408 - Classic IRONMAN Off-Season Training Makes You Slower
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Off-Season Philosophy
IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon defines the off-season (or post-season) not as a gap between racing, but as the foundational first step of the upcoming year. A successful period focuses on mental and physiological restoration while building a platform for future training.
Avoid the "No-Break" Athlete: Continuous high-intensity training leads to mental exhaustion and physiological plateaus.
Avoid the "Winter Warrior": Constant high-effort training causes burnout and prevents true recovery.
Avoid the "Rogue/Random" Athlete: Complete cessation of training leads to detraining, injury, and difficulty ramping back up.
The Goal: Achieve consistency over months and seasons rather than daily perfection, creating "compound interest" on fitness.
Training Principles
The off-season shifts focus from boosting functional thresholds or speed to preparatory work that builds a robust chassis for the next season.
Reduced Volume: Athletes are encouraged to train fewer hours (e.g., dropping from 20 hours to 12–14) to reduce cognitive load and life competition.
Strength Focus: This is the primary window to "double down" on strength training to increase durability and power.
Technical Development: Without the pressure of race deadlines, athletes should focus on craft, such as swim hand entry, running posture, and cycling traction.
Variety and Additive Activities: Incorporating activities like skiing, yoga, or mountain biking helps maintain vibrancy and prevents boredom.
Physiological Ceiling: Utilizing short, high-intensity bouts to build the heart rate ceiling without the volume of a full race prep block.
Program Details
Purple Patch will officially launch its off-season program on September 28th, though onboarding can begin around September 14th or 21st.
Structure: The program emphasizes building an athletic base (multi-directional stability and power) rather than just a traditional Zone 2 base.
Next Steps: A follow-up episode will feature a Q&A session to address specific training challenges and structural questions.
Inquiries: Interested participants can contact info@purplepatchfitness.com regarding the Tri Squad off-season program or request a complimentary assessment call with Max.
How can athletes best integrate these principles if they are still actively racing through October?
If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out to info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
:00-:28 Intro
:30-end Meat & Potatoes
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 0:00
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. And welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast. As ever, your host Matt Dixon. Today we're going to talk about off season. I'm looking forward to it. It's my favorite time of the year, but I wanted to start with something a little bit different, perhaps tang gentle to the episode, although grounding in the power of a coaching relationship. I love to share this, and this is not about me. This is about one of the Purple Patch coaches and their relationship with one of their athletes. And absolutely unsolicited, the athlete ended up texting me. Now, how they got my phone number. That's a different story. But they had it, and they sent me a nice text. And I think it's a grounding because this athlete is getting ready for the 70.3 World Championships, and she will remain anonymous. But she shared with us. She said, "What a powerful element the coaching relationship has been. She said, "I've been in the dark place for quite a few weeks right now, and I felt like my training wasn't necessarily getting me anywhere.
Matt Dixon 1:27
My coach, who also will remain nameless, we're going to keep this all about just broadly Purple Patch coaching, said decided that I was going to do a pretty challenging bike and run, and I got very frustrated because my power was lower than I thought, and she shared the text thread that went back and forth. Here's from the athlete. Goodness me, I just felt terrible today. My power was way too low. It was tough. Rum was fine, but oh my goodness me, it was tough. Coach says, "Hey, all good. I thought that you might be a little bit muted. Go eat a pizza tonight. Go and have a little slice of bread. You need to carb up. We've got a big one. Make sure you consume a couple of liters of water. We want to rehydrate. And as you recover, this work is good. You're going to carry a little bit of fatigue right now, but we're going to start to emerge over the coming days, and you should feel good. Athlete responds. Large pizza. Come on, I just got done with a two and a half minute massage, and my data is just terrible. It's not good. It's getting in my head. I think we've regressed. I've gotten slower. I just don't see a world out of this. How does the coach respond to that? Here we go, athlete, or from the coach, snap out of it. Hey, pause right now. You're gonna be okay with love. Your coach, snap out of it. My power was shit. That doesn't mean anything to me right now today. You had a tough day, but we both know you know how to ride your bike. Next time you ride, remove the power meter. Remove your heart rate. Go and have fun. Go and love it. In fact, I think we should duck in to a sprint triathlon this weekend. I know you've got one local in your race. Can you get it done, athlete? That's the worst idea. There's no way I want to race. My legs are terrible, coach. If you can do it, go and do it with freedom. So how do we think that ended? Well, here it is-the ending of this. I ended up doing a sprint triathlon today. It was my quote training race. I expected to do crappy. I felt terrible. You know what prevailed? Just the opposite. I've never even done a sprint triathlon. It was so much fun. I had joy the entire time, and guess what? I was farts. I ended up the top female and fifth overall. Two of the guys ahead of me are going to Nice, and I chased them down. I couldn't be thank more thankful for the coach helping me screw my head on straight, even when I'm a pain in the booty, it's just a heartwarming story, and it's also, in many ways, echoes the life that we all go through as an athlete. Things get hard. Fatigue is a part of the sport.
