How One Coach Built the Future of Athlete Performance

That's actually my first time hearing that. That's a great.

“Because they don't focus on strength and they don't focus on landing mechanics.”

I've kind of lived those like recovering from those injuries. Myselfs and I'd say it's a long road and it's not fun. Once they know that they've got that issue, then we can train it out. We can work with them on building that out. And one of the biggest things we have to do is that.

Brad Tatum is a passionate specialized in results driven athletic performance coach and the founder of the jump lab. Channelling his expertise in sports mechanics, he helps aspiring athletes maximize their physical potential and elevate their game. Building a foundation of a lead athletic capability, unshakenable confidence in life-long discipline.

We had just acquired the jump lab and then the eating fires happen. So we almost lost the business within a few months of being the owners of that business. And it was a really dark period. We were genuinely afraid we were going to run out of cash. It might have to show the doors right before we really got started. We really believed in what we were doing, what we were doing for these kids and what the jump lab,

the potential of the jump lab has to be able to help even work kids. And so we wanted to, we wanted to do it because we believed in it. There's no guarantee it was going to happen. There's no guarantee that all that money would have just gone right down the drain. But we...

Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. It's not over! I'm telling our way! The living your legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy. That's extremely great! That's awesome, isn't it?

Oh, that is sensational! Open! She called it with the ladies and Paul in the boxes, not on the planet. You can live your dreams! Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Living Your Legacy Podcast.

I'm your host, Jason Tyler, and I am joined today by Brad Tatum of the Jump Lab. Brad, welcome to the show. Thank you, I appreciate you having me. I appreciate you being here. So you just finished up your interview.

First of all, how do you feel now on the other side of it?

Relieving a little bit, didn't know what to expect. It was an urgent nervous but getting into it. But it got very comfortable going throughout and felt a lot more comfortable just telling my story throughout the journey.

“That's what we aim for here, that's what we aim for.”

And you were with Kofi, so Kofi is a great interviewer. I think he does a fantastic job. So for the audience that's out there, they haven't been introduced to you. Give me just a quick breakdown on what the Jump Lab is and how it got started. Yeah, so the Jump Lab is a sports performance training facility in Pasadena, California.

It was founded by another gentleman. He built it up as a private coach up through got very successful and kind of got beyond his capabilities and he decided it was got to burn out and has a lot of founders due to decided he wanted to sell a little too close to the Sun. Blue, a little too close to the Sun.

And so we acquired the Jump Lab back in fall of 2024 from him. And so he had a good foundation for what it was built up a really good brand, a good local following and really identified the gap in the market for sports performance for youth and teens in this area. There's a ton of clubs, club sports is really intense in southern California,

especially girls volleyball. We have a ton of girl volleyball players and so the Jump Lab, it's, it was focused primarily on volleyball and basketball players when we took it over. We've elevating their vertical. Yeah, God.

So I was going to, I was going to ask too.

“I was like, what is the jump in Jump Labs time for?”

But it actually exactly. That just makes sense. It's exactly elevating their game, right? And so we've expanded it to be work with a lot other athletes, not just the volleyball and basketball players, but that is still like a core thing.

Most of the families have come in because it doesn't matter what sport you play, like soccer players, they've got to jump up higher with headers, football players, New Deal, got to jump higher to go get the ball, baseball players, the shortstop, trying to get those grounders. Doesn't matter what the sport is, everyone's trying to like elevate their game.

Even if it's just a couple inches, a couple of notches, that's a world of difference.

You know, my first client, when I got into doing video work, one of my first clients

were his pro-trained athletics and they did NFL combine prep for the 40 meter. So, or 40 yard dash, I'm sorry. And so when we were when I was watching them trained and filming their whole process, they were trying to shave off like tenths of a second. Absolutely, right? Every little bit counts, especially when you're talking about, you know, multi-directional athletes in terms of football, that little bit of edge gets you so much further.

in some of the athletes that come through the jump lab?

