374 - Most Triathletes Do Off-Season Wrong - Here's the Fix
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
Welcome to Purple Patch Podcast! On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon discusses the importance of the off-season in triathlon, emphasizing it as a critical phase for performance breakthroughs. He highlights three open spots in their one-to-one coaching program and offers complimentary off-season needs assessments. Dixon outlines a five-step plan for a successful off-season: nailing basics like nutrition, hydration, and sleep; reducing training load by 30-40% while maintaining rhythm with strength and technical sessions; infusing fun and flexibility; tackling specific projects to address weaknesses or build strengths; and leveraging team and coaching support. He emphasizes the importance of consistency and intentional recovery to prepare athletes for success in the next season. If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
00-2:20 Promo
2:50-6:51 Intro
6:58-14:15 Step 1: Nail the Basics
18:14-34:30 Step 2: Shift your Training
34:35-40:02 Step 3: Have Fun
41:26-end Step 4: (Optional) Pick a Project
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
Hey, team, I've got two very quick things before we get going on with the show. Number one, I want to give you insight into a little bit of a heads up with something that doesn't happen too often. We have not one, not two, but we have three spots open on our one to one coaching program. This is a pretty rare opportunity. Typically, we sit at capacity for one to one coaching. And if you know anything about purple patch coaching, it is a very different way to do it. It is all encompassing, about integrating your sport into life, making sure that we drive great performance, and we've got quite the pedigree at that. But also, you don't just have the benefit of a dedicated coach that is at your side all the way you have in support of that whole team of coaches, including myself. And so if you would like to take this opportunity, these three spots are going to probably go in the next two or three weeks, reach out to us. It is absolutely pressure free. We're going to have a needs assessment. We're going to find out whether you are a good fit for us. We are a good fit for you. And if it locks in already, reach out to us info@purplepatchfitness.com We'll set you up. You're going to meet with Coach Max. He's going to understand your goals, and we'll see if you're a fit also 2026 Do you want to make this the best season yet for you? Well, guess what? It doesn't start in January. It starts in off season. It is a critical phase. And in the world of triathlon, there's a ton of information out there. It can be complicated. It could be time consuming to understand, but we're going to help you break through. We are offering complimentary off season Needs Assessment calls you can meet with one of our coaches, where we can understand your background, your goals, what your ideal pathway is to success. Now it might result in us finding that you're a great fit for purple patch, but either way, I tell you what, you're going to leave with some real, practical insights to make sure that you can go ahead and nail your off season, which I have said many times and we dig into on today's show, is the baseline, most critical phase for athletes to have performance breakthroughs. It's very, very simple to get involved. All you need to do is reach out to us info@purplepatchfitness.com let them know that you'd like a needs assessment with whether on our coaches and we will set you up. We are going to unlock your effectiveness and your off season magic. 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 02:50
And welcome to the purple patch podcast as ever your host Matt Dixon and today, we continue on our journey. Last week, we dug into off season framing why it's important. Today, we're going to go a little bit further. We're going to dig into the details and help you set up the most successful off season so that you can go to a whole nother performance level next year. Now let's do a quick recap of what we went through part one. You can go back, you can listen to last week's episode. I think it is worthwhile, but remember that we reinforce the off season is not a break between seasons. In itself. It is a phase of training. It shouldn't be an absence of structured training. In fact, it is the phase of training that builds the athlete that you're going to be next year. Imagine if you typically put in 10 to 12 hours a week of training well off season is suitably less hours than that. You want to reduce the number of total hours. You want to have more freedom, and you want to make sure that is restorative, but it is a critical less. It's not random, it's not nothing. And when you start to layer in this highly specific, really valuable set of reduced training over the weeks, over the months of off season. You know what occurs? You emerge ahead of the gate. Here's a nice way to think about it. You should consider it as your 100 hour head start on all of your competition. You go for a few months. You layer it on 100 hours, and so yes, you need a break, but the smart break that's going to set you up for breakthroughs next year. So many athletes just turn their back on the sport and wait till January to start their 2026 year. But by then, the best athletes have already found created a foundation, not a foundation, how you might think about it, but a platform of readiness. You don't want to be playing catch up your 2026. Begins right now. Now, before we dive into the details, I want to give you a little mini anecdote about this. A few years ago, we reimagined our off season. We were having a hard time of getting our. Athletes to buy in, even though we felt like and I always said, this is the most important phase of the year. And so we shifted how we started to discuss it, how we talked about it, even how we structured it. And the shift in approach ultimately resonated with their athletes. You know what they did? They bought into it. They said, All right, we'll buy into this. There's a concept, and it really, really helped as a framework for them. They still felt free. But I really remember, and I think most of the purple patch athletes that were around to that phase would endorse me on this, that that phase, that first