369 - Run Smarter, Not Harder: The Proven Formula for Speed Without Suffering
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon discusses the Purple Patch Run Squad program, offering personalized coaching for $99/month with a 25% discount for the first month. He highlights the success of Pasquale Romano, a 60-year-old athlete who achieved a half IRONMAN PR and first age group win. Dixon breaks down running performance into five components: cardiovascular conditioning, muscular resilience, tissue durability, economy of movement, and biomechanics. He emphasizes the importance of frequent, easy running, strength training, and leveraging multi-sport workouts to build resilience and reduce injury risk. Dixon also cautions against over-reliance on super shoes, recommending neutral shoes for daily use and limited use of super shoes for speed work and racing.istent, non-intensive training.
If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
1:00-3:05 Promo
3:37-6:53 Intro
7:14-18:34 Part 1
18:37-45:32 Part 2
49:33-end Super Shoes
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
Just before we get going with the show, I've got a couple of things to tell you about. Firstly, if you're listening today and you're a runner, in fact, you decided to take on the big challenge of maybe a half marathon or a marathon towards the end of this year, we've got a very special opportunity for you. We've taken our run squad program, which is the most proven method to get ready, stay injury free, and unlock not just performance, but also fun in your marathon journey. And we've patched it up with a very special experience. You're going to get some personalized coaching. You're going to be a part of a group with a whole bunch of access to the whole purple patch coaching team, and you're going to get your tailored program that brings you all the way into your race day to ensure that you can be successful. And it is for a one time feat of $99 a month. It is the most affordable program you can possibly get to amplify your running performance. I'm going to leave a link in the show notes for you. Check it out. It's a wonderful promotion, and if you don't like it, even more special is the first month, we're going to give you 25% off so you can get involved, get up to speed and get you accelerating, based on many of the principles that we talk about in today's show. Secondly, and I'm going to say this really proudly, it echoes to what I just talked about. Purple patch programming works. Look short term interventions. They can spice up personal performance. But the stories that I really love are of ones of enduring performance evolution. I want to tell you about a purple patch athlete that I coach, Pasquale Romano. He's been a purple patch athlete for many years. He's one of the most consistent athletes in our program, and he's not, by his own admission, a natural athlete. He's not like he's coming to this with these great physiological gifts or anything like it. But at the age of 60 years of age, last weekend, he had another half Iron Man, PR at 60 years of age. And guess what? After being all these years in the sport, he cracked the code. He accomplished his first age group win. Why do I tell you this? Well, because you can get faster. You can unlock performance time and time again. You can be like Pat. He is the finest example. It isn't about throwing up obsession or just dumping loads of hours at the challenge. In fact, Pat doesn't have many hours. He's a very busy executive and family man. It's all about smart programming, building great habits, embracing team. And so if you want similar results, feel free to reach out to us directly for either one of these programs. If you want to learn more, why don't you set up a complimentary needs assessment, whether it's run squad program, whether it's tri squad or coaching all the way up to me, reach out to us info at purple patch fitness.com that's info@purplepatchfitness.com We'd love to continue the conversation, and with that, let's break apart running today. 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 03:35
And welcome to the purple patch podcast as ever your host Matt Dixon, and today we are going to revisit running. In fact, we're going to break it apart. And this is going to be a show that, if you're listening today, and you're a triathlete of all distance, whether it's sprint, Olympic Half Ironman or Iron Man, and also if you're a runner, whether it's 5k 10k half marathon or even marathon and ultras. This is a show that is going to be very, very useful for you, and you don't need to be a purple patch coached athlete to take the principles and apply it to your own journey. You see, when it comes to it, there are a ton of theories and methodologies around how to best train for improved personal performances, and they answer questions around, should you hit a certain number of hours or a certain number of miles every week of training? What are the critical, specific interval workouts that you might need to do? Should your emphasis be more on long, slow distance, or should you have a weighted emphasis around short higher intensity is integrating wall breaks smart, or is it just a sign of weakness? In order for you to answer those questions, I thought it'd be really helpful to break down in the most simple and understandable tones. What are the actual components, the different components? Opponents that make up running performance. I also want to, with that in mind, investigate what are the common limiters that we see for triathletes and runners, particularly those that are going the journey a little bit longer distance running, marathons, Ultras, Iron Mans, etc, what are the common things that undo race performance so so for so many athletes, and with that in mind, number three, how should these components and the limiters influence your approach when you start building your training Pro, when you get that locked in, it's going to be empowering, because you can step into every training session with more confidence. So this isn't today about me telling you how to build a running program. Instead, it's before that. It's taking running and breaking it down and investigating what actually goes into running performance. And by the way, I'm even going to add a little bonus today, and this is by request, but at the end of today's show, I'm also going to have a quick snippet on Super shoes. Most of you guys are familiar around super shoes. Yes, the shoes that you can put onto your feet to get that extra two or 3% of speed out of yourself, they're, quote, great, but they also come with a cautionary tale. And so now I'm going to investigate and give you my opinions on how best to leverage technology so that you can go faster but not end up on a physical therapist treatment table. All of that at the end of the day in the bonus section. And so it is today, running broken down in your pursuit of you, loving running, staying injury free and ultimately getting faster. It is time for the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 06:58