“Yeah, so that's really exciting. We recently just bought these three dimensional force plates.”

So, the first facility on the West Coast, the United States,

at any level, professional, collegiate or private facility to have this capability. And so, a lot of facilities will have like the one-dimensional force plates. Like a measure of how high you can jump, but they can't measure your explosive power forward backward or left and right. And whether or not you're landing with an imbalance on as you're coming down, if I'm favoring one leg, if I'm kind of rolling onto that ankle,

risking injury to a knee or something, it doesn't measure the output in those different planes, but ours does. So, for us now, we have a very big differentiator in the quality and the quantity of data that we can look at and how we train out error in the athletes' performance. And in fact, we're running performance testing. We do it every six weeks through our training

“cycles. So, we can measure progress. And so, I have parents see that their kids are getting”

better through the training cycle. We're not asking them to believe us. We want to show it through measurement. And we're running performance testing this week. And this morning before we came in,

we got a text from our coach from how last night when he said, "It's amazing. Since our

January testing, which is the first time we ran a large batch of testing where we collected data on a lot of athletes," because we want the they want operational and December and then into January for touring around the testing. So, now, in the six weeks from then until now, we've seen a lot of these kids have put in, have gained over an inch in their vertical in six weeks. I mean, inch. And so, he said, he's like, "I can't breathe. I can't believe it. Every kid we've tested so far

has gained an inch in their vertical from the last time." That's insane. Yeah, I have actually a really pretty big background in sports. Like, a lot of my video work has led to sports. I opened up a podcast studio last year with the buddy of mine. And we were doing podcasts for all the heat players. So, we did, you don't just have some of Mike Miller's podcast. We did Shack. We had Jalen Branson and Josh Hart and there. And I ended up becoming friends

with Victor Ola Deepo, who famously he blew out his knee playing for Indiana. And so, I ended up executive producing his show. And one of the things that, one of the episodes we did was with his doctor that did his knee surgery. And so, the science behind creating that explosive force, he gave a really good analogy. He was like, when I saw Victor's knee for the first time, I realized that he was doing the 48 hours at Le Mans in a Toyota Camry, essentially, or he was

trying to push a Camry to the level of a Ferrari. When you talk about injury and injury prevention, what are some of the specifics that you guys do at the jump lab to make sure that I think injury

“prevention is like one of the most important things in sports. I think load management, a lot of”

that stuff gets overlooked, especially in the professional leagues. What are you guys doing to sort of manage injury at the jump lab? So, that's a fantastic question. So, those three-dimensional force plates are huge in our ability to train out air. So, the landing mechanics is really important, especially for our girls and our volleyball players. So, fascinating fact about the jump lab is about 50% of our athletes or girls. So, a lot of sports performance facilities focus

on your baseball players or your football players who things like that, right? You've got the elite speed camps and the 40-yard dash. And that attracts obviously big names, big dollars, because that's where the money is in professional sports. But it's all they care about at the combine. It's what's your 40 times? What's your 40 times? What's your 40 times? Are they care about? Well, for girls volleyball, what they care about, they care about hitting power, and they care about

your work, right? And so, what are girls, what are girls like always told? You're not going to be

even today? You're not going to be as strong as or as explosive as a guy in your same sport. Yes, exactly. That's part of it. And then it's also like, the girls themselves, like, you know, you're you're supposed to look pretty. You're supposed to look feminine. It's a non-contact sport. You're not going to get her. I put you in a non-contact sport. So, you don't get hurt. So, there's a false idea that you don't need to be strong in the sports. But, you know,

like, girls volleyball players have a higher percentage of ACL tears than football players do. That's. And so, that's actually my first time hearing that. That's not correct. And because they don't focus on strength, and they don't focus on landing mechanics, and they, in their shoulder, they have a very high incidence of rotator cuff tears, too. Like, like, pictures. And that is the worst. Yeah. I've had that happen to me, my former rotator cuff.

