368 - How We Help Runners Stop Getting Hurt—and Start Performing
Follow the Purple Patch Podcast at:
APPLE PODCASTS - SPOTIFY- AMAZON MUSIC - GOOGLE PODCASTS - YOUTUBE
Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon and Purple Patch Fitness Coach Max Gering discuss a case study on Gwen, a 43-year-old triathlete who has been dealing with recurring lower-body injuries. Gwen's training followed a fixed three-week high-load cycle, leading to frequent injuries. The intervention focused on a three-week cycle with intentional recovery, shifting from a swim-bike-run routine to a more varied approach. Swimming emphasized cardiovascular conditioning, cycling focused on strength endurance, and running prioritized tissue integrity. Gwen's performance improved significantly, achieving her best half-IRONMAN time without injuries. The key takeaways include the importance of out-of-the-box thinking and consistent, non-intensive training.
If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
00-:50 Promo
1:23-3:00 Intro
3:02-5:50 Athlete Profile
5:56-8:42 Diagnosis
8:48-25:30 Intervention
25:42-end Outcomes
Purple Patch and Episode Resources
Check out our world-class coaching and training options:
Tri Squad: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/squad
1:1 Coaching: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/11-coached
Run Squad: https://www.purplepatchfitness/com/run-squad
Strength Squad: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/strength-1
Live & On-Demand Bike Sessions: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/bike
Explore our training options in detail: https://bit.ly/3XBo1Pi
Live in San Francisco? Explore the Purple Patch Performance Center: https://center.purplepatchfitness.com
Everything you need to know about our methodology:
https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/our-methodology
Amplify your approach to nutrition with Purple Patch + Fuelin
https://www.fuelin.com/purplepatch
Get access to our free training resources, insight-packed newsletter and more at purplepatchfitness.com
Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
Let me tell you, there is no shortage of information out there. In fact, information, in many ways, has become cheap. It's hard to navigate through the blizzard of bullshit. But knowing what to do isn't the same thing as doing the right thing for you. And that's where purple patch comes in. We are the human in human performance with our tri squad and one to one coaching, you'll get more than a training plan. You'll get a whole coaching team, real connection, a personalized path that fits your life, whether you're a beginner or an experienced athlete. We're going to help you unlock your vest without burning out. Reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com to see what program fits best for you and your goals. We hope to see you on the train. We love it when people join us and have fun, because they tend to stick around, and there's a reason for that. Enjoy the show. I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the purple patch podcast. The mission of purple patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.
Matt Dixon 01:23
Matt and welcome to the purple patch podcast as ever, your host Matt Dixon and once again, joined as well. Matt scary and Max. Welcome Matt to the show. Thank you. We are back on case studies. This week is some of our favorites, where we get to go through real purple patch athletes, and we talk about some of the challenges and interventions that we go through, and outcomes of those interventions, hopefully all in the pursuit of listeners learning,
Max Gering 01:49
yes, and this is a very common one today, talking about injuries. And if you didn't catch the previous episode, the previous case study that we recently did think listeners really need to when they think about this is, don't get so caught up, of in of, oh, I don't struggle with this specific injury, or I do. I have different race goals. Just listen to the case study. Think about what the athlete went through, how we help them solve their problems, and figure out where and what is applicable to you. It doesn't have to be a one to one situation there.
Matt Dixon 02:20
Yeah. I mean, it's, there's a lot of stuff we'll find out today. I mean, we might have, you might be really, really resilient, but there's a lot of structural stuff we go through today with training and mindset and approach, and also a little bit of the fixed mindset that I think it really affects much of the multi sport landscape of this is how you train for something, put it in the meat grinder, and out it comes like a sausage. And she's gonna find out today. That's not the approach. So you've got Gwen. She's 43 years of age. Without further ado, shall we get going with this? Yes, let's do it. Alrighty, let's do it. So why don't you go through the profile a little bit, give listeners the profile,
Max Gering 03:00
yes, Gwen came to us at 43 years old, very ambitious and a committed athlete to the sport of triathlon. She was really passionate about it and wanted to have better success, which is very common, and she was going through a lot of cyclical frustration of just being injured. So she was competing in all distance of triathlon and all distance running, and she was either showing up to her race injured or she was showing up after being injured with a lot of low confidence. Both situations resulted in poor race performance and just really not enjoying the process, always in fear of, am I going to be injured? How am I going to perform?