Yes, folks, the meat and potatoes, we are breaking down running. Now I'm going to have my opinion today, but I hope it's going to be very, very helpful for you. Let's start with part one. We want to break down the different components of running. What goes into you, getting faster, staying injury free, unlocking enjoyment of doing this sport that is ultimately very, very healthy. Well, let's start with this, an understanding, a realization and acceptance that it is incredibly common for amateur runners and triathletes to experience injuries when they are going on their training journey. You register for a race, you're excited, you start training, but the data suggests that somewhere around 40 to 50% of training marathon runners end up having their training interrupted due to musculoskeletal injury. Triathletes, multi sport athletes, it'll it's a little less, but it's still around a third, 30% or so of triathletes end up with their training interrupted because of injury. And yet, when you take a step back, the vast majority of training programs and coaches prescriptions of workouts out there just leverage the same old, tired, classic training programs that have typically been designed around the approach that elite runners take. The only thing that they do is they take these elite runner programs and they dilute the expectations in terms of total weekly mileage or duration, but ultimately, still in there, keeping the backbone of the key workouts. You might do a little bit less, but you still have the long run nearly every week, the fartlech workout, that speed play, the tempo run, mild discomfort, and, of course, the interval base runs. And these programs tend to be applied mostly in the name of tradition, I would argue. And I feel like often without anyone really administering the program, prescribing the program, executing the program, actually pausing and asking just a few really simple questions. Hang on, what are we actually trying to achieve here? I know we're trying to get ready for a race. I know we're trying to run faster, but what are we building here when it comes to Jimmy, Jane, whoever the athlete might be, what actually goes into an amateur runner, not a very, very fast, gifted, time rich Canyon runner, but what goes into helping an amateur runner with lots of other busy things in their life, being successful? And also, what are the things that we're seeing as coaches that are the limiters of running for. Performance for amateurs, those of course, express themselves, typically late in a marathon or running off the bike in a half Ironman or Iron Man. Where do athletes fall short? Where do they struggle? What do athletes actually experience that leads to their race performance, ultimately even underwhelming? And so I'm going to try and answer these questions in the most simple terms possible, and I'm going to ignore, as I go through this three very important factors, because it's not part of the conversation, but it is important. And so I'm going to take out three factors that absolutely go into your race day performance. Alrighty. Those three are number one, fueling and hydrating with exogenous carbohydrates to deliver prime performance. So you need to stay hydrated. You need to make sure that you're adding fuel, particularly in the longer distance racing. So fueling, we're not going to talk about that today deliberately. The second component that's very, very important is your mindset. How you actually manage pain? That's a part of prime performance. How do you actually set the right mindset? That's an important discussion. We're not going to have it today. And then finally, how do you take your fitness and distribute it over the course of the race. In other words, your pacing, again, critical I understand, but not a part of this conversation. Instead, we're going to anchor more on the physical preparation. Alrighty. So what goes into running performance from the physical side? Just bear in mind as you listen today. I understand fueling, I understand pacing, I understand mindset. Those are all important to dial in and get right. But what do we need to do in the pure, simple terms around running readiness? Alrighty. So with that in mind, I've identified five key components, and these all interlock almost to be your running fabric. Who you are as an athlete. There are five things that we want to work on as amateur runners, amateur triathletes, to improve your running performance. If you think I've missed one, reach out to us. Info@purplepatchfitness.com
Matt Dixon 12:19
tell us what I'm missing here. I guess I should say, is, I'm going to do this. I'm also not talking about technology. I'm going to talk about that at the end of the show. But here are the five components already. Number one, cardiovascular conditioning. So that is training your heart, your lungs, your delivery system, so your cardiovascular system that goes all the way out building your aerobic engine so that you can sustain effort and process negative byproducts that emerge from you doing the activity. Cardiovascular conditioning, very, very simple. You need to train the heart. This is an endurance discipline, and the whole cardiovascular system. And as we go down from the heart pumping, delivering out all the way through to gas exchange that's occurring in the capillaries, that is a critical component of training to becoming a better endurance athlete and therefore, aka, a better runner, we need to train the heart. Fantastic. Number two, the second component, muscular resilience, training your muscles to handle the load of the longer efforts, especially under fatigue, it's big part of it. As you're running off the bike, you are going to start your half marathon several hours into the race, you're going to start your Ironman. Many hours into the race, when you're doing your marathon, you need to be able to maintain form mechanically at mile 2021 22 all the way to 26 so training your muscles, your prime movers that generate propulsion training them to handle the load of longer efforts. That's a second component, and it's important, for the sake of this discussion, to separate those out, heart and lungs, let's call it that muscles. Those are our first two components. The third element, and it's nuanced, but it's slightly different, is what I would label tissue durability, alrighty. So that's about strengthening and improving the integrity of your tendons, your ligaments, your bones, so that you reduce injury risk and you can increase your training capacity when an athlete absorbs or executes too much training load relative to their musculoskeletal system being able to effectively absorb it. Things break. They get injured when an athlete ramps training load too quickly. So goes week 12345, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, very, very quickly. Think things break, they get injured. So tissue durability is different than muscular resilience. So now we have three components. You've got heart and lungs, you've got muscles, you've got tendons, ligaments, okay, bones. That's tissue durability. That's what we're going to label this. The third element is your economy of your movement. Now, if you're an ultimate bill that's like your miles per gallon, can you improve your running efficiency through frequency, through improved motor patterns, in other words, neurological conditioning and technical development, that's a really important component, because at any given pace, can we reduce the physiological cost? If you're a car, it's fine tuning the engine to get more miles per gallon.
