414 - The Counterintuitive Daily Habit That Boosts Performance, Energy and Sleep
Follow the Purple Patch Podcast at:
APPLE PODCASTS - SPOTIFY- AMAZON MUSIC - GOOGLE PODCASTS - YOUTUBE
Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast! On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon describes the performance reset as a deliberate short break that helps restore energy, focus, and performance rather than taking time away from productivity. Drawing on the example of strategic walk breaks during an Ironman, he explains that brief recovery periods can help manage accumulated physical and mental stress and support stronger performance later in the day.
He outlines three reset options: meditation, which he presents as the most effective for processing stress; a short nap of around 7–15 minutes to re-energize; and walking or active mobility, an accessible way to refresh the brain and mobilize energy. A reset taken in the early or middle afternoon may support focus for the following hours and help reduce stress that can interfere with sleep.
Dixon emphasizes that a reset is one part of a broader set of performance habits. Combined with adequate hydration, nourishing food, regular movement, strength training, and good sleep, it can contribute to greater resilience and capacity at work, in sport, and at home.If you have any questions, contact info@purplepatchfitness.com
Episode Timestamps
0:00-1:49 Episode Intro
2:19-end Meat & Potatoes
Purple Patch and Episode Resources
Book your needs assessment with Coach Max
Hiring Purple Patch Coach: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/careers-page
Fast Track Run Squad: purplepatchfitness.com/fasttrackmarathon
Check out our world-class coaching and training options:
Tri Squad: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/squad
1:1 Coaching: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/11-coached
Run Squad: https://www.purplepatchfitness/com/run-squad
Strength Squad: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/strength-1
Live & On-Demand Bike Sessions: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/bike
Get a free needs assessment and learn more about our programs: https://purplepatchfitness.simplybook.me/v2/#book/service/19
Live in San Francisco? Explore the Purple Patch Performance Center: https://center.purplepatchfitness.com
Everything you need to know about our methodology:
https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/our-methodology
Amplify your approach to nutrition with Purple Patch + Fuelin
https://www.fuelin.com/purplepatch
Get access to our free training resources, insight-packed newsletter and more at purplepatchfitness.com
Matt Dixon 0:01
Folks, today's show is all about something a little bit different. It's called a performance reset, and you can listen today, and it's going to help you get faster in sport. But it's also going to improve your performance across the workday, and it can even enhance the quality of your sleep. It's actually a great example of how we view our performance coaching, because yes, we want you to get faster. We want to help you through a really structured, integrated training program that fits into life and doesn't compete with it. But we also have a broad, broader perspective, because we want you to smash your goals. That's terrific, but we don't want to do so at consequence of your ability to show up in the other really important aspects of life, and that's why we always have a broader perspective on all of our coaching, making sure that you get faster, but you also accelerate and amplify your big life, ensuring that you can show up performance ready at the workplace and still have time, energy, and capacity for all of the important stuff when you get home, and so whether it's through our one-to-one coaching or one of our squad programs, we integrate education just like this into all aspects of our training and programming. So if you want to gain access, if you want to get better, not just in sport but also across other aspects of life, and ultimately have a bigger, more rewarding life. Why don't you reach out to us? You can set up a complimentary coaching call. This is a wonderful part of the year as we're leading into the holidays to bed in these types of performance practices. And so we can explain more about our performance programings when we chat. You can also visit purplepatchfitness.com. If you want to reach out for a complimentary coaching call, just ping us info at purplepatchfitness.com. All right, on with 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. And welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast.