Matt Dixon 03:38
It's going to resonate with a lot of athletes, it's incredibly frustrating. Ultimately, it often drives people out of the sport because the frustration, you know, when you're highly ambitious, you want to achieve your goals, and you're just getting sidelined, not because of laziness or lack of motivation, but your body just not cooperating. So we will go into challenges straight away with her, and we have to start with with the sort of injury cycles and what they were like for it, because I think it's really important. So firstly, most of her injuries were lower body, so low back hips, but particularly around knees, calves, Achilles, so classic, sort of what you would call running injuries, overuse injuries. I should say that there really wasn't anything for Gwen around nutrition, like under fueling. Per se, we are going to talk a little bit about nutrition, but most of her injuries were more mechanical in nature. We felt. In fact, there's an old adage that if you're consistently getting injuries, knees or down. That tends to be around training structure a little bit more, or maybe some supporting habits. Knee up, if you're getting stress fractures, up in the hip or anything, that tends to be quite correlated to nutrition. So this wasn't any sort of eating component so far as in the classic sense of the word. But I think the. Important, the biggest challenge for Gwen is she just the magic word of performance. She never able to hit consistency. She would do a few weeks of training, something would pop up. She'd have really compromised recovery, trying to think out of the box to get there, get back to health, start to build again. Something would come up. Something would come up two or three weeks of training, pop something else goes and, as you said, incredibly debilitating, emotionally, practically and physically to try and go and race when you're either navigating pain or you're healthy, but you've had a really poor run up so far as training consistency. So, um, so I think that was the that was the challenge. That's what we want to focus on today, mostly, yep,
Max Gering 05:48
then we should start with training. So going into the diagnosis of, you know, what was the issue? What was happening behind the scenes that was creating this cyclical injury cycle for her?
Matt Dixon 05:59
Well, and I didn't train Gwen directly. She was, she was a purple patch athlete, of course, but one thing I do know is a it was what I think is very, very common, and I'll labor it as a fixed mindset around training. And she was a triathlete. So she had three swims, three bikes, three runs. Of the three swims, there was one that was interval based, whether it's threshold or high intensity. There was one that was endurance based, and then there was one that was a little easier, the bike, same pattern, high intensity, whether it's threshold, high intensity, whatever it is, big resilience, one easy, one run, same thing. So it was 333, separate going through. She had a fixed number of training hours that she wanted to hit every week. She was a little bit higher on training. So she was about 14 hours a week, which I know doesn't sound high for some people, but higher than the most athletes, and her definition of success was hitting those hours. And then I think the one thing that was very, very important her case is she followed a routine of three training hours, training weeks in a row that you could designate as higher load. Sometimes they progressively built up. Sometimes they were all trying higher training load. So she had the classic, this is the normal three training weeks in a row, and then one week of full designated recovery and and that was classic, and it clearly wasn't working. And we're going to dig into that. The other thing I want to point out before we talk about, what do we do with this fixed mindset, three up, one down, three sports broken up. The same way is, we're not going to go into habits too much on this, but I did make a note here that we did adjust some of her habits as a part of this. We did have her increase her protein. That's but that's common across all athletes. Most athletes are not consuming enough protein. We did increase her total calorie count on a day to day basis. We did introduce a much heavier focus on post workout fueling that we talked about in our most recent case study as well, and we did focus on daily hydration as well. So those were there, but I don't think they were huge indicators on injured or not injured and and for the pursuit of this show, we're not focused on we're not going to focus on that. So just know that it's not just about training ever. So we should at least tip our hat to it. What we should go into is a little bit of intervention here. So so what did we do with Gwen with this overall focus and challenge?