Matt Dixon 4:11
Sometimes you need to push through and just wait and peek over the other side and see what happens, rather than react. And for me, that's just the power of a great coaching partnership. A little bit of trust and leaning from the athlete, a little bit of a steady, strong hand from the coach. I thought it was a really heartwarming story, and I couldn't wait to share it with you on the show. But that's not what today is about. Today is about, as I mentioned, one of my favorite times of the year. In fact, if we go all the way back to the Purple Patch Pros, if we think about every single athlete that I've ever coached, that anyone on our one-to-one roster that has gone through, and all of our athletes that are on the squad program, and we identify and. Little check next to the athletes that have genuine breakthrough seasons, just a huge PR, maybe brought a Kona qualification. Even the athletes that won Ironman races or even won the World Championship, those athletes that finally broke the back of injury cycle. We've had many of them on the show. It always came on the back, always, always, always came on the back of a successful off season every single time. If I had to identify the one thing that's the differentiator, that's the thing that changes, it's a successfully executed off season that enables recharge, reset, lots of freedom, but critical work to set up the building block for the next year.
Matt Dixon 5:48
They always talk about the magic word of performance in any arena is consistency. This is what we're talking about, and this is what we want to dig into today. And so today we're going to go through the first of several episodes on off season. Now our off season doesn't start for about another month, September the 28th, but we want to give you guys, the listeners, an early reminder so you can get in the right mindset first and start to plan what you're going to do with one of the most important training blocks of the year. Now, quick disclaimer here: many people are still racing. In fact, we've got one of our key team races middle end of October, Ironman California, and so we've got a ton of athletes still racing. It's okay. Many of our athletes are racing. You might be racing. The same principles are relevant. You're just going to kickstart into the program a little bit later. All good. So let's start with a bad off season, a missed opportunity, where athletes typically go wrong. Simply put, if you want year over year progression, you don't want to. Here's some don'ts. Okay, you don't want to keep hammering the same type of race prep training that you've been doing all year. It's going to be like cliff erosion. You'll get mentally exhausted. You'll get physiologically flat and plateau. You also, on the other side of the spectrum, don't want to stop training. That's a critical component, a for the fundamentals of you as a healthy human being, but also for your consistency in the performance breakthroughs next year. So we've got two ends of the spectrum, no hammerheads, no complete cessation of training. You also don't want to. I would add one more into this. You don't want to shift the mindset and say, "Hey, I read lots of books. I've been doing it. I look at the cyclists. I'm just going to go and do a whole bunch of base training, just zone one and zone two. It's just too random, and it doesn't fit into your life. There is a better way, and so let's break down the three of those very, very quickly as an introduction to today's show. The first is the no-break athlete. This is the one that's either often really frustrated through a poor season, or has come off the back of a big win and said, "I'm going to go through super ambitious. Now, this isn't a healthy relationship with really the sport, but it's also not a healthy relationship with performance breakthroughs. The hammer up, the one that is often referred to as the winter warrior. Now, this athlete feels disciplined. The problem here is that the brain, the body, cannot always be on. It's only going to lead to burnout over the course of a day.
