the right mindset to take into workouts? How do we change our thoughts and mental state in front of a challenge? Lets evolve our understanding of the mental side in sports performance. Scale your workouts but still push your athletes to perform. Two words we refer back to in this podcast are robust, and fragile. We want to create robustness and a general resil...

Quick hitter this week. How do you maintain high effort? Everyone says they train hard, everyone works hard, but how do you know you are truly giving peak effort? WE break it down into being present and being motivated to hit the target. Many athletes come in with a goal to just “go hard” that intent is not good enough and it leads to burn out. You simply cannot maintain the go to go as hard as po...

Hello, and welcome to our interview with Darren Treasure. Darren is a mental performance coach who works with multiple world level and professional athletes. We talk a lot about mental skills and what a mental performance coach can offer for athletes. As strength coaches and healthcare practitioners we can always employ a better battery of mental skills. This is a great entry level talk on what me...

Having trouble transitioning from wrestling to jiu jitsu? Or just starting jiu jitsu? We can empathize. As we continue our journey as sports performance professionals for MMA we detail our own transition into BJJ. Austin and I have been having a blast learning Jiu Jitsu and grappling. We talk about learning progressions, drilling, and etiquette when doing BJJ. It holds so much value to know the sp...

Jordan Rudolph! Jordan has been a great mentor and friend to Alex since 2016 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Jordan is the owner and operator of Unity Fitness. Unity is a fantastic gym where the commUNITY shines and people are able to move better, feel better, and look better. He talks a lot about starting a business, being genuinely yourself in coaching and owning a business. We talk about coaching mode...