Max Gering 08:41
Yeah, so, like any good intervention with an athlete, the first thing that's really important is helping the athletes at the lens, getting you know agreement on how we're going to approach this, this this challenge. And for her, it was starting with the over arching training structure of this three weeks on one week off. Yeah, later, there was changes that were made. There were changes that were made to the specific, specific workouts and what she was doing on a day to day basis. But the big thing at first was getting out of this three week on one week off, and actually getting ahead of recovery and shifting to a three week cycle, which you can break down for listeners.
Matt Dixon 09:19
Yeah, this really, I mean, it really is the, I would label it the classic purple patch way. And this emerged out of our pro athletes, actually. And I've talked about it on the show many times, but, but it was always okay. Look, we're looking to string together. We talked about this in the prior case study, long term consistency of really effective training. The challenge with training for three weeks in a row and then having one full week of recovery is by the time what my observation was when I was a younger coach, particularly with athletes that are hard charging, the Pro has been a great example. By the time we're in the. Third week, they're in survival mode. Their their ability to show up for the big sessions was compromised. Their fatigue creep was was building, and they were just tired. And then so that was, I would always see that third week of the three weeks of training being compromised and and then the fourth week was just desperate recovery, basically trying to get them to dig out of a hole. So when I took a step back, I looked at and thought, hang on, 50% of our training hours every month arrive a less effective. So it's in deep. It's basically in a hole or desperately trying to get out of it, where you're not forcing adaptations, you're just trying to desperately gain them out of this. So why don't we get in front, in front of deep fatigue and so introducing more deliberate, intentional recovery in every week, but then after every two weeks of training or so, and some athletes, they could only do 10 days, some they could go a little bit more. Remember Laura Siddle being able to do a little bit more, but having two or three days of rejuvenation and bounce back before they got into the pit and and having that structure was, I think the very first thing that with Gwen was really important. That took a little bit of bravery, because when you it's easy she's got three weeks in a row. That's how I get better. Clearly, it wasn't working. She was consistently injured, saying, we just want to introduce recovery. And in fact, the interesting part of it is that the athlete is not recovering more. They're just recovering before they desperately need it. So if you're not getting into quite as much fatigue, you bounce back after 72 hours, and you're ready to go again, and then you have a little bit more recovery, so you're really fresh for the next block. So that that was, that was part one, the second thing that I would say is, is shifting the mindset and the practical approach from swim, bike, run, you know, I talked about it. One high intensity, one endurance, one easier. That's the classic sort of approach, shifting away from there and saying, Let's just remove the modalities. Let's actually think about what you need to do to get ready. You need to, number one, have general fitness. So you need to develop the cardiovascular system. That's number one. So that's one thing we're going to target number two, we need muscular endurance. You need muscular endurance on the arms. You need muscular endurance on the legs to bike and run. So let's break apart that, and that's what we're going to try and do. And let's be more open to using different modalities to actually have you arrive with the cardiovascular fitness ready to carry you for the distance of the race, and the muscular endurance to help you get ready. And that really informed how we did under the banner of making sure that we could develop tissue health. And so that was, that was how we did that. And so that's
Max Gering 12:59
really important for the listeners to understand, because you say a lot in episodes when I'm not with you, that triathlon isn't swim, bike, run, it's swim, bike, run. That's a really good breakdown of what that actually means and how you want to think about yourself as this overall machine, and you need different capabilities, and not being so fixated on how you train those capabilities and create. Creativity may not be the right word, but I guess it goes back to not having a fixed mindset. From the story of the pros to now talking about Gwen, I think for athletes feeling stuck, it's you need to pause and zoom out and say, Is there a different is there a better way to do this? And that's what we'll