Matt Dixon 16:58
That's why I like to use that energy. So economy of movement is a really important component. And then finally, generally just biomechanics and form optimizing your own individual and we all have individual, your own individual, strident movement patterns to prevent breakdown and to maximize your effort, giving a speed return slightly different than economy of movement, okay, which is just about lowering cost, if you want to think about it in those terms, biomechanics in form is maximizing speed and ensuring that you're not having mechanical breakdown, therefore injury risk and in conjunction, hand in hand, making sure that you're not getting injured so you're getting more improvement in that Okay, so these are the five components that we build the conversation around. Let's just label off one more time, because it's important, as we go through the discussion that you remember them, heart and lungs, cardiovascular conditioning, muscular resilience, staying power for the length of the running journey. Number three, tissue durability, making sure that your body doesn't break down your tendons, muscles and ligaments. Number three, reducing cost, okay, so economy of movement, and finally, number four, biomechanics and form. Those are the elements you can think about it in many ways if you want to improve your running. Those of your pillars that should inform our thinking when it comes to building training programs. Okay, that's and this is a gateway to think about. That's what should inform any coach's thinking as we go through that. So as we lead to part two here, then we say, okay, if those are the components of running, what are the limiters? Where do you an amateur runner tend to go wrong? Where does performance decline occur. Where does frustration emerge? What are the limiters? If we throw a blanket, what goes wrong for triathletes running off the bike longer distance, or for runners when they break down? Well, if you have ever experienced a marathon run off the bike in an Iron Man, or if you've ever experienced the last few miles of a standalone marathon. Perhaps you've been right in that very, very painful part, chasing towards the finish at mile nine to 13 of a half Ironman, or even a standalone weekend half marathon. That's a big thing for you, and you just go, this is really freaking hard, but I'm goal driven, and I'm trying to maximize performance. I want you to think back and ask yourself, What's the actual biggest challenge or limiting factor? And the answer is, for most athletes, nine times out of 10, the challenge is not you running out of Puff, the cardiovascular fitness is seldom the limiter. So far as, Oh, I'd love to run harder, but I just, I just can't maintain it. It's too painful up here for most amateur athletes, that's not the limiter.
Matt Dixon 19:02
It isn't global, systemic stress of the heart in your mouth and your legs burning with that sensation that so many of the less informed would label lactic acid. It's not that. Think about it. It's not what it is typically, is something that I would label mechanical fatigue. Your heart rate isn't massively high relative to what you could get it up to in training. You've got plenty of energy, assuming you fueled well, but those legs down there, they're not listening to you anymore. They don't behave. They're stiff. You lose your spring, you lose your power and your step. You feel like you're limber and mobile and supple power generators are replaced by stiff and rigid, almost toothpicks you simply can't get your body to hold good form, to retain that economy that you chase, to ensure that you can maintain propulsion that you. Would usually get from normal running, your steps get less spring they get shorter. You have mechanical muscular fatigue. You have a drop off in your biomechanics. Quite often, you lose your posture, you start to tip down, or you lean back with the hips forward. You have a huge reduction in economy, and therefore an increase in cost. And suddenly, before you know it, you're frustrated. And it's even more frustrating because you think, I've still got the fitness, but these things aren't behaving. It's mechanical fatigue that is the limiter. And the reason I highlight this is because we want to set up an approach where, very simply, you've got a mission to build a recipe for yourself, a performance recipe, a training recipe with the very best training possible To address these challenges. How do I overcome the mechanical fatigue aspect that just inflicts a run off the bike or the later stages of a marathon or half marathon, you need to show up with fitness, but you need to be ready to thrive for the long run. And I would argue that our success when we think about building a program for an athlete is you want to stay healthy. That's really important. You want to improve your economy. You want to become a better runner where the cost goes down. You want to boost your tissue integrity. The musculoskeletal system. Wants to be able to absorb more and more training at a higher and higher load to drive the ceiling of your performance up, and you want to give your muscles the staying power to carry you throughout the journey. And ultimately, you want to also improve your technique, biomechanics, and the improvement of that is powerful, not only to get faster, but to reduce the risk of breakdown.