Matt Dixon 8:34
That's not high performance over the course of a week and month. You can't always be on, on, on. Over the course of a year, you certainly can't. It doesn't matter how tough you are. Ultimately, things will burn out. In fact, this athlete often represents the definition of one of my least favorite sayings: "Fit and fatigue, the thing that we want to avoid. And unfortunately, there are way too many athletes out there in the world, particularly age group athletes, that have raced for years but have never gotten faster. That's it. Now this is also problematic for a life outside of sport as well, because the competition of having this as an obsession, almost a focus all the way on, is going to dissolve your ability to really sharpen as the other aspects of life the very best version of yourself. So we don't want that. The other side, the other big challenge, is the athlete that goes rogue or random. This is an athlete that says, "It's been a season. I've committed myself to it. Win, lose, lose, or draw. I've made other sacrifices, and you know what? I want to go and just focus on other aspects of my life. I get it. I need to go and invest in my family, invest in the work, and so I'm just going to turn my back on the sport. A few weeks, maybe even a couple of months. I just need to go and emphasize other aspects of my life, and so I'm going rogue for lack of a bit of freaks. I might do some exercise. I'm going to stay healthy. And I feel like I'm being responsible because ultimately I'm turning my back on it so that I can come back refreshed. I can be ready. And of course, over the course of those months, the athlete starts to detrain. They start to have their hopes and ambitions start to drive up because wolf, I'm ready to go. They get hungry, and they come back on full steam. What happens with these athletes? They're way behind the eight ball.
Matt Dixon 10:28
They know they are. They're detrained. They ramp up very quickly, and they either plateau or they get injured. In fact, it is a missing cog in the wheel of performance to go rogue and random all the way through. Now other athletes do this in a refined way to say, "Hey, I'm going to turn my back on the sport as well, but I'm just going to build my base. After all, I read it, I heard it. That's what the pros do: go and build base. But that's actually really outdated, and it also just doesn't fit to the realities of your life. When we think about base training, that mostly emerged from professional cycling, and these athletes were racing upwards of 100 days a year, full steam, hard work. Their brains, their bodies were fried, and so they had a nice break, and then they went and built base because that was physiologically responsible, they just were so cooked their bodies needed to recover. But for an age group triathlete that doesn't have 20 or 30 hours a week to train, and also hopefully isn't cooking themselves racing every single weekend, it's not appropriate. In fact, if we're training correctly over the course of the ramps up to our racing, a lot of that training will be zone two by definition. It will be building your base, and so as the days shorten and get colder over the winter months, we want to have a program that fits into the reality of life, that actually works on the other end of the sport because we're doing an endurance sport where we can build the engine, build the strength, build the resilience, take down the commitment level, so that you're not competing with ours with the other aspects of your life, and ensure that your body can benefit from a magic word, variety, touching all but pieces of intensity and drop it through. So there's a really fresh approach to this. Now I want to approach one more. I want to dial into one more concept here that's very important. At the start of the show, I talked about the magic word of consistency. Alrighty. So what we're looking for here, a lot of people think that consistency means you must never miss a day of training.
Matt Dixon 12:46
Whatever happens in life, it's a commitment. It's an important component, and if I miss a day, I'm inconsistent. But that's not true. It's a little bit like balance in life. The myth of balance across the broad spectrum of life is that we're looking for some form of harmony between our fitness and our sport, our family and our work, but that's not really what it is. It's actually appropriate sometimes to really go all in on something, to drive into an emphasis and focus on work where the other aspects of life have to take a little bit of a back seat, or really invest in family and friends and dial back the other focus, or of course sometimes when you're really getting ready for a race, maybe that has the spotlight. But we want to achieve balance over the course of a year. Well, that's a little bit of a similar concept to what we're looking for in athletics and sport, where we want to achieve consistency-not over never missing a day, but over the arc of weeks and weeks and weeks, months and months and months, and ultimately seasons and seasons and seasons-and that's the catalyst of where you get this consistent application and focus on training. That's going to create compound interest on your fitness.