Matt Dixon 13:44
continue to break down. Yeah, I think the easy way, the way to the way to cement this, of what we're talking about here is probably on the run, because it's weight bearing and realizing, and for Gwen, this was really important, realizing that there is no rule in the rule book that says to Gwen, okay, in order for you to build muscular resilience for the run, you must run, you're allowed to use any modality you want. What you do need is you need cardiovascular conditioning and you need muscular resilience in your modality to get you ready for that. And so what I'll do is I'll break it down, and you can come back on top of meat, because I really liked your analogy, a machine that opens up rather than I've got to get ready for my swim, I've got to get ready for my bike. So here's, here's what we did with Gwen, the swim, I think was really important. The swim is, is, I think the important part when we talk about the swim is swimming does fit outside a little bit of biking and running, where athletes tend to bounce back quicker from it. So if you really hit an athlete hard with the swim, you can be tired afterwards, but it doesn't have the same impact, and that's because 90% of your body weight is displaced. By water, and so it's non weight bearing. So it becomes a wonderful venue for cardiovascular conditioning. It's a great place to actually do high intensity swimming, getting, oh, high intensity intervals. Really, really good. And of course, we wanted to do a lot of work for the muscular resilience necessary for the swim. If you want to have the muscular endurance for swimming, you've got to swim. So we actually, I would say, overemphasized the swim for Gwen and and did a lot of that swimming pretty hard outside of now, the one thing that we did want to be aware of is systemic recovery. So we made sure we did some easy day swimming on the easy days, but generally we went pretty strong, pretty consistent on the swim, and we went off to cardiovascular conditioning, and then sport specific muscular conditioning on the bike, which is mild weight bearing. This was the venue for her that we felt like we could get her race ready. But also really have injury avoidance. So I would say, at the heart of the whole program was cycling. And we we did the bike as the real focus. So we had two purple patch bike sessions a week. She was did on demand sessions, mostly hard for her to come to my live sessions because of her time schedule and her work schedule. And then she got one to two other bike rides outside, typically. So she wasn't too, too time-starved, but we really leveraged it. And I think the key point as it relates to running here, not just riding performance. We had to do a lot of strength based riding so low cadence work on the bike, Hill repetitions outside. We did a lot of that type of stuff,
Max Gering 16:52
just for the listener, in at most two minutes. What's the what's the carry over there? How does doing strength endurance work help somebody on the run physiologically quickly. It's
Matt Dixon 17:04
muscular. I mean strength endurance work on its bike. And when we talk about strength endurance, we're talking about doing intervals that are relatively strong to very strong at lower, what I like to say, synthetically low cadence. So depending on the athlete you're riding, certainly under 70 revolutions per minute, but quite often, 6050, even 40 revolutions per minute. Strength endurance, there is a pedal stroke component to it. There's a muscular recruitment component to it. So you're actually driving and bringing more muscle fibers into the usable mix, sparking up the dialog between brain and muscle. It's a really good resilience development tool. So it is a catalyst primarily for improved bike performance. And I think of everything that we do outside of the Terrain Management work, it is labeled the purple patch special source for a reason. I think it is the most valuable to interval type of session that an athlete can do for riding, but consistently, when an athlete tends to adopt lower lower cadence riding on the bike, it has a performance imprint on their running, and it's mostly just muscular resilience. I would say it probably brings more fibers into the usable mix. But that's questionable on running, because you're weight bearing and you're loading it, it just tends to be this really good muscle conditioning tool that tends to extend running, let's say, all right, should I carry on with running?