Matt Dixon 22:04
And when you layer all this together, you start to develop strategies to implement across training to boost your performance potential relative to the training that you put in. And so what I want to do is I want to go back through the list of five our components, and I'm going to highlight the components, and then I'm going to anchor the purple patch approach to it. How I think about it, as the head of purple patch, how do we address these components, and how do we think about them in terms of training the different elements so that we serve the need of amateur athletes. These are absolutely core when we talk about this, if we're working with a member of the run squad program that I talked to, talked about at the top of the show, the tri squad running off the bike, obviously being a prerequisite. And of course, one to one coached athletes, whether it's with me or one of the purple patch team. These are infused into the fabric of the approach of every single purple patch athlete, and I believe, by the way, a core, central component of our success. And I hope that when you listen to this and you get some takeaways, you can say, Ah, I can apply this to my own journey, and even I can ask my coach if we can add some of these components. Or, if not, why not? What's the limit on this? Why would you not want to do this? Okay, so I'm going to draw all of these components because I think it's foolhardy not to think about those five components when you think about building a SMART program for any amateur athlete that wants to improve and get better and accomplish good things. Now, as you listen to these five components again and we break them down, I want to highlight one other thing. You're almost guaranteed, almost guaranteed, that you won't find all five of these components represented in the vast majority of training programs out there, whether it's standalone running programs, Marathon programs, Ironman readiness programs, coaches just don't tend to think about it in these terms. And I'm not sitting up here just saying, and I know better, etc. I'm just warning you, you won't get this in an off the shelf program, alrighty. And so the only way that you're going to see all five represented, as far as I can see, is from coaches who have decided to copy and paste our running training program into theirs. Yes, I see you, Mr. Australia. I saw what you did there, and that's okay. There's plenty of space for everyone. But next time, if you could just ask, it would be great. This is, I hope, influential for coaches. If you're listening to a coach Joking aside, feel free to draw these elements. That and apply them into your own methodology, because I think it's going to help your athletes and your runners be healthy, get faster and have fun. And that's ultimately all I have. So let's go through them, five components, once again, pretty briefly. Number one, remember cardiovascular conditioning, build your aerobic engine to sustain efforts and process byproducts. So how do I think about it in these terms? Well, firstly, running. If you're a triathlete, you want to run. You need to run. You're running off the bike. If you're a standalone runner, doing five Ks, 10 Ks, half marathons, marathons, etc. Running is the central sport, and so we should chase cardiovascular conditioning through running. Okay, it's an important component. It's not anti running this message, but there is good value when we think about cardiovascular conditioning that you build a lot of the running training program, quite easy conversational. You want to do it quite a lot of it easy conversational. And it's beneficial to quote, hit the heart with high frequency already. Now, there's other benefits of doing high frequency. I'm going to explain that in other components, but high frequency. So the baseline of running training is a lot of your running should be pretty frequent, okay, almost daily, would be the quote that I would say with a lot of it easy, conversational effort and real caution, real caution on too much over distance running when it comes to standalone runs, alrighty, I would really be cautious on doing too much over distance, long, long running. I would also add to that a Second caution of doing too much sustained, high intensity work. So that's long tempo runs for amateur athletes, that's higher intensity. Track intervals, eight by one kilometer, four by two kilometer. You want to be very, very cautious with most damages doing that type of running if our goals are to get faster, to maintain health and to unlock fun, alrighty. So easy, frequent, be careful of the long run.