Matt Dixon 2:20
As ever, your host Matt Dixon, and today we're going to break down a performance tool that we leverage for our athletes, for our business professionals, for our executives, and even our parents. We call it the reset. So, what is a reset, you ask? Well, simply put, it's an intentional break, or I might say, an investment that not only will enhance your energy, boost your brain function, and ensure that you perform for the several hours after performing the reset, but can also cascade on to yield better sleep, enhanced adaptations from your training that you're doing, and deeper rejuvenation on a day-to-day basis. Now, a reset is for most people one of the most counterintuitive performance strategies, and few discuss it in the terms that we are going to today. All the more reason for us to dig in, because if you can integrate this reset as a habit, and as I mentioned, it's counterintuitive. A lot of people think I'm not doing that, but if you can, I promise you, it's not about less is more. It's about getting more out of yourself. I mentioned this being an investment. It's not stepping away from performance, when you do a reset in the middle of the day, give your brain a break. It's actually fueling of your performance. It is a pathway to get more. Now, my analogy for this is all of the coaches and athletes out there that still look at walk breaks in a marathon and think I'm not doing that, and judging them as a sign of weakness, versus actually understanding what they are-a strategy and a tool to go faster on your marathon. As an athletic coach, my nickname was the recovery coach, and that's because I prioritize recovery as much as the hard sessions of swim, bike, and run, and it wasn't because I wanted to train the mate the demands less. I wanted to lower the bar. It's because I wanted to help athletes go faster, and so having the courage to truly recover was a catalyst and gateway to achieve this.
Matt Dixon 4:40
But recovery wasn't just reserved for a periodic day off training. Have a break, Sally. In fact, recovery we even infused intentionally in the height of competition when the demands were at the greatest. Take an Iron Man for example, swimming two and. Half miles in open water with often hundreds of your closest friends, followed by a 112-mile bike ride, and then following it, capped off with a marathon. For the vast majority of our athletes, one of the and I'll say this deliberately strategic tools that we would recommend to the athletes was to recommend a smart walk break at almost every aid station, but why would we do this? To try and make the marathon easier? No, it's fricking hard. As a little bit of a consequence, to maybe say, "Hey, we can make this more comfortable. No, we wanted to excel. We wanted our athletes to win against themselves, achieve better performance than they ever have before. The reason that I love the walk break in an Ironman is really twofold. Number one, it actually provides a mental break from the huge physical and cognitive demands. As you're going through an Ironman, the stresses accumulate, and you get more and more demand on the system and the brain. Breaking it down into mini projects and giving the brain just 1520, maybe 30 seconds of reset has shown, by research, that performance can actually enhance. The other side that we love walk breaks is it's a postural and mechanical reset, ensuring that you can give the muscles a little bit of a break, and while doing so, doing something productive, which is get some fuel and get some hydration into the aid station, and then reset. Now the key to doing these is always to infuse walk breaks early, as an investment, so that you can fuel better performance later in the race. And it's no wonder that so many of our athletes, when you look at them at the back stages of their race, are still able to retain their form, maintain speed, and keep their output going. In other words, the walk breaks themselves are the things to fuel performance. They ensure best race outcomes. Well, when we think about a reset today, the analogy is there for life as well. Let's tie it to it. When we get to work at 910, 11 o'clock. Most of us have got energy. We're ready to charge. We're restored from hopefully good quality sleep the night before. We're fueled from a good breakfast. Hopefully, we're hydrated. We're ready for the day ahead. Our brain function, our energy, is at its best performance. But over the day, we all face relentless cognitive demand and therefore stress accumulation. We have projects, we have meetings, we might have difficult discussions and meetings that we have more and more and more.
Matt Dixon 7:54
And as these demands accumulate, by definition, as we get to the later stages of the day, there's going to be a disassociation between the demands and our brain and body performance. It has to start to decline, and so in other words, who we were at 10 a.m. is going to be pretty different than who we are at let's say 4 p.m. unless we do something about it. This is the reset here. Just like a walk break in an Iron Man, a reset is an intentional reset of the nervous system, a chance for the brain to recover, to re-energize. With the impact of this being better energy, enhanced cognitive function, in other words, our ability to process information, to focus, and performance for several hours following. And this isn't theory, ladies and gentlemen. Research points to the benefits of things like a 10 to 20-minute break, a reset, in other words, and enhancing your performance for hours following. They've done studies on your energy, on brain function, on all of the aspects that relate to us being our best, making tough decisions, being able to focus in the back half of the day, and yet most people don't do it. It's not culturally accepted or normal within the workplace, and I get it. We've all got huge demands, probably even more demands now, because of the layering on of the rapid change and increase of demands on everybody around AI.
Matt Dixon 9:28
And so, the most intuitive thing that we do when