year, was one of the most fun and cohesive parts of the whole year. It felt like everyone was engaged. They were having, what's that word, Barry? That's right, fun. And the impact was dramatic, not in November, December, January, February, but over the course of the next year. In fact, some might say this, the impact was stunning. You see, the following season, we qualified more than 130 athletes to the World Championships. We had countless others that smash personal best, that experienced personal breakthroughs. They up leveled, but more importantly, they weren't dragging themselves through the year. They were fresher, happier, in control because of the systems and frameworks that they had created when the stresses the demands of grain training and racing were less, and they ultimately became more effective, not just in their training, but in broader life. And so today we're going to get into the details. I want you to build your best off season ever, and we're going to do this by getting a look inside with how we do it, a purple patch, so that you can devise your own best approach, and you can catapult you to next year. It is now in the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 06:57
Yes, the meat and potatoes. What we're going to do is we're going to break down off season, and we're going to do it in a series of steps. These are the foundational steps that I think are so so important for you to be successful. And the first one is going to be really counterintuitive, but ultimately it is the backbone of our success. In fact, if we go all the way back to the pro athletes that I coach for all of those years, the squad of athletes of many of the names that you have heard of, that includes world champions, multiple Iron Man champions, etc. We built the whole ecosystem, the environment, around a single phrase. That phrase is something that you can borrow, and it's is very, very simple. All it is is nail the basics. The off season is the time for that, placing our foundational habits in place, where we get them rock solid and nail the basics habitual. When your training stress is lower, when race demands don't loom on the horizon, you actually have capacity to start to integrate these habits. Now this isn't sexy, but I tell you what, it's magic. These are things around foundational habits of nutrition, hydration, sleep practices and, perhaps most importantly, weekly organization. These are our invisible levers of performance. And going back to those pros, this was the approach of our pro athletes. It was the glue that bound all of those individual athletes into a team. And I would say this is how we locked in our universal practices for those professional athletes, and it proceeded to be the biggest impact to their long term progression and development. Now, amongst all of these habits, very, very simple post workout, fueling good foundation of eating, making sure you're hydrating, prioritizing sleep, integrating some strength training, etc, I think the one that really drove the needle, that acted as almost the cocoon for these to live in, was something that we called the Sunday special. This was Magic, and it unlocked consistency. It developed capacity, a sense of control, effectiveness, and enabled every pro athlete as it can enable you to be able to make smart decision making. It's actually going to leave you feeling like you've got more time. And it's not complicated, but I tell you what, it is very, very difficult to start to implement this habit when you're on a ramp of building training load. So once you get into heavy training, it's just not going to happen. So now is the time in off season when we actually have more capacity. We ings, we integrate some recovery, some rejuvenation, a little bit more flex in the program. You want to layer this down, because this is your system. Uh, there's going to be the unlock you want to put this practice in place right now. Now to explain this, let's take Sarah, one of our athletes. She was a really, really busy executive and a mum. She had a mum, two kids, two wonderful kids, actually. And in her first season of off season, I thought it was really, really interesting, because she arrived to us, and I looked at her training and I thought, well, she's actually pretty good here. She's not doing that much wrong. She was doing all of the appropriate training. She continued with her off season, she reduced her training hours, and when we looked at her training program, it was really pretty good. But she came to us, and instead of actually shifting her training approach, we just actually focused on some of these foundational habits. So what we did is we really wanted to get her consistent with something that was her Achilles heel, as it were, hydration. She was walking around, as I like to say, like a dried sponge. So we said, Let's really create a foundation of better hydration. Now this is outside of activity, but I wanted to boost her immune system. I wanted to stabilize her energy. I want to increase her cellular function. So hydration was something we decided to focus on. The other thing, with all of her competing demands, she was a very ambitious athlete. She had an executive job, and she also had two kids, really, busy. And so we actually really locked in some practices of getting good quality sleep, seven, eight hours of sleep almost every single night. And the big part of it, as we come back to is that Sunday special helping her manage all of these components of life into one process. She always did a good job of planning her demands and priorities at work, but I asked her to take a step back and said, Let's implement these practices across all other aspects as well. So let's start with life, what your role is, as a partner, as a mum, etc, and start to look after yourself a little bit. Let's integrate the life's non negotiables now. Let's prioritize your work, what you're going to get done, what can wait till next week. Let's have a vicious prioritization component into this so that you can feel like you've been effective and actually got control. And then we layered in these habits and her regular training schedule. Now, remember, it was off season training, so we had a reduced training load to get ready for this really, really valuable. So do you know what the impact is? And remember when we're talking about Sarah