And I have a partially torn LCL in my, in my left knee, from my first deployment. So, not

sports-related, but, you know, high impact load on it. So, you know, I've kind of lived those, like, recovering from those injuries. My cells and I, it's a long road, and it's not fun. So, for us, what we do is, like, we, we start all of the athletes out on an assessment to see where they are today. And we use the force points to help us tell, tell where that story of where they are today. And then we, we build the progressions that are training planned based off of that.

And everything we do, we build some pre-have into what we do. And then we also have recovery services, where we do with massage massage balls, rollers, resistance bands, cups. So, we'll do all of that. And we have a targeted cryotherapy system where we can, you know, just, not a full cryopod, but, like,

“just, like, cool. The ones that go to, like, on the legs. Is that the inflatable ones?”

No. So, we have those to the commission therapy, but it's just, it's spraying cold CO2, like, just, like, you wouldn't a cryo thing. But, like, imagine, like, a 20 minute ice pack in about 90 seconds. So, I'm going to cool your, I'm going to cool the joint down that's causing pain to a very cold temperature in about 90 seconds. It's, like, the equivalent of a 20 minute ice treatment. Got it. And so, we, we have those kind of things as well. And if you get into good routine,

of both rehab and then rehab, post session. And then our sessions, we focus on training out the imbalances. So, it's not just how much can you lift. It's not just how high can you jump. It's, we're going to work on the landing mechanics. We're going to work on the load absorption. So, we'll do a lot of elevated platform ramp jumps. And then just absorbing the load as you come down and making sure that we're landing on both feet evenly, so that you're not putting that extra load

on one side. And then, so we're trying to, one, make the athlete aware that this is what they're doing. And so, because it's like the GI Joe thing, right? Because now you know and knowing's have the battle. So, once they know that they've got that, that issue, then we can train it out and we can work with them on building that out. And one of the biggest things we have to do is educate the parents, like, so educate the athletes, the girls, like, I don't want to get bulky. It's like, well,

like, that's, that's not how it works. Like, you know, especially for girls and women, like,

“you have to really want to get bulky to put on the amount of muscle. Yeah. People that say that,”

like, I don't want to, I don't want to live weights because I don't want to get big. I'm like, you, you have no earthly idea of the amount of effort that it would take for you to get as big as you think that you're going to get from lifting weights. I've been lifting weights consistently

for, like, four years now. And like, getting big has never been on my radar. I'm just want to get

stronger out by product of that is I'll have the more lean muscle mass, but I'm not going to be any materially larger. Right. You know what I mean? You have to try your heart at ask anybody that's working in that's doing, you know, bodybuilding. Right. They'll tell you they amount of food you got to eat the amount of rest you got to get. Nobody's getting big just by osmosis. Yeah, you don't, you don't, you don't do one set of lifts at the gym and then like you wake up the next day and

you've bought it. And you're just not out of energy. You feel like you feel like that when you leave the gym, right? You feel like you leave with the pump, you're like, oh my god, my shirt is tighter. Yeah. But that's just more blood flowing through your muscles. It's not necessarily an actual build-up and expansion of that muscle mass. I like that you brought up landing mechanics because, you know, I've had conversations with Vic about this. I feel like not enough coaches work on

we work on explosive movement to get up there and then we don't care what happens when you come down. You've seen it happen time and time again in the NBA and in the NFL where athletes are landing unilaterally and putting way too much load on one joint and then all of a sudden it's gone.