Matt Dixon 14:07
Now, if I only use a little bit of science here, if you look at someone and you just realize they are incredibly resilient, they have a huge platform of fitness, they are just inspirational in what they've done, they have unlocked a very scientific concept here, and the abbreviation or the acronym is FAF. F A F. Do you know what F A F stands for scientifically? Fit as fuck. That's right. Very scientific of me, but the truth is that we don't achieve fath status as an athlete, whatever context we're putting in, through just a huge block of work, multiple weeks, big training camps, a three-month period of work. That's not how an athlete raises status, where they're just. Fit, healthy, strong, resilient fat. You achieve fat through consistency layered across many, many months. Ultimately, multiple seasons in a row, and a key part of that, a central part of it, is a really successful off season. And it sounds like a paradox because when your season, your last race finishes, we want you to have a break. We want you to mentally recharge and restore and get that commitment and motivation level back up. We want you to physiologically heal at a deep level, and so we want to bring everything down. And all of that is true, but at the same time, your starting point for your next season breakthroughs is that same block of work off season. It is the period that is the critical foundation, and so this is the most important reason that we do it: is we want to ensure that we dial down the focus and the cognitive load and the time commitment, while yielding great consistency and preparation and readiness for the season ahead, and that's just the sporting context. Because outside of that, we also want to remember that we're human beings, and we want to ensure that we're investing in our longevity and health now and for the future. That we're showing up to our workplace, whatever we do in the world, whether we're a doctor, a teacher, a firefighter, we want to show up our best cognitively, physiologically, really healthy, great energy, and we want to show up to our friends and family the best versions that we can, calm, available, etc. and we do that not off of a bedrock of detraining and exhaustion, but off of a platform of vibrancy, vitality, and so we don't want to go rogue. We don't want to cram loads of base miles in. We want to adopt and adhere to a program that achieves all of that vitality in life, while also preparing ourselves to absolutely unleash in the season ahead. And the good thing is, it's quite simple to do it: reduce the competition between work, life, family, friends, and our sport, while also doing things that are additive, preparatory, and absolute catalyst for you becoming a better version of an athlete than you've ever been in your life before, over the course of the nine months following your successful off season. Now, when I come back to this, but it's absolutely critical.
Matt Dixon 17:46
So the question is, why do so many athletes get it wrong? And it's not so many a silent minority. It's most athletes. If you take a big fishing net behind the world's biggest trawler, and you capture all of the endurance athletes of the world. Most of them mess it up. They don't do off-season well, and as a coach, it's incredibly frustrating. But also, I absolutely understand. Here's the catalyst of why so many athletes make one of the mistakes. Number one, they've trained incredibly hard the year before, and they haven't got the yield. Their results haven't been great. It's fricking frustrating, and so therefore, all right, I'm going for it the next year. I get it. Another athlete might have gone through the season and just been derailed with injury. They feel like they're behind. The last season might have been a waste. They certainly haven't got the results, and so again, it's frustrating. I need to go at it. On the other side of the coin, a lot of athletes fall into the trap where their recipe, their training program, competes with life throughout the season, and ultimately, that training that should be joyous, it should be fun. We heard at the top of the show is demanding, but it should be pretty simple. Ends up feeling like a second job, and you're just fricking done with it. And I get it. And then, of course, finally, others' life demands they pull us back. They want your attention, work, family, life, and we feel like a little bit of guilt. Okay, I'm gonna not think about myself so much now. I'm going to go and put my energy there. I get it, but self care is not selfish, and there is a way that you can look after yourself, invest in yourself, invest in your future athlete, while also amplifying how you show up in the other aspects of life, and that is a successful off season. And so I want I want us to align on a very simple concept here. When you think about off season, and I should say I have an uneasy relationship with even the label off season, and I only use it because that's the common terminology. We prefer post season, but I'm going to say off. Off season is not a gap between two race seasons. That's the mindset, all right. It is not a full break stopping your structured training entirely. That is for every single athlete a mistake. It is also not classic base training. It's not the time to log those boring base miles. Period. You can do some for sure. It's easy to do it hiking, very easy trail running, nice riding outside if you get the opportunity, and it has some zone too. But it's not about building that foundational base.