here, we didn't really change her approach to training whatsoever, so we repeated her regular training load as an athlete six months later. No real shifting training stimulus, no lowering of demands in broader life, she was stronger in every discipline, and on top of it, she had greater energy at work and at home. What we actually did by just infusing some habits and getting it organized into a smart, pragmatic system the Sunday special, we really helped Sarah build capacity, and we also laid a system that facilitated effectiveness. And so for her, the difference maker wasn't more training, it was better basics. And this is why I always talk about high performance isn't born just out of straight toughness and discipline. I don't like those T shirts that just say, embrace the grind or dive into the suck, whatever it might be, it's more about the system and the environment that you create. That's what high high performance comes out of. And this can't be isolated, as a note. This has to be one system, one approach that enables you to organize life's non negotiables, work priorities and your training and habits one system. That's why we call it the Sunday special, and it is the tool to really facilitate effectiveness. So the first step in off season is getting your habits locked in and creating your performance systems. Now, how we doing this at purple patch? Well, let me tell you, it's really, really tricky to do this alone, in isolation. In this type of action, habit development, behavior modification, it is so much better when individuals have a sense of shared mission and they have the systems of support and accountability, a little bit of a stick there from teammates and coaches. So in off season, we're not racing, we're not chasing cardiovascular fitness, but we still like to define challenges. So we have community challenges embedded in our programming around these basics. It might be tracking hydration as a team, and of course, obviously, as yourself as an individual. We might be really committing to sleep. Maybe it's post workout fueling. We also integrate simple educational touch points into the actual programming. So. So it's so much more than just swim, bike, run, strength, it's all encompassing. And this is the time of the year that we extend our arms, bringing everyone in, and they say, let's talk about these habits. Let's actually infuse this education into the program itself. I don't want athletes to look at the training session as check boxes, where as soon as they've done the training they're done instead, I want to think about it as all encompassing, trying to attack the things that are going to be really beneficial for the year ahead. And then we introduce team wide, not just yourself, not just Sarah in isolation, as using our vignette there, but team wide weekly planning sessions, integrating everything we talk about. Let's go through your life and family commitments, your work, your training, an opportunity to actually work directly with the purple patch coaching team to put these foundations into place. Because remember,
Matt Dixon 15:59
remember, if you wait, if you don't do this in off season, oh, I'll deal with it later. I just need a break right now. There is a simple pattern that repeats itself across all levels of athlete every single year, and I've been doing this for long enough now that I can tell you as a simple truth, it's true any athlete that waits and tries to implement these practices in parallel with ramping their training up as it comes into the new year, there's a simple truth. It's never, ever gonna happen. It's just too much to absorb. The natural athlete. Mind goes towards swim, bike, run, whatever your disciplines are. Let's get the load in. And once again, people feel unorganized. They're behind the eight ball, and they struggle. And so yes, most athletes, when they think about their training, they chase shiny workouts. But if you can't consistently fuel, hydrate, recover and organize, and you can't build in intentional recovery. It doesn't matter now, the basics and every session, not just now, but over the course of the coming year, is going to be more effective. And that's what we're looking to do, is create effective training. So if you want an actionable takeaway from step one, pick one foundational cat habit. Commit to it and track it. Track it daily for 30 days. Do you put it into place? Does it become a part of your daily practice? Because if it does, it's got staying power. It's got a much higher likelihood of being a part of how you do things over the course of the coming season. If you're really ambitious, do too. And I would say everyone listening, if we could all do this, integrate the Sunday special into your week reviewing the year prior. What did I do? Well? What did I not do quite so well? Where should I place my focus in the week ahead? And then, three components, life, work, and of course, your training and habits, you are going to unlock effectiveness. That's step one in your off season magic puzzle. Step two, of course, is you do want to shift your training. We are not going to repeat. We want our training load to lower, and this is important, but your training load has, I would argue, even higher purpose right now. So as a general rule of thumb, and this is a tough one to say, because I'm taking my arms out and I'm grabbing every single athlete under the big umbrella of endurance with all sorts of backgrounds, histories, goals, ambitions and ability to absorb training, let alone differ in capacity of how much training they can actually do. But as a general rule, in off season, we want to infuse intentional recovery. So therefore we're going to reduce your training load, by rule of thumb, about 30 to 40% but we want to maintain your rhythm. And so the way to do that is to anchor your week and to say, okay, what are these bolts? A little bit like tent pegs in a storm, anchor your week. And, you know, do that with anchor sessions of strength training, as you're going to learn really, really critical and also technical work. Okay, some of the areas that are opportunity to develop your technique across the disciplines. Whether if you're just a pure runner, you're thinking about posture, form, etc, etc, if you're a triathlete, then you're thinking about all sorts of areas. And this is a really critical component.