Matt Dixon 29:34
Be careful of the high intensity, sustained high intensity. Okay, so, but running is the component point. The second thing that we think about though, though in when it comes to cardiovascular conditioning only, is to leverage other disciplines, and this could be a host of things that you might leverage, walking on the treadmill, particularly against grades, are going up hills. It could be riding on a bike trainer or outside on a bike. It could be the elliptical. I'm not a massive fan of it, but it could be the elliptical, a stair climber. Very, very trendy in gyms nowadays, good tool. It could be swimming. It could be rowing ergometer, directly transfers into improved running performance. There is no rule in running preparation. Iron Man half Iron Man marathon, half marathon. There is no rule that you condition your cardiovascular system via the prime discipline, which is running. I do believe that we want to primarily be running, but we should leverage other disciplines. And by doing that, it proves typically to be a huge unlock, an unlock of reducing risk, introducing variants which the body likes. And on top of it, it is a gateway to hit higher intensity, in fact, very, very high intensity training that many athletes just simply can't execute in running, very high intensity with much less impact on subsequent training days and much quicker recovery. If you have ever had an athlete that likes to swim high high intensity, bounce back straight away, you go and replicate a similar session on the track, in running, you've got multiple days of recovery. So when you look at the training program over a longer lens, multiple days in a row, leveraging multi sport is a way a tool to train the cardiovascular system with higher intensity training and quicker recovery. So we've got three things as recovery. There frequent easy running, becaution on the over distance and the higher intensity. Number two, training with lower risk via the multi sport approach, walking on treadmills, elliptical trainers, rowing ergometers, stair climbers, swimmers, etc, so that you can get greater variance and lower risk, but also as a gateway to actually train harder do higher intensity work. So the takeaway from cardiovascular conditioning is to broaden your perspective and your vision of what it takes to be running better you want. To have high, high conditioning fitness of the cardiovascular system, but I would encourage you to design an approach that keeps you in the game and practicing well. So we have a saying, Take no bad running steps if you're chasing cardiovascular conditioning by increasing more and more running total volume, and your form is declining, risk amplifies and you get tired. So leverage multi sport, and it's going to get you there. And you're even going to raise the ceiling of performance from a cardiovascular standpoint by hitting short part intensity with rowing ergometers, bike trainers, swimming, whatever your tools that you might leverage, okay, cardiovascular conditioning. That's how we think about it, and we isolate it, boom. Number one. The second component that we turn to is muscular resilience. Muscular resilience. Think, remember what that is, train your muscles, your quads, your glutes, your hamstrings, your calves, etc, your running muscles. Train your muscles to handle the load of longer efforts, especially under fatigue. And so let's not dodge it. In order for you to have staying power in running, you kind of want to run. Okay? It's weight bearing. You've got to run. You need to run. It's Central, and so I am not anti running. It's important, but in order for you, and this is time served, this is such a long time. This is me going back 20 years and seeing people being successful. If you want to build muscular resilience. Run Well, maintain really good form, okay, and do it frequently. There is something magical about an athlete running with great consistency. I am not a fan of an athlete building a running program with three big runs a week. That's a big mistake that I see. I've got my tempo run, I've got my interval run, I've got my long run, and I'm going to rest and recover between lower those down, spread it out and run more frequently. You will get greater injury risk reduction. You will get improved muscular resilience, you will have staying power, alrighty. So that's one component. Run frequently. Run off and remember most of that running can be easy. That's a really powerful tool. Running shouldn't be hard, okay, you're gonna have to sometimes go hard, but for the most part, it should be easy. That's one component to building muscular resilience. But then we have proven and these are proven tools that you can leverage it. Okay, what are your disposal to improve muscular resilience? Well, first is strength training. Strength training is absolutely critical improves muscular resilience, 100% okay, even relatively short rep, higher weight, muscular resilience, huge, massive component strength training. By the way, add to this strength training all the latest research shows that including strength training in your endurance programming has a direct reduction of risk of cramping. So if you're a runner and you're not doing strength, you've got an amplified risk of cramping, and that's a runner's nightmare. So strength training is a huge component. That's why we have athletes infuse strength training all the way through their program, year round, even in the weeks as they get ready for a half marathon, a marathon, an Ironman, half Ironman, etc. Okay, so strength training is number one. That's great. Then we have more specific and related multi sport disciplines. So the scope of options here gets a little bit less because we're not gonna build running muscular resilience by swimming a ton. And so this is more rowing. That's one so being on an elliptical rower, low cadence bike riding, so you're doing what we call strength endurance, a lot of high torque work, and then also, for many athletes, Hill base walking or stair machines, typically that's on a treadmill or a stair machine inside, but it can include hiking outside in hilly terrain. This is a route to build strength resilience and radically reduce risk. It amplifies your impact, and these disciplines that I highlight cross pollinate to your running performance. So we're not on the bike doing low cadence gear work because of recovery. It's to get faster at running. We're not on a rowing ergometer doing high intensity intervals because we're just training the heart. It's to build muscular resilience as well, and it cross pollen. It's really, really, well, it's not highly specific, but locks in together with a fabric, particularly when you combine it with really consistent running, high frequency easy running. So that's the muscular resilience side. So what do you take away from that? Well, the big takeaway is you don't need to suffer