Matt Dixon 20:34
That's not what off season is through the Purple Patch law, and it's definitely not just carrying on exactly as you have all year. It's about building an approach that allows physical and mental restoration. It opens up an opportunity to add other fun additive activities in your life and invest in other aspects, but also lays the backbone and the platform. I'm going to use that rather than bass, to create a huge catalyst for the upcoming year. All right, folks, I just want to pause here and share a couple of quick notes from athletes that we asked for thoughts around the off season before recording this. We thought, you know what, it might be worth hearing from some of our athletes, and so here's what the first athlete said, and I love this one. They said, "It felt simple. That's perfect. Simplicity is golden. It felt simple, but I progressed in terms of performance in all three sports. I set my highest FTP despite only training a couple of sessions a week. I p.ored in two half marathons. That sounds pretty fun. Over the course of the new year, and I had my best 1k swim test ever. All of that in the winter months when I felt like there was no pressure. I had lots of time for family and friends, and ultimately it didn't even feel like serious training. Well, that's sort of the bingo in many ways. Second person asked told us this. I joined last October, and I really loved the off-season phase. I'm an internal medicine doc. The training was super flexible.
Matt Dixon 22:08
I didn't have to ask for so much time. All I had to do was unlock a little bit of consistency without having to pile on all the hours. I really enjoyed the technical focus in each discipline without the constant ramp to race day, and so I wasn't always forcing, chasing fitness, speed, etc. And yet, what I realized is my engine developed over the course of that time. When I look back in retrospect, it was probably the most critical phase of training over the whole 12-month period. I'm looking forward to that opportunity again. You see, that's it. That's from our athletes, and I think both of those are really great testaments of what the off season is all about. We kick off at Purple Patch September the 28th, or whenever you finish your last race. And so I recommend you maybe join a week or two before, maybe the week of September 14, september 21, we can onboard you. We can have a one to one meeting. We start with a kickoff call, get you grounded, and then you'll be good to go. If you're interested in having a discussion, just email us info@purplepatchfinch.com, ask for off season sign up, or click the link in the show notes and go to our Tri Squad website. You're going to see all about the off-season program and how it's a little bit different. We're always happy to have a conversation as well. Coach Mats is on the docket. Just email us info@purplepatchfitness.com. Alrighty, let's get back to the show. So if we've talked about the mistakes and we've talked about what it isn't, what is it? What is off season? Well, it's key training, but it's different training. It really, really changes. What changes is the intensity that we're doing, the specificity.
Matt Dixon 23:56
We're after different things, but we don't remove the structure. Here's a nice thing to think about it, and I think this is liberating. Perhaps the most important thing: over the course of all off season, we can remove something that in the rest of the year we're always thinking about. Here's what we're going to remove. In off season, you're not overtly trying to boost Fitness, speed, any of the functional thresholds or critical powers that you love to measure. We're not looking for performance progression, fitter, stronger, more powerful, faster. All of those components. That's not the purpose. The whole purpose is preparatory. In other words, we're doing work that is absolutely critical, but is setting up the framework, the chassis, and the catalyst for you to maximize the absorptions, the adaptations, and the boost that you're going to get from the hard training that is coming over the course of the coming season. And so, for that, the reason that off season is so critical is because we would identify it as step one in next year's program. It's step one, and this is the good news. As I mentioned before, that means that you actually can take a proper break, and you can start next season miles ahead than you've ever been before. Well, and so in other words, off season through our mindset. Remember, we talked about it's not a gap between seasons; it's the first one. So, in other words, it's not where your performance stops; it's actually where it's built, and that's a really important component. So here's a few things to think about in episode one of off season. Firstly, you're absolutely allowed as an athlete. There's no rules in the rule book about this. You're allowed to train less. You don't always have to hit your capacity of whatever hours you have available in the week. You don't have to hit the ceiling on these, so you can train less. If you typically train 12 hours a week when you're getting ready for your races, it's okay to do seven or eight. If you do 20, it's okay to do 12 or 14. If you do nine, it's okay to do six. You can do less. You can also do things differently. I want you to do that. Okay, it's important that we don't establish an all-or-nothing mindset when we're doing this. If your only definition of successful training is accumulating miles or hours, we're going to be in trouble, because this is going to set you up for failure. And so, this is really helpful to set the lens.