Matt Dixon 19:35
If I talk about off season to many athletes, they immediately, often, I would even say the majority of people go to All right, off season, zone two big base miles, create that foundation. You'll often hear people say, you can't decorate the bathroom until you've got the foundation of the house. Well, whenever I hear that, I always think of mark one. Our athletes. He's a great athlete. He's an age group triathlete, and he consistently for years, loved the sport, really committed, wanted to improve, and every single year, well off season, time to hit base, I'm going to build my foundation. So used to grind through endless base miles, Zone Two, Zone Two, zone two and only amplified over the course of the last 345, years, where zone two has become this new, fresh thing that nobody knew about before. I'm on about my fourth cycle of that. By the way, as a coach, Matt, I've got to build my base. Well, guess what? Mark lived on the East Coast. The days are getting shorter, the days are getting colder. It's damp, it's wet, it's going to be snowy, so therefore, so much of his winter months meant hours on the trainer and treadmill. Zone two, Zone Two. Zone two. Next year is going to be my big year. I'm building the foundation fat utilization, making sure my heart rate never goes over 120 miles and miles and miles. In fact, the total hours were increasing in off season, far away from his race, but he was keeping it all low, low intensity. Do you know what happened every single year. He would hit the spring, the days would start to get longer, and he was already start showing signs of fatigue, not just physical fatigue, but more mental. The grind was, well, a grind, and so finally, I persuaded him, and he shifted his approach. I'm not going to say he shifted his approach. Quite bravely. He was willing to try something different, and I asked him to shift his perspective. I said, Look, we're not going to do base training, but we are going to do foundational training. What I mean by Foundation is I want you to put the foundation in place that's going to get your body ready to go and train very, very hard. That means I'm going to structurally make you very strong. Strength training is important. We're going to try and improve your technique. So we're going to do some Terrain Management work on the bike. We're actually going to do some postural elements on the run. We're going to try and improve your running capacity. We're going to really focus on drills and technical development in swimming. And we're even going to do a little bit of spicy speed. We're going to infuse that stuff in there so that when you are ready and the spring comes, I want you to be mentally fresh. I want you to be strong, resilient and ready to absorb the training hours. So it was a shift. It was strength focus with skill focus. Swimming, short but punchy bike sessions. Everything's shifted. Do you know what happened? Fine. Well, he showed up February, March, and he was lighter. His body composition was drastically improved. Even though that wasn't a direct focus, he was stronger. Naturally we've been doing strength training absolutely committed a couple of sessions per week, and he was mentally ready to hit the big training loads. He was invigorated. Did he miss his base? No, he'd been accumulating it year on year. Those miles are not wasted, and he is going to continue to accumulate it over the course of the summer months, when he does go outside and he has more time to ride. So what does this look like? Swim, bike and run? Let's get into the specifics. I know you want the specifics. Well, how we design our swim sessions, and we'll go through triathlete in order, swim, bike and run. Here. Swim, we do a lot of technical work where we try and sort out one of the common flaws for triathletes, which is body position, hips lower than shoulders. And we do some technical work and some short interval work to help what it feels like to have a really taut, robust, strong core in the water when 90% of your body weight is displaced. You're swimming with good alignment and you've got good body position in the water, we try and help you get more purchase on the water, where we actually develop drills that you can actually implement to help you feel the water and get some tension on that grip so that you can propel yourself forward. So in other words, you can get further with less effort. And we build in a host of technical work in there. And then to supplement it, we're not doing a bunch of threshold and debilitating sessions, but we are going to do some high speed. I want you to get a development of gears, in other words, that you can shift speeds. So in order to do that, you need to get very, very comfortable swimming fast without having a loss of form. This isn't hard. It's fast or fast, if you're listening to an as an American, really, really simple stuff. So this becomes really eye opening for athletes. Now, of course, you can't do this in a vacuum. You need to have some feedback. You need to have some round tables, and we're going to talk about how we develop that. It later in this show on the bike, what do we do? Well, by definition, many, many people are coming inside in off season. You don't want to be spending, for most people, miles and miles and miles hours and hours and hours outside, if you can well, it should be fun stuff. It could be snow mountain biking. It could be regular mountain biking could be road biking if you happen to live in a nice area, but that should be soul filling. That should be fun. Many people spend to, tend to spend more hours in the trainer, and that's a venue where it's almost like bike school. And what we're looking to do is to teach you the basics when we're not chasing cardiovascular conditioning. Teach you the basics where, in the coming months, and I want you to listen to this carefully, you can get more speed for the same effort that you put in. How do you do that