Matt Dixon 35:23
and run with bad form to drive and improve muscular resilience again. You don't need those suffering long runs with declining form, where you have amplified injury risk without many of the benefits and then having a negative impact on your readiness to train the next day. Don't view multi sport. The second takeaway as just general conditioning, leverage it as a tool to build muscular resilience so that you run faster. That's the big takeaway on that. That's what we're doing. These are highly specific, multi sport workouts that infuse into your running program to help you become a better runner. It's not general conditioning, really important tissue durability. So reminder, when we talked about tissue durability, it was tendons, ligands, bones. We want to make sure that your frame can absorb the training that you want to execute. We want to have less time out of the game. We want to increase your training capacity. Alrighty, so there is a muscular, skeletal it's a little bit like the chassis of your car. This is way under appreciated, but without it, you have got radically amplified injury risk. In fact, the greatest cause of injury is somebody training their aerobic system, their cardiovascular system, without the musculoskeletal integrity to absorb that training. The heart's not the limiter, it's the Achilles, it's the hamstring, and the insertion and the hamstring, it's the low back, etc. And so you are going to quickly reach a training capacity ceiling, and you won't be able to train more without the frame to support it. It is the biggest thing, and this is why injuries pop up. Athletes are very excited. They've signed up for a race, and they radically ramp their cardiovascular training, but they don't have the tissue integrity. It's huge. This is why with purple patch, and when we come back to the purple patch, it's the same thing. These things are related strength year round, alrighty. So we're doing strength year round to build muscular resilience. It's also tissue integrity. It's critical, and it's also why we tend to love athletes to do very, very easy running, high frequency consistency is queen. It is the unlock. So early in the year, we're infusing running almost every day, but it might be 10 or 15 minutes after a strength workout. It might be 10 minutes off a bike, if you're doing a low cadence bike, it might be a 50 minute soul filling run, but it's almost daily, and gradually over time, we're not even chasing fitness earlier in the year, we're building tissue resilience. Now fitness is sneaking up, but then at a certain point of the year, we're ready to absorb the work.
Matt Dixon 38:10
We ramp up and make the running training harder, and hey, bingo, the body is ready to absorb from a musculoskeletal standpoint, huge. So what's your takeaway from this as a listener? You don't need to suffer to drive tissue integrity. You shouldn't be anchoring and thinking, Can my body absorb it? I need to just increase my distance, my weekly miles, the total hours that I'm running. That's not the route. You don't want to go on big, long runs where your form declines and injury risk goes up. You don't want to compromise your next day and your day after that training. You want to hit consistency. And so I invite you to take the long lengths. Consistency is queen, easy and often, and your takeaway, if you're not doing strength, you want to think about doing strength, because that is a core component of building that third area of running performance number four. Starts get interesting. We got two to go economy of movement. Alrighty. We're looking to improve running efficiency and neurological conditioning, in other words, motor programming, brain talking to muscles. How can you do that? Well, the truth is that running performance in a marathon, a half marathon, running off the bike in triathlon, it's not about how fast you can go. What it's about is how fast you can run and maintain over the distance of the event, and a huge prerequisite of improving that run speed over the event is your economy reducing how much your effort costs. Okay, it's critical in late stage, standalone run performance, as well as half Ironman and run and so how do you do it? Well, it sounds. Like a broken record, but number one, practice makes perfect on this. It's a little bit like playing guitar. Don't play guitar for two hours every Sunday and think you're going to get better. Play 20 minutes every day. If you do it every day, it's programming the dialog between your fingers doing what your brain's asking. It's a bit like running for that your body gets more economical as the motor patterns are primed and developed, a little bit like lighting up all of the branches of a tree. And we do that through frequency. So another reason to do high frequency running with a lot of it easy is actually for economy and movement. What else improves our economy? This is where things get a little different. Number one, strength training. All research shows, and certainly our experience shows, it's why, for years and years and years we've had year round strength training, that when you integrate strength training, it has a direct imprint on improve running economy. All right, so a core element of you running faster is economy, and by you investing in strength training, it's not just about injury reduction, it's run performance. It's going to improve your running economy as well as your tissue resilience. So there you go. But the third element and where we get really interesting, a little different, we deviate. Here is speed and power. Alrighty, I've said be careful with sustained, high intensity running. That doesn't mean you shouldn't run fast. There are some really, really valuable form by mechanical improving sessions that you want to do. And you can do these on the flat high speed. You can do them against a grade, high power.