Matt Dixon 26:41
Number two, you're absolutely allowed to stay ambitious and train hard the right way. The key, though, is that we want to ensure that you finish the off-season block, so you're going into the new year next year absolutely mentally fresh, you've got room to grow, training hours. You've got capacity to build fitness, strength, power, and you can actually have the hunger, the desire, the commitment, the thirst to actually say, "Let's accelerate, let's go. The difference is your body's ready to absorb, and so for many athletes, that means dropping total hours, dropping total volume, and a lot of that depends on who you are as an athlete and your situation. Because we do, and I should say this, have athletes that do do some over distance stuff, whether they're and that's because they have the availability. We do add some lower hours, that's there. But for the vast majority, yeah, drop it down. A third component: off season should do the following. Number one, enable high flexibility, and so in other words, it's unlocking the chance to enjoy, genuinely enjoy opportunities to travel, holiday, family, friends, more. You also have the freedom to add other things that you love, maybe things that are tangential or parallel to if you're a triathlete that focus. You might be doing some more skiing, a little bit of yoga, maybe gravel biking, fat tire, mountain bike riding in the snow, high rocks. Even it's all good, it's all great.
Matt Dixon 28:24
These are activities that are additive, that are fun, that are different, that mix it up, but can all be woven into an overall recipe or program that still creates the preparatory load, but also enables a little bit of freshening up. Let's talk in this a little bit about strength as well. Over the course of the years, strength has rightfully received more and more attention from endurance athletes. We all know now that strength is an important part of successful training. We have a lot of athletes when they hit off season saying, "I was training for my triathlons. Now I need to just do strength. They doubled down it, and that's two thumbs up. But here's one thing that I do want to say that's very important. If you realize strength is important, maybe you've relegated it to an afterthought or haven't even successfully started it yet. And you think in the off season I'm going to double down. Make no mistake about it. In the off season, your strength is your bullseye. It's absolutely key. We're going to be talking about strength in the upcoming episode. At the same time, it doesn't conflict with your triathlon training, so you can successfully achieve off season triathlon training, swim, bike, and run, as well as the other additive stuff that we talked about-hiking, skiing, yoga, whatever it is-and still have a primary focus on strength. In fact, we love that. It's really important, and so there's a nice marriage that can occur when you can drop the emphasis on your endurance modalities. And double down on strength, but don't turn your back on it, and that's really important. So those are some of the principles that we think about with off season. What's the litmus of success? Well, let's just take a case study here. Let's take John, who's a very busy teacher. He's got a family, and he absolutely loves triathlon. Over the course of these months, if I asked John at the end of off season, was it successful? John would be really hungry for the season ahead. He would have unlocked consistency of training, but one of the things he would say to me is, "You know what? My family should hardly my family hardly noticed that I was training, and that's a really nice way to do it. We all stay healthy. We all want to make sure that we're looking after our wellness and our vitality, and we can do that in a structured manner while also increasing our capacity for others, and that is critical, because when we can unlock just the right amount of structure and a framework, it's going to prepare your body, but it's also going to prepare your mind, and we're all ready to go in the new year. So this is a good moment for us to just take a little pause on the episode and say what's happening in the subsequent episodes? Today was mostly introductory.
Matt Dixon 31:26
I want to make sure that we're setting everybody's mindset up around off season. Next week, what we're going to do is go deeper. We're going to start to talk about some of the training concepts, and I just want to flash over them here as a little bit of a catalyst, because what we talked about here is restoration, taking a break, but most importantly, not being a gap, and it's that phase where we are rebuilding the year. So what we are doing in off season is preparing the body and mind for your next performance breakthrough. That's our concept. So let's touch on it, and then let's really go deep next week and break it all apart. Number one, and I think this is key: we want to build an athletic base, not just a zone two base. An athlete. If you want to be a great triathlete, be a great athlete first. Strong, multi-directional, really, really stable, good strength, good power, good vibrancy, a big physiological engine, whatever we have. That's a key component. Number two, we're going to build strength, in other words, a catalyst for greater durability. We're also going to focus on technical developments across every sport, we're going to get faster on how we do stuff, how our hand entry is, what our recovery is like, what our posture is like on running. Why we're going to be be able to build more traction over the course of rolling terrain in the bike to get faster. Some really educational and technical development stuff when we're not chasing fitness. It's a nice thing. We're going to focus on your craft, the things that actually decide how good you get. And these are the things that we can only focus on: strength, technique, speed, durability. We only focus on that when you don't have the looming deadline of a race off season. So that's a great thing that we're going to dig into.