“That's the best. And it's the worst thing that can happen to an athlete because it can be a career”

under. I mean, you look at Derek Rose. His career was never the same. Vic's career had to take a

harsh, harsh left turn. I mean, you're talking about a guy that took primed LeBron James to seven games, damn near by himself to then go on to be playing in the G league in 30s. Like that's that's a hard that's a harsh reality. Talk to me a little bit about, you know, when an athlete comes into the jump lab, usually what's their immediate goal? What's the first thing that they're looking to do and what are they what are they misled about? Maybe through other coaching programs

that you guys are coming in and kind of taking a science-based approach and saying hey, actually you should be doing this this way. I was a great question. So again, the jump lab attracts a lot of jump sport athletes. So we we have a lot more athletes at different backgrounds

dancers. They all do some jumping and stuff. So it's sort of like jumping things that have

“attracted all not all but a lot of our athletes into the facility. So one of the primary goals”

we hear all the time is I want to increase my vertical. Okay, great. Why? What is it that you're like what's the why behind that? It's like oh well because, you know, I coach says I need to get higher. If I want to be an outside hitter, I am, you know, that's the kind of the that's the quarterback or or the the star position at least on the on a volleyball team. I know it's really in volleyball players will tell me no like you know. That's not that's not the quarterback,

but it's it is like that that is the person that's getting all the spikes, right? Because they're the ones who are the volleyball player will tell you it's the center. That's the actual like quarter back quarter. The center or the liberal, right? Because I want to just like move it around the chord and like giving the direction like like and and so there's and saving them in situation. I'm a huge fan of volleyball. Okay. Love volleyball to death, but the Liberals the one that's

like saving the day, saving the day. He's on that back line making sure like hey, nothing's going to make it past me. Make sure you guys handle it on offense. Yeah, that's another thing when you have highlight reels are the spikes. Yeah, the wings. So the wings are coming from

either side and they're taking these huge leaps. I've always said this watching a vertical on a

spiker and watching a vertical on somebody who's like a professional like dunker. When you watch the mechanics of those jumps, it almost looks like two completely different things. What's the what's the mechanics behind that? Well, when you think about it, like the basketball ram is at 10 feet, right? And so like you're jumping to a fixed height. You know, you got to get over the rim to do that. And then you're also jumping more broad jump distance, right? You think about like

Michael Jordan jump doing the dunks from the front. Right? Which is still just one of the most unbelievable feeds of athleticism that I've ever seen, but it's forward and to a fixed height. Yeah. Right. And so, but volleyball, I mean, the nets out of fixed height, but you never know where the, where the ball is going to meet your hand. And the opponent on the other side of the net,

“where they're going to be and where that ball's going to meet the net, right? And so, you have to be”

able to get up really high to either get over them or to get up so high that they can't get over you. And so there's, it's really a lot more of that exertion to transfer the force straight up. And maybe a little bit directional, but really transfer. Yeah. Because you also want a little bit

of, you need a little bit of time of there. There's, there's a split second while you're up there

that you have a decision to make. Am I sending this broad across the net? Am I sending it straight to the back? Do I have two blockers in front of me? So now I have to adjust and maybe pivot my, my, my hit angle, like there's so many different mechanics that go into it. You have a, you have a second up there. And I've heard volleyball players say that when you get up there and a set comes to you, it's almost like time slows down and you kind of see like, all right, where do I want it?

There, boom. This is just bringing out my volleyball nerds. Well, it's awesome that you know so much about it because it's a lot of people don't. And so like I grew up playing baseball and football. So I've had a crash course in volleyball ever since we acquired the jump lab because so many of our athletes play volleyball and one of our coaches played D1 volleyball and coach competitive and he's still plays competitive volleyball as well. And so I've learned a lot, but you're absolutely

right. I mean, the way the time slows down and sort of associates to me is like a lot like the running back like reading the defense and making the cut, seeing the whole and then exploding through it. So it slows down in that moment when you see all of the motion and you see where that one gap is and you take it. It's all happening that fast, but same thing for the volleyball player, you're up there. You're floating and then yeah, like where is everybody? Where is the gap? How do I

angle the ball to get just where I want it to be? There's a lot going on up here while you're also going up and then coming down. If you don't have the height to give yourself the time to make that decision, then you have less time to make that decision and you're just sometimes you end up forced into a position that you don't want to be and then now you're getting blocked. That's right. All right. I want to ask one more, one more question before we sort of wrap up here. You know,

as a business owner, I'm sure any of the, any of our viewers out there that are watching this, they're all entrepreneurial minded, they're business owners. If you had one tip that you could

“give a business owner to get to a level, get to that next level of success, what would that tip be?”