Matt Dixon 41:58
They both have value. But these are not, quote, hard from a cardiovascular standpoint, when we talk about doing running intervals, quite often, the image that shows up is a bucket on the side of the track with people throwing up. No, we want to have you running with good posture, nice and supple, because you're going to get the most explosion propulsion from supple muscles. And we want you to bam, reduce the amount of time your foot's on the ground and maximize propulsion. So we do that with fast running, and that's somewhere around 1520, 2530 seconds in duration, up to about 200 meters on the track, or the same duration against the grade with a hill interval, fast, fast, fast. And you can do a lot of these. As you start to develop, you might start with 10 by 212 by 200 you might go up to, I've gone as far as 30 times 200 but you never take a bad step. In other words, if you're 567, in and you're having a lot of recovery between this, you might run a 200 easy or 30 seconds easy, then take 30 or 60 seconds rest. So there's lots of recovery. Each one is a masterpiece. But if you start to lose your posture, your spring, your suppleness, your speed, you take a break, you go and run easy, maybe a 400 a couple of minutes rest, and then you go on to the next five. So it might take you quite a while to finish the 12 or the 15 or the 20 intervals, but every one is a master speed, and it's over speed. You're priming the muscles, and it is a direct connection between the strength training you're doing your general run conditioning, and it helps you improve your biomechanics and your economy. See a takeaway from this, don't skip strength number one, infuse frequent and often. Remember the guitar analogy already. Don't really care about the long run too much. Avoid taking bad steps quite often. At purple patch, we infuse this with integrating walk breaks into your training, then, of course, racing. So if form declines, take a walk break to reset and then embracing over speed, but form based sessions, these are not hard, but they are, oh, my goodness me, highly effective. Fast, fast, fast, or sorry, fast, fast, fast, boom, alrighty.
Matt Dixon 44:31
The final component, biomechanics in full, optimize your own individual stride and your own unique movement patterns. I see so many athletes get injured because they try and correct into some form of classic running style that they've read or are told is critical. But guess what? The way that you walk me slightly like a duck, maybe you slightly pigeon toed, or you carry your arm a little weird. There's a. Little course correction you can do, but that's not the key. Within the spirit of your natural gait and your pattern, we want to improve and work with what is imprinted all the way through our childhood into our adult life. And so shifting technique is less about some radical intervention, especially for time-starved amateurs, by the way, instead, we try to improve technique, improve your biomechanics, by doing technique promoting sessions. So we talked about those, some hill based form sessions, either walking on the treadmill, where it's easier and more intuitive to hold good posture and realize about activating that posterior chain, pushing off your toes, that's a good thing that transfers into good form based when running, also those technique centric speed sessions that we just talked about fostering better posture, better speed and awareness, and then doing strength sessions that help with kinesthetic awareness. So general athleticism, mobility and propulsion, leaping, bounding, etc. We're doing things that open the gateway for your technique and your body to move in more effective manners. So for me, when we think about biomechanical improvement, it's never no stop pronating. You need to move back to neutral. I don't like that. Your toes are slightly further out than the heel. Shift them in line. That's just going to lead to, typically injuries. Instead, do things that naturally guide the body in the direction you want to move them to. Alrighty. I would also add to this, by the way, as a takeaway, have the courage to infuse walk breaks on all and any long distance run that you're doing, because I don't want you practicing bad fall. I would break apart many over distanced runs that you do into cluster of Back to Back runs. So rather than just doing a two to three hour run, instead do a 90 minute run, a 60 minute run, a 50 minute run, day by day by day, so that you can build muscular resilience, but your biomechanics and form can be excellent on every single step, because one way to get better biomechanically is to improve and practice really good biomechanics. So don't or reduce or avoid the fatigued running, and do it really, really well. Then infuse into your program strength and speed. We talked about that in the economy side of it, going the two hundreds fast, but with great form, repeat lots of rest between and have the courage to integrate that as a training so those are the components. When we think about building a running program, yeah, it's cardiovascular conditioning, but don't just run. Yes, it's muscular endurance, but that doesn't mean you have to just pile on a whole bunch of interval workouts or longer running. We want to improve tissue integrity, so you need to do that sensibly, and we want to improve your economy and biomechanics. So that opens up health, it opens up speed, it opens up improved cost, and you go faster. And ultimately, if you've got the courage to do that, it's not rocket science. This is our job as the coaching team, to take all of these elements that go into making an athlete be successful. Take them all and put them together into a molded program and approach to develop and optimize each of those areas, all of them. I want you to be cardiovascularly trained. I want to have the muscular resilience. I want you to be healthy through tissue integrity. And I want to help you get improved biomechanics and lower cost. And that's my job as a coach to mold it. And it becomes the backbone of the approach to getting ready for Iron Man, getting ready for marathons, etc. It is the core essence of how we've been so successful in helping runners improved, whether they're getting ready for five or 10k whether they're getting ready for half marathon, Marathon performance. It's huge, and it is also also really important of why so few of our athletes, and I say this with great pride and truth, so few of our athletes get injured, and so many of our athletes find a positive relationship with running where they love doing it as a lifestyle. Alrighty. So I promise you some thoughts on Super shoots. What I thought would be helpful we think about Super shoes. Let's think about what's happening in those shoots.