Max Gering 18:34
Yes, here's the work of running. Well,
Matt Dixon 18:36
talking of and because this is the, as is typically the pace the case, this is the venue of all injuries. I would say it's weight bearing. As you as you are landing on the ground multiple times, your body weight are going into the ground and come up back through the musculoskeletal system. So there's a high risk adventure. So we, we really wanted to shift the running. And she was running three days a week. She had her heel repetitions on running, which can be really valuable tool, but were limiting her. She track sessions bi weekly. We removed all of those. In fact, with her running, we removed all running intensity that took a lot of bravery. So we just said your running is going to be done primarily, really easy, conversational effort, walk breaks, integrated. And what we're going to do with your running for multiple months in a row is we are just going to try and not chase Fitness on the run, not chase speed on the run, but Chase tissue integrity. We're going to try and strengthen your tendons, muscles and ligaments, so that in a few months time, you can absorb more regular running training. We are going to shift our emphasis and not get it in running. We're going to get it through the swim and bike, and that was the primary thing. So the first thing we. Do is we removed all of the intensity. Took a little bravery. It comes back to that thinking about your body as a machine. Then we wanted to build real consistency and frequency. So we had that run project we did, running most days, quite short again, quite easy, walk breaks, a ton of walk breaks, and then we leverage something that many athletes poo, poo, they don't, they didn't feel the that it's having any imprint. But in fact, we consistently see is having a massive imprint. We put on a treadmill and did walking based intervals, putting it up against the grade. And the reason for that is it's actually really driving the posterior chain. So actually activating, and you being the strength guru, you know all about this, but, but driving that side of stuff, and and then the third component, or the final component, the fourth component was leveraging multi sport. And for her, it was a rowing ergometer. So we actually went outside of triathlon to get a triathlon ready, and that was the venue that we could include some more high intensity work, again, but we did it via a non weight bearing piece of equipment that we know does cross pollinate into running. Really, really well, even better than a bike, I would say, the rowing ergometer, particularly as a leg driven sport. So, um, so if we want to sort of go to headline news on this, it was short, high intensity on the swim, really focusing on the bike. A lot of work on the bike, both in terms of hours as well as key interval sessions, a lot of strength based stuff. And then on the running, just say, don't try and and this is a a fake truth, we're not trying to build fitness. All we're trying to build is tissue resilience. Now, the truth is that by running frequently, you're building fitness, you're building fitness, you're building motor programming and muscular recruitment, you're improving your technique. But it was always, I think it was important for Gwen that she could finish the session and not feel fatigued, and that had a huge impact on it.
Max Gering 22:02
Yeah, I think for an athlete like this going through an intervention like this, at first, there's a little bit of skepticism. But then, you know, three weeks in an injury doesn't pop up, six weeks in an injury doesn't pop up, and then you start to see the light and say, Oh, this is this is working. I feel really good. I feel really strong. Yeah, and I think it's, again, it's important to highlight for listeners that she was still working very hard, just deep, depressurizing the run. That's a word we use a lot at purple patch when talking with athletes. Is sometimes when there's an issue, we want to depressurize it, and we want to look, how can we solve it somewhere else, and depressurize this thing that's becoming a monkey on a back, which we don't want,
Matt Dixon 22:45
yeah, yeah. I love that phrase, and, and I think it's important the you talked about depressurizing, the one thing that we didn't mention, that I think was important for her, is she was, and still is motivated by events and race performance. Obviously, I think it was really important and liberating for her that we said, let's do a three month project on health and and are ruining one of the outcomes or the results of all this. But interestingly, that really created freedom for her, you, you know, we depressurized it. I think we did a really good job on the team for Gwen on that she was chasing tissue health. And interestingly, at the end of that three months, we had her just go and pop into a local half Iron Man, and she did her best half Iron Man that she'd ever done
Max Gering 23:39
by 19 minutes or so. Yeah, significant improvement
Matt Dixon 23:42
is significant improvement. And I think a big part of that is the key, the reason that's important, in many ways, it's less about she did a PR and amazing race. It was more a real jolt of learning to say, Hang on. You know, I it's not just about hitting perfection. When you build consistency like this, you can be performance ready. Because she went into that race with zero expectations. In fact, I remember her saying to us as a coaching team, she said, I haven't even trained for this like am I going to be ready to to even be successful? I most and she was especially worried about the run because she hadn't trained for the run at all. But in fact, what she had was layered weeks and weeks and weeks of lower intensity running, but really consistent running that she hadn't had for years before that. And I think that was really, really valuable, and I think it was high value. Yeah, yeah,
Max Gering 24:39
that idea of not having trained for something. It's there's not a one size fits all approach to training for these events. It's really important for people to realize it is, we didn't mention strength, which is a given for an athlete like this. Legulate, the strength a given for, first of all, any athlete but some middle aged woman whose injury prone strength is of the utmost importance. So it was two strength work. A week that was key, and then the intensity of those strength workouts was changing based off of what was happening in her training outside of strength,
Matt Dixon 25:08
yeah, I think, I mean, I deserve a smack on the bottom, because we didn't mention strength. And in effect, it was really important, because it was integrated and not dumped on afterwards. It makes it sound like we're dumping it on but we actually almost ran actually almost wrapped the endurance work around the strength sessions. And that became really, really important. I think for her, strength is a critical component for any athlete. But as you say in this it was everything.
