This is episode 56 of the Dunk Talk Podcast and a personal one: the guest is my coach. I’m Dylan Haugen, and Tom Barnes (“Ask Dunks” on Instagram) is the founder of JumpX, the coaching service that has programmed every workout of my rise from a 37.5 to a 41.5-inch vertical and three contest wins, now operating as Jump Master X alongside Austin Young, Jordan Kilganon, and Brody Stevens. Tom is also one of the strongest dunkers alive (a 682-pound paused deadlift will be discussed) and a 47-inch tester in his own right, from Perth, Australia, where every rim is actually 10 feet. We covered his whole arc: the journey, the numbers, the coaching philosophy, and the merger story nobody has told publicly.
An Australian childhood of rotating sports
Australian schools rotate sports by term, four terms a year, so Tom grew up playing everything: Aussie rules football, field hockey, cricket (“baseball, but you have to bounce it off the floor first”), basketball, cross country, track. He didn’t focus on basketball until 12 or 13 and didn’t choose dunking over it until 17. His theory on why he tolerates brutal training loads as an adult: a childhood spent literally racing friends through the park after school every day. He worries, credibly, that the phone generation is building less base work-capacity than any before it, and his advice to parents matches every guest we’ve had: if you want an athlete, raise an active kid.
His gateway into the community was the same as Elijah’s and so many others: Steven Selby, a 5’10” guy barely grabbing rim, exactly like teenage Tom, who built his way to Windmills and between-the-legs on camera. Tom filmed everything from day one (camera balanced on a water bottle) and credits that archive with keeping him grounded ever since: same height the whole time, completely different athlete. He also named the cultural headwind Australians know as tall poppy syndrome: announce you’re skipping the basketball season to train jumping, and people look at you like a villain. Doing anything unusual draws the same stares I get power-cleaning on the actual Olympic platform at LA Fitness. Do it anyway.
The land of true 10-foot rims
The Australia-versus-America rim segment deserves permanent citation in the rim-height debates: in Perth, roughly 95 percent of available courts are state or national-level facilities, so rims sit within half an inch of true 10’. There are no LA Fitness courts with floors installed after the rim. Tom isn’t attacking American low-rim culture when he notes this (he had a glorious childhood adjustable hoop himself, 7’5” to 10’8”, which built his technique); it’s just calibration: when an Australian posts a dunk, it’s almost certainly on regulation. Imagine the arguments we’d be spared if every rim everywhere matched.
The strongest dunker numbers we’ve ever put on this show
Tom got coaching within his first four to six months of dunking, refusing to waste his prime years on bad training, and the weight room became a parallel love affair after watching Jonathan Clark and T-Fly High rep squats over double bodyweight. His current PRs, converted live on the call from kilos while we both failed at arithmetic:
- Deadlift: 310kg / 682 pounds, with a deliberate pause below the knee. He hasn’t “full sent” an unpaused max in ages.
- Back squat: 200kg / 440 pounds, raw.
- Power clean: 130kg / 286 pounds. Twice.
- Bench: 155kg / ~340 pounds.
- Vertical: 47 inches tested a month ago, with flight times on non-Vertec jumps that flirt with the 49-50 territory.
His framing of the lifting obsession is the right one: he’s not a powerlifter, he’s “a dunker at heart” whose two loves happen to feed each other. He’s also the standing proof, alongside Travis Reynolds, for the no-one-right-technique doctrine: his jump looks nothing like the textbook and produces world-class heights anyway. (He was also three weeks deep into an illness during this recording and still showed up, which tells you most of what you need to know about him.)
How a coach actually gets made
Tom’s coaching education came from four stacked sources, ranked by his own honesty: a sport science degree from Curtin University that taught him real physiology and, in his words, zero vertical jump coaching; years of obsessive self-experimentation; training athletes informally before he was even qualified and learning through their results; and the endless online sorting of good information from garbage. That last one is his pitch for coaching generally, and as the athlete in his program I co-sign it: I know plenty about jump training, and any idiot can Google a program, but periodizing a year so you peak in June without breaking in March is a different profession. Tom and Austin studied so their athletes don’t have to; the app tells me what to do, and the questions are always answered when I want to learn the why.
Founding JumpX: green before blue
The origin story, told fully for the first time: Tom and Austin Young dunked together for one to two years as friends who talked training constantly. Right as Tom graduated university, Austin wanted to move from in-person coaching to online and had already built a website; Tom planned the same path solo. One meeting settled it: complementary strengths, better together. JumpX was born (the brand was green before it was blue, for the deep-lore collectors), and the training model has remained essentially the same ever since: individualized programming, heavy strength bias, athletes like me as the proof of concept. They signed me the day after my first Eastbay, right before I turned 16, which remains the best bet anyone’s placed on me.
The merger: Jump Master X
And the news behind the new name: JumpX has joined forces with Jordan Kilganon’s Jump Master ecosystem to form Jump Master X: Tom and Austin’s coaching engine plus Kilganon and Brody Stevens on the technique side, the custom-coaching tier Kilganon described wanting back in episode 47 now fully staffed. The courtship was appropriately funny: Kilganon quietly interviewed JumpX’s long-term athletes for honest reviews, and a month before the announcement he cornered me with weirdly casual questions about how JumpX had been treating me. I thought he was recruiting me away. He was doing due diligence. The athletes all said the same thing, the deal closed, and the best technique mind in dunking now shares a roster with the strongest programming duo in it. As the guy whose training comes out of that pipeline: it’s a good time to be coached.
Tom is “Ask Dunks” on Instagram, and Jump Master X is where the coaching lives. Thank you, coach, for the four inches and counting. Next episode: getting flown out for a dunk contest. Comment with your conversion of 310 kilos without a calculator, liars.