Matt Dixon 48:28
They tend to have pretty thick padding. But inside a shoe, super shoe, there is a carbon plate already. So I'm adding this image. You can look at this on YouTube. You can also add it in the show notes. There is a carbon plate. This is an image of a carbon plate that is infused into a classic, very popular super shoe right now. These are the backbone, pardon the pun, of why you run faster in them. It's not just because they're big and they're puffy, but effectively, in these shoes, you have got a trampoline. And what that means is, when your weight is dropping into the ground, because both feet are off the ground, that by definition, is running, and your landing foot lands into the ground, it creates a response. And rather than your Achilles, your calf, the rest of your muscles absorbing all of that momentum into the ground, multiple times your body weight, and then needing to respond to create acceleration. You're landing on a trampoline, and it is doing a lot of the work for you, alrighty, that's what you're running on, is a trampoline, and so it creates greater responsiveness, greater propulsion, and less deceleration you are running on a trampoline, and that's great. That's what the rules allow. That's what the advancement of technology is providing us. It is here most likely to stay. And so when an athlete says, Should I wear super shoes? Well, in racing, it's not such a bad idea to find the right shoe for you, because there is absolutely a performance benefit to it. I wouldn't be going and telling a professional athlete you shouldn't be running in those you should not take advantage of this thing. That's legal. It's a trampoline in there. But there is something to know about it, and your use of shoe, super shoes, that's critical, and that's that that trampoline, as I said, is doing a lot of work for you. So in other words, it's reducing the work that has to be done by the foot, the ankle, the lower leg complex, your Achilles, your calf muscle, etc. So therefore, if you are running frequently in a super shoe that's got a trampoline in it, and it's taking that workload away from that muscular skeletal system, over time, you're going to have radically reduced lower leg strength and stability. Okay, that becomes important, because the super shoe with its trampoline, trampoline like foam and carbon plates maximize propulsion, but reduces the demand on your lower legs and tendons. So it comes back to that component that we talked about, training the body to absorb your cardiovascular, aerobic work. If you, or one regularly trains in these shoes, it diminishes the natural strengthening effects of running, and it leaves you with weaker calves, ankles and feet. What comes out of it? Injury? It's occurring a lot at elite runners. It is a critical performance limiter. And so how do you overcome this? Well, number one, it starts with daily life, when you're going to the office, when you're walking around the world, I would first walk around not in any type of running shoe. All of the running shoes nowadays are over foamy, over cushiony, and some of them, like these super shoes, have trampolines in they are designed for running sport specific. Walk around in regular shoes, neutral, okay, the Adidas sambars, the chuck all stars, the vans, a lot of the skating shoes, a lot of the basketball shoes, very neutral shoes, where the foot gets plenty of space to walk around on a neutral service. Most people middle of the envelope don't walk around in running shoes. Don't walk around in your Hocus. It's not bad. You think it's helping your knees. It's actually weakening your lower leg, and long term, it's hurting walk around and give the opportunity for your lower leg to strengthen. Number one, already. Number two, most of your running training that you're doing go around in neutral shoes with low to medium padding. Alrighty, proactively adopt some of the lessons in today's show and make sure that you're limiting risk of injury, but don't use the big puffy shoes as a crutch. Alrighty. Proactively. Number three, strengthen knee down. So you want to strengthen the total body, you want to strengthen hips, back of quads, hamstrings, etc, but strengthen knee down. What I mean by that is number one, mobility around the ankle, the foot, the calf. That's he key. Strengthen tendons, muscles and bones in the gym, and maybe infuse a little bit a very short two to three minutes broken up, that two to three minutes of barefoot running in the grass. Okay, really, really helpful to do that and then leverage the super shoes for three main things. Number one, if you're.
Matt Dixon 52:24
Doing some of those speed form components, it's okay to use them, them no more than 200 meters in length for most runners. Number two, very occasional short runs for familiarity, get yourself used to them because you because biomechanics do change, so you want to do it a little bit, but very, very short. And number three, racing already, that's it. So I hope that helps guys, and I hope that I find you inspired. I promise you this, the components that we went through in this discussion are important for you to understand and appreciate so that you can make smart decisions when you tackle your run program. The recipe, ultimately, though, because it's pretty complex stuff, the recipe coming out of it should be simple and repeatable. Everything we discussed today, we at purple patch take on the role of molding it together in a smart personal program for you. So if you'd like to continue the conversation, reach out for a complimentary needs assessment. Share the episode please with anyone that you think might find this information beneficial. And as ever, following or subscribing to the show on your favorite place helps get us to reach other people. And we really enjoy that. And so this is it. It's the run. Remember our special run programming right now, month of July, it's going through personal coaching support, part of a group, $99 monthly. We'll leave the link in the show notes. And of course, if you're not so sure, just reach out to us. All right, we go now check out the link in the show notes, and please share with anyone that you think might be interesting information until next week. 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
Matt Dixon 57:28
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
Run Squad program, personalized coaching, injury prevention, running performance, cardiovascular conditioning, muscular resilience, tissue durability, economy of movement, biomechanics, strength training, super shoes, training recipe, mechanical fatigue, triathlon, marathon