by becoming a better craftsman on the bike. In other words, we try and teach you some of the tools, some of the skills that enable you to manage terrain better, whether it is cresting over hills, climbing, descending, or, of course, headwinds and tailwinds. How do you get more speed return for whatever fitness you develop, this is the time that you can really focus on the fundamentals the other types of sessions that we tend to do is just putting a little pinch in a very, very high intensity work. This is where we do drive the training of the cardiovascular system. VO, two, Max work, short, very hard, high intensity intervals. What about my base training? Don't worry, you are going to accumulate many miles, but we do short, sharp shocks of work. We're looking to raise your potential ceiling here. And we do it about once a week, very, very high intensity training. Once again, it's way easier to do it, not in a vacuum, isolated. It's much more fun to do it when you're a part of a team. And then finally, we also have one more technical development. Now, this is done on the trainer as well. But can you become a climbing Pro? Can you really understand how to turn those hills from, oh, my goodness Hill, Oh, my Goodness me. It's just a hill I just need to survive into Wow, it's a hill, it's an opportunity, it's fun, and I'm going to be able to navigate this using my tools in my toolkit, when the only way to develop those tools is to practice and the only ways to learn is to be coached. That's why we've invested so much in our video based coaching, so that we can teach you to become a climbing Pro. Really important. And then finally, the third component, running. What do we do on running? Well, there's a lot of work on posture. So many people end up running like they're a sack of potatoes, but we actually try and connect the upper body and good posture to what's happening downstairs with the legs. We also want to build real tissue resilience, because one of the ways that runners and triathletes get undone is through consistent overuse, tissue, muscular, skeletal and tissue injuries, and we want to stamp that out. We want to reduce the likelihood of injuries over the course of the coming season. So we don't just send you out on these long, slow distance where your form is declining, your muscular load is increasing, and you end up getting injured too much. We want to build your cardiovascular conditioning. So we want to build your durability, and the best way to do that is by frequent, short intervals of running. Now here's the mindset when you're doing this, and I think this is very, very important and very helpful over the course of off season, I really encourage athletes not to chase Fitness on their run, at least in the classic way. Don't chase fitness. Okay, that's just a mindset thing. Instead, Chase tissue resilience. So here's another way to say this. When you're running in off season, you're not trying to drive cardiovascular conditioning, heart, lungs, delivery of oxygen, etc, to the tissue. Instead, train the periphery. Alrighty, train the periphery. That's your tendons, muscles, ligaments. We're not trying to improve our fitness. We're not trying to increase our running speed. We're trying to prepare the body to absorb the looming, hard work. When you do that successfully, you're more durable, you're more resilient, and you have a greater capacity to absorb the training that you want to do, to actually get you race ready in the months ahead. It's a critical component. So here's how we do it. At purple patch number one, we have pre prioritized sessions, the key workouts, the primary now this is built first with two shots. Strength training sessions a week. That's your bullseye, lifting. Very real weight training relative to yourself and your starting point. This is the bullseye. This is what we wrap everything else around. So in off season, everybody, and I mean everybody, does strength training, alrighty, period, boom. Lock it in, then we build it around and say, what are the technical sessions that we're going to do? And that could be a high intensity bike, that could be Terrain Management on the bike, that could be some strides based over speed work on the run, that could be some short interval speed in swimming. But also the technical elements, you know, 234, of those over the course of the week, and that might be all you do in off season. So we start to have prioritization. And then for people that want more, well, it's a little bit like Amazon pack fella, but really, really valuable and important stuff, but you build it up, so there's always a capacity to increase, but everybody is locked in with the priority workouts. Very, very simple and, of course, highly flexible. If you've got holiday parties, you can scale down. If you've got some travel for Thanksgiving, you can scale it down, etc, etc. In support of those training you have real coaching via video, because we want to have feedback loops. And so we coach people. We don't prescribe training sessions. We coach people, repeat, repeat, repeat, with live feedback. Really, really important. And beyond the video coaching, then we want to integrate what we call our hub, which is our custom online community, so that we can have round tables, discussions, feedback from coaches, Q and A, what am I doing? Well? What am I not doing so well so that people can feel like they're almost in school, developing the habits and practices and making sure that all of this has massive flex. Every single session is scalable. You might only do a 20 minute run. You might be able to do 50 minutes, but making sure that these can ebb and flow with life. Because remember what we talked about, we want your training load to decrease. We want to ensure that this is fun and it frees up capacity, but also the ability for you to physiologically recover and mentally refresh. Really, really important if you want to be successful next year.