Max Gering 25:34
And what that looks like is talked about this with our previous case study, David, the hybrid approach of workouts. So because she was focusing on run frequency, and not necessarily long run sessions. She was able to attack on runs to the end of a strength session and get more bang for her buck with her training time. Yeah, that was good.
Matt Dixon 25:51
Well, we go to outcomes and and I'll start the outcomes, which is by far, for me, the most important outcome. She hasn't been injured, that that's so you think about confidence, joy, opportunity for long term progression, just hasn't been injured, and and that that that's obviously tremendous. Race performances have improved. That's a nice byproduct. That's always good. But I think the other one for me is joy. You know, actually, what's that word that we always talk about? I always forget, it's fun. That's right, she's actually having fun. Which is, which terrific. But I think the key thing, one of the key lessons here, is out of the box thinking. And really, I think it's very, very difficult, and this was the case in Gwen's situation, it's very difficult to come up with a solution that's out of the box without someone else's perspective and guidance. That doesn't mean that you always need to have a long term coaching relationship, which we obviously believe with, but really helping someone come out and saying, This is how you need to do it. I think that was the thing that was the catalyst for when of having that different perspective.
Max Gering 27:12
Yeah, I really liked that, that outside perspective, that partnership and going through and being being coachable. She was very coachable. She was
Matt Dixon 27:19
very coachable. And so guys, I hope that Gwen's story, particularly if you are someone that is on the repeat pattern of injuries, the cycle of frustration and annoyance and pain, just know that you can break it. It is something that is sometimes a part of the sport, but it doesn't have to be a part of your journey. And and you can build a recipe if this story resonates. If you'd like to further the discussion, if you'd like to grab a consultation, one of our coaches to try and have you troubleshoot your own injury cycles. That's a great opportunity. You don't necessarily need to be coached by purple patch on the long term, but you might choose to have a consultation, one of the coaches to help us look at your situation to maybe come up with a strategic plan how we did with Gwen is absolutely open. Just feel free to email us directly info@purplepatchfitness.com we'll set up a consultation with you, and if you would like to set up a complimentary call to understand more about purple patch programming and how you can get involved in the program. More generally, feel free to reach out to that same email address info@purplepatchfitnisch.com We'll be delighted to set up see whether a good fit for you. Max. Thanks. You Very Much. Always a lot of fun. Enjoyed it, and also very valuable. And we will see you very soon on the show. Let's be real. Thanks, Matt. Take care. Guys. Thanks so much for joining and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the purple patch channel of YouTube, and you will find it there and you could subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe. Also Share It With Your Friends, and it's really helpful if you leave a nice, positive review in the comments. Now, any questions that you have let me know. Feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com or leave it in the comments of the show at the purple patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it, and so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, Let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the purple patch community with that. I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, doing whatever you do, take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Purple Patch, human performance, triathlon, injury cycles, training structure, fixed mindset, recovery, muscular endurance, cardiovascular conditioning, strength training, tissue integrity, race performance, coaching, athletic potential.