Matt Dixon 33:22
How do we actually break it down? We'll go into that next week, so make sure you don't miss next week's episode. Another opportunity is let's shore up the areas of opportunity, and I'd like to call it your weakness. We all have strengths. What are the areas where we can get stronger? We can get better. The off season is a great time to develop skills and technique in those areas so that you become more well rounded. That's terrific. We're also going to dig into, and I want to spend a lot of time next week on this on our engine, the size of our physiological engine. What does that mean? Well, off season is a time that you do a whole bunch of short, high-intensity training, isn't that the shit? Work that out. Yes. In other words, we're going to be doing short bouts where you're going to get your heart rate very, very high. Your breathing's going to be up there and labored, but it's going to be building the ceiling of your physiological potential. And then on top of it, I want you to just get fricking strong like a bull. It's a great opportunity off season to go have fun, mix it up, feel different, have different expectations and goals that you're chasing, and also lay the platform of great habits, improve body composition, get in control, and just going and having a whole bunch of fun. This is a key thing, and this is often the time when you've got holidays, you've got work deadlines, you've got a bunch of travel. This is a time that you lock in and say, "Wow, this training doesn't." Compete with life. It's additive. It's off season. It's a wonderful opportunity for people to actually say, "I feel better. I am better. I show up better. And then let's get ready for the big challenges. It all adds up to if you join the tribe on this, you commit to it. You're going to be ready to absorb the training ahead to get ready. You're going to be mentally fresh, and you've got a body that is ready to shine. That's what makes 2027 so so different. The magic of off season. I told you it was my favorite part of the year. Alrighty, a few housekeeping things to wrap it up, folks. Next week, as I mentioned, special off season Q and A episode.
Matt Dixon 35:46
We're going to go deep into training, how to work on certain weaknesses, how to structure your training, how to do anything that comes to mind that is going to help you unlock these broader concepts that we talk about today. And so, I want to ask you this: If you have a question, anything around off season, some of your challenges, some of the things that you find tough about off season, please email us now info@purplepatchfitness.com. We're going to cover the best questions in this episode. We're going to go through it. It's going to be a novel episode. I want to answer all of your questions that you have, things that you've struggled with before. How do I accelerate? How do you get better? It might be a question of should I do a marathon? Whatever it is, ask us. Alrighty, we want to answer the questions. Info at purplepatchfitness. com. And of course, if you are interested in joining us for off season? You want to go through and have a complimentary needs assessment call, where we will look at your training, understand your challenges, think about your goals, and help you set up the best strategic path forward with Purple Patch on North. We love to do this. Feel free to ping us info at purplepatchfitness. com and just ask for a conversation. Coach Max is the man on this. He's going to talk. He's got a few slots left this week for recording the episode. I said, "How many you got? And he said, "Four or five slots. And next week he's got 10 spots to have calls with people. And so, over the course of the next 10 days, over all of our listeners, we've only got about 14 or 15 spots that are complimentary. So if you want to have a one-to-one complimentary session with Max, feel free.
Matt Dixon 37:30
Alrighty, you will at least leave with a clearer path of what you want to achieve in your goals. And so that's it. And if it ends up being a great partnership where you want to join our off-season program, that's terrific. Remember, it's September the 28th, but I would recommend coming in a week or two early to get grounded, so we can hit the ground running. And of course, if you're racing, Kona, any other race, Ironman California, whatever it might be, it's fine. We will work with you one to one to integrate you into the program when appropriate. Still reach out for the call, and we can plan it with you. Alrighty team, that is it. I'm looking forward to the Q and A session next week. We'll see you next time. Take care, guys. Thanks so much for joining, and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel of YouTube, and you will find it there. And you could subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe. Also, share it with your friends, and it's really helpful if you leave a nice positive review in the comments. Now, any questions that you have, let me know. Feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com or leave it in the comments of the show at the Purple Patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it, and so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community. With that, I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, doing whatever you do. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Off season, Coaching relationship, Consistency, Performance, Training, Recovery, Strength, Technique, Resilience, Vitality, Base training, Intensity, Discipline, Mental health, Longevity