Matt Dixon 32:24
And so yes, let's point out there is value to doing zone two training. Doubtless, I'm not against zone two. It is a bedrock of athlete development. You will benefit from that. But the truth is that it doesn't fit into life and most people's schedule in the middle of winter, particularly if your time-starved. And so when committing to traditional base level type training, it leaves athletes flat, fatigue, mentally, just out of it. And instead, this approach really builds your strength, your durability and your efficiency, so that every mile that you log next year, including plenty of zone two, you're gonna accelerate, we're creating a workable, integrated solution that ramps up your consistency. And I tell you what, I have never, ever in all of my years when we're working with athletes that are consistent. And this is a way to unlock that magic word consistently. Never seen an athlete that has had an issue with their base. And so over the course of this step, I'd encourage you, choose a discipline, sharpen technically, what you want to do, really focus on it and dedicate one to two sessions just purely to this skill, and that's going to be an opportunity of a strength or shore up a weakness, whatever it is, but it's critical, very simple. Step number three, we've put into place the foundational habits now the basics, remember, we've broken down swim, bike and run. We're reducing training load much more flex. We now understand foundation as a strength, technical development, etc. What could step number three of a really successful off season beam. It is a three letter word. Do you know what I'm going to say? It's very, very important. In fact, some might say it's the secret I might even get on Oprah for this. What's the secret of off season? It's a core idea. I want you to have fun. I want you to have fun. Kill the boredom. It shouldn't be zone two, Zone Two. Zone two, infuse enjoyment. Flex, keep consistency alive. When you keep consistency alive, it's going to break through. Jess, a marathena. We're talking a lot, a marathena That sounds very American. Doesn't it? I would say a marathon athlete, but there you go anyway. Jess used to hate winter training. She would grind and grind and grind lonely miles in the cold. And what starts to happen? She starts to build a negative relationship with her sport. She's committed, but she's losing motivation, and by the time you hit spring, well, just like Mark flat. And so when she joined purple patch, we encourage her swap. Swap. What she said, swap, one of your big sessions. Don't go for that massive long run. Instead, take your kids out. Go for a hike. Two three hours, you've got teenage kids, go and take them on a hike, get them outside, enjoy it. And just by that shift, the rest of her running was actually suitably enjoyable because it was kind of hers, and it was short and it was frequent, and it didn't feel too dominating. Now replace that long run with a couple of central strength sessions, and that's all she did. Her habits were pretty good in her case, and so she just had a real focus, and she got to do something that was fun, liberating and family friendly. She got to share her journey with her kids, and she had lots of fun conversations. It was really additive, really important. Now, for some of you listening, that might sound like a horror show, but for Jess, it was really, really powerful. You know what happened? She didn't lose fitness. She wasn't behind the eight ball. Instead, she found joy, and she came back with a good platform, improved strength and conditioning as a foundation. She also even had positive shifts in body composition, because if you had a heightened prototype, she could bring more to her strength. And most importantly, she came back more motivated than ever. In other words, it's just a small vignette to highlight that this phase of training should not be about the grind. It should have a ton of flex, and it should include a host of different activities. Much of it should be soul filling. I coach a nice gentleman in Geneva who loves to go ski touring. So we do it every single weekend. He goes up to Verbier. He goes on his cross country skiing or his ski touring, loads of different components, but his focus is triathlon, but it's good. One of the most successful professional triathletes that I ever coached, Jesse Thomas, hardly used to run in off season. He would just do an amateur type thing, short frequent runs, but he would do a bunch of cross country skiing, Sami ink, and that you've heard me talk about before. He came from a background of cross country skiing. Whenever he could take the opportunity, he would leverage that over the course of off season. This is important and fun stuff. It keeps it fresh. It prevents burnout. It keeps you engaged without all of those races, but you're still building consistency, and that's the word. And so how do we do it at purple patch? Well, firstly, we build many of the weekend sessions with high flex. Great time to go out for a hike, cross country skiing, you're going to go out a mountain bike if you want to. We also infuse it into the actual fabric of the specific training sessions that we do, hosting live rides and workouts both on the weekend and throughout the week. These are powerful, but they're also fun, because guess what? It might come through on this show sometimes, but I kind of like to have fun, and we are deadly serious about your progression. Every athlete that we guide, it is our number one priority to make sure that you're successful. But there's also something powerful around looking forward to training, to be able to take the time when the pressure is off, to have fun. We also really infuse the coaches right now, I'd say that the coaches are most active in off season, for connection, for feedback, for guidance, for stories. What are we seeing out there in the world of performance, and we like to put in some really good community challenges. It's pretty simple stuff as we kicked off the show, habit development, but developing some nice accountability partnerships and community challenges makes it fun. And then, of course, we infuse those soul filling activities. Go play. You'll read that in some of your sessions. Go play. It's additive. Make sure that what you're doing buoys up your soul, your life, and by the way, it's also positive to your physiology. And here's the irony about all of this. This is the time of the year when many athletes finish their races and they think all right, now's the time to go alone. They leave their coaches now we have a little less of a challenge with this at purple patch, because we've got a consistent, year round program, but a lot of athletes out there choose this at the end of their race to leave. But I run. Clean. This is when they need their coaches most. It's like when the sun goes down and it gets dark and you turn the lights off, it doesn't make any sense at all, because this is where the fun can begin. But most importantly, this is when you are as an athlete, building the ecosystem. You're building the framework you're going to stay on and drive to consistency, and consistency becomes effortless.