Anything worth doing is hard. Anything worth doing is going to cause a lot of pain and you're going to have a lot of peaks and valleys. So we, we had, we had just acquired the jump lab and then

of that business and we were carrying the debt if even if the facility shut down because no one

“could come in or if the place had burned down. Unfortunately, we were far enough south of the fires”

that the facility was never in a physical threat, but we lost a huge piece of our client base who's

homes burned down and then who's even who didn't burn down who were evacuated and their whole lives were turned upside down. So they didn't have the money to spend and they didn't have the time to come train with us. So we had, we had to pivot and it was a really dark period. We, you know, we were genuinely afraid. We were going to run out of cash and might have to shut the doors right before we really got started. And you know, but we just believed that there's a way through this

and we had the optimism that, no, this was the journey we wanted to embark on. Like, we're not going to give up. We got to find a way. And so we doubled down. We pulled even more out of savings. We hired a consultant and then they helped us get in touch with a good marketing company to get the word out. We had to go find athletes from a bigger radius than before to offset that physical gap where all those homes are now gone. But all of that was because we believed it was

worth it to make another like to put even more skin in the game. So we, we really believed in what what we were doing, what we were doing for these kids and what the jump lab, the potential the jump lab has to be able to help even more kids. And so we wanted to, we wanted to do it because we believed in it. There's no guarantee was going to happen. And there's no guarantee that

“that all that money would have just gone right down the drain. But we, we believe. So you have to”

believe it's possible. You have to see the brightness through the darkness. And then just like,

you sort of feel like if I can never, I don't know if I can make it all the way to the end,

well, I don't know if I can make it all the way there. But you know what I do, I know I can do. I can at least, and I don't got one more step at me. And then once I make that step, I know I got one more step at me. And then I know I got one more step at me. And I mean, that's kind of on the on the days when I was going through offshore candidate schools in Marine was like those like 15 mile hike in the middle of the night and you haven't eaten anything for days and you're,

they kept you up all night on purpose. And then 24 hours later, now you're starting on the 15 mile hike.

“All right, you're exhausted, you're hungry, you're out of energy. Now I'm going to push you to your”

max. I don't know if I can make that, but I know I can take one more step. And so just telling yourself that whole time, I know I can take one more step and 15 miles later you're at the end. So that same kind of journey sometimes is, but you just got to believe that you can do it.

Yeah, that's my same philosophy I take with the gym because you know, I don't always want to go,

but I always tell myself, I got one more day at me. And four years later, one more day has compounded into, I've created this, you know, routine that's discipline with myself where like I don't even, when I get home from working here and I'm done with the office, I get home. I don't even think and suddenly I just appear at the gym. Yeah. Like it's not even a, it's a foregone conclusion that I'm just there now. And so so for those of you guys that are still watching at this point, I want to

make sure that you go and check out Brad's episode, which will be dropping shortly after this podcast episode. Ayers, make sure you guys check that out for more of his story, more of, you know, a deeper dive into what he's done to make it to the place where he is today. Brad, this has been an incredible conversation. I've enjoyed it immensely. If the people out there want to follow along in your journey, working they follow you. Yeah. Thanks so much. So we're honest to Graham that at the jump lab

and we're on Facebook also, the jump lab. So we've got, we'll be expanding to some of the other shows, but right now, everyone falls us on the, on Instagram at the jump lab. Got it. Got it. Make sure you guys go out and check out the jump lab on Instagram. Again, this has been another episode of the living your legacy podcast. I'm your host Jason Tyler and I'll catch you guys in the next one. (upbeat music)