Matt Dixon 40:27
And so what I would encourage you in off season is don't just carrying on the grind. You should schedule one activity that's a little bit out of the box. Do something that excites you, that's different, that represents a different challenge. Maybe it's doing a rowing ergometer. Maybe it's a stair climber in the gym. Maybe it's going for a hike. Maybe it's going gravel, riding, whatever it might be, but something that has nothing to do with FTP zone two heart rate metrics, globally, it's not even doing it for the pursuit of performance in your chosen discipline, but is indeed additive. All right, we're almost there, folks. Step number four, and this is an optional one. This is something that we encourage our athletes to do. Some choose to do it, and they're highly successful with it. Others decide not to do it, and they're highly successful on their journey. So this isn't a game changer, but it is something that can create a tent, Peg, a compass, a direction for you to drive up. And this is pick a project off season is a little bit like the lab. That's the way you want to think about it. It's the time that you do have the opportunity to address weaknesses, or, of course, build on your strengths. This always reminds me of Tom, triathlete always struggled with run durability, and so he used his off season to have what we label a run project. Now, this isn't training for a marathon. It isn't going to join your local track club. It was really, really simple. We just encouraged Tom to say, Let's build that durability that we talked about earlier in the show. So he ran 20 to 30 minutes almost every single day. Alrighty. He didn't do too many long runs. Did one or two trail runs. He went there and he wasn't chasing running fitness. Instead, his project is, I am going to train the periphery. And so we wanted to build calf strength, ligament strength, tendons, muscles, posture, stability, and we do it through frequency. You know what happened by the time he emerged into spring? Well, he had built his fitness. He had built his running durability. But that wasn't it. His tissue resilience had skyrocketed. Now, of course, over the course of the season, we layered on more demanding run sessions, he actually managed to accumulate more total running load over that season than he ever had before. We did more hard running, more track based running, more longer running. But he did it because he could stay injury free all season. What he had done in off season was the catalyst to open up his world, and it was that simple off season project that unlocked his best year ever. And so how do we do it at purple patch? Well, we have specific off season tracks. Again, this is optional for our athletes, but some athletes really love to do this. In other words, they have a swim focus. They're still continuing to do the other sessions, but they're really focusing on swim. Or maybe they're doing just like Tom the run focus. Some people that have a hard time sticking to strength and conditioning year round, they really prioritize a strength project that was me last year. It was my weakness, and so I committed to it on this show. And guess what? I'm still doing it. I did it this morning. Other people really think about body composition. Training. Stress is lower. This is the time that I'm really going to dive in and show up next year, leaner, stronger and healthier through nutrition. So we have multiple tracks of projects where you can basically shine the light of focus. Look, let's face it, we've all kind of got our thing. I mentioned mind, it was strength. I'm pretty good on nutrition. I certainly don't need a swim project. I've done too many years of that. I'm pretty good at riding a bike, and so mine was strength training. I was failing, but I added on. I actually got support. I developed a little strength training class that I could have a support and accountability crystal and Brad can coach me through it. You know what happened? I got better, and here I am, a year later, I will never not do strength training again. And so this stuff can be really, really powerful, still having an umbrella approach, but just having a project. And so we actually designed the off season program at purple patch to have these tracks. And of course, then what you. Do Is anyone on the swim project? Well, Coach John Stevens is infusing greater education. Is live on that hub to answer questions, to give you feedback. Many people choose to do the swim program with him, where they supply videos. He can provide feedback. Tailor specific custom sessions to them. Other people that have a bike project. Maybe the bike is the weakness. They doubled down on it, the same thing as I did with so many athletes that arrived to me as professionals that I felt were not strong enough on the bike. Tim Reed heard of him, world champion. Sam Martin heard of him, one of the most successful Half Ironman athletes ever. These athletes that we did a bike project in in in off season, we're just bringing it to you. Very, very simple. I would say one of the biggest mistakes that athletes make is waiting until race season to fix the limiter. Remember what I said, off season is your lab, and so this is when you experiment, you adapt and you grow, all without the looming demands of a race coming up, and of course, the pressure of trying to get all of the training that you want to do to get ready for those events. Do it when you're training less, but do it with greater purpose. Step number five, to finish the day, lean into team and coaching. There's been a through line on this whole show, team and coaching. Let me tell you the core idea here. It's very, very difficult to do this alone. I mentioned the last step people leave their coaches right now that is beyond mad to me. Off season is the perfect time. In fact, I would argue, the only time that you can establish your systems, you can refine your technique, and you can establish your baseline habits that you want to do. Remember how we started the show nail the basics, and you want to do this, by the way, while infusing intentional recovery and also showing up more in other areas of life, being really present with your family and friends, making sure that you're excelling in work, making sure that you have more capacity to do other stuffs in life, and doing this solo is just so much cognitive load. I seldom, if ever, see anyone succeed at this. When Alex joined purple patch, he admitted, I always go random in winter. I need my break. I want time to focus on the other parts of life. And of course, when he finished his last race of the year, the first couple of weeks, Oh God, it's nice to have a break. And it's true, he did well there you should have a break. You shouldn't think about anything for the next 10 days after you've finished a big race. But then every year, by January, you know what happened? The same as what happens for every athlete that goes rogue, as I call it, in off season, he was overwhelmed, he was tired, and he was behind. And so last year, for the first time, he leaned into off season team programming. And you know what happened? He committed to staying consistent. He applied much of what we talked about today, and over the course of those months, November, December into January, he increased his capacity. He said, everything just feels easier. And that's not random. That's actually intuitive, because he didn't lose his structure. It was the framework his training schedule. Was the framework that enabled him to be really, really organized in other parts of life. He increased capacity. He was more energized, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of coaching and community. And so here's how we do it. At purple patch number one a global community, it's very, very important that we tie everyone together on the team, not because we care about community, but so that we can create frameworks of support and accountability where we want everyone, whether they live in Kansas, whether they live in Sydney, Australia, whether they live in Santiago, whether they live in London, whether they live in New York, wherever they live in San Francisco, that they feel like they're a part of something. And I tell you what, our athletes that lean in, that get it, that decide to actually say, I'm going to engage. They love it more. They get more. They excel more. It's very simple. Now we have to do our part as well. It's not just about saying, look, there's a nice hub that you guys can connect. We infuse into it myself and the purple patch coaches and so we lead the education, the check ins, the round tables, the discussions where we can have shared insights. We can answer questions, we can share the journey together. Because whenever we as individuals become us, things improve. We also make sure that we leverage this training, not to just keep on the grind, but. But to create the structure, to reduce your stress, to actually integrate it into life, it's important. And so for me, off season, I want you to carry on, but not as it just was when you were suitably slightly obsessed getting ready for that big last race. And I want you to ensure that you're staying consistent, consistent without shouldering it all alone. It's about lightening the mental load. And the coaching and community don't just guide your training, but they give you capacity back so that you can not just thrive in sport, but most importantly, feel like you're getting intentional recovery and showing up truly for your family, your friends and what you do in professional life. And so lean into team. If you are going on a solo journey, don't find accountability. Find team. Find mentorship. I can't tell you this is almost number one with fun, almost number one, if you lean into it's going to create an operating system, and that removes the magic word, that destroys performance random. Instead, we want consistency, whether that's where the training group and accountability partner a coach lean into it.
Matt Dixon 51:20
Now you've probably noticed that everything I've just walked through today the basics, shifting your training approach, infusing fun, tackling projects, and then, of course, leaning into team and coaching. It's a lot to put together on your own, and so that's why we built this special program. It is the purple patch off season program. It is designed to create the ecosystem. That's it, the structure, the support, the accountability, but without the overwhelm, we want to remove that so we take care of your planning. We help you refine technique, feedback, feedback, feedback loops, coaching, coaching, coaching. We embed challenges that are going to rebuild those key habits, and we wrap it all in with a global community of athletes sharing the journey together. And here's the real magic, instead of feeling drained or scattered, actually going to give you greater capacity. Every all the time, our athletes tell us, I've got more energy. I feel like I've got more time. I'm showing up better family, friends and all that other stuff, when before I was just trying to wing it. That's because this program gives you something that we love, rhythm. It also gives you clarity. It reduces cognitive load, and perhaps what emerges out of it is confidence, because you're not guessing. You're not carrying all of that load alone. And so if you want to make 2026 your best season yet, this is where it starts. Don't wait till January. This is it. It is the off season program. Remember what I talked about at the start? It is your 100 hour head start, and we'd love to help you build it. Feel free to reach out for a needs assessment. It's very simple. It's complimentary info of purple patch fitness.com info@purplepatchfitness.com we want to understand your goals, where you're at some of your prior challenges, and see whether our program is a fit for you. We kick off official off season, October the first that's when we kick it all off. Okay, very, very simple, but it is an easy program to integrate to after your last race of the season. So if you are doing let's just make it up a full marathon, a Iron Man in the fall, maybe the world championships. And it is after October the first it is not a problem at all. We just slide right in. Every single program starts with a complimentary coaching call where we go through we help you get up to speed so you won't be behind the eight ball, even if you were starting December 1. Alrighty. Now, if you have the luxury, don't wait. If your season's over, lock it in October the first and so the outcomes of doing this right team number one, more efficient technique, better economy in all your sports, you're stronger, more durable, you're resilient, you're healthier, you're fresher, you're excited. You have a faster ramp to race readiness. You accelerate, and you're positioned for a breakthrough in 2026 Goodness me. Am I been enough of a Salesman here? This is it, team. I wish you the best of luck. Next week, we're going to dig into some case studies. We're going to do our final episode on off season. But join us, team. It's a lot of fun. Until then, have a great time. We'll see you 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 in. 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
off-season, one-to-one coaching, performance breakthroughs, needs assessment, training load, foundational habits, Sunday special, technical development, strength training, fun activities, community challenges, team support, intentional recovery, off-season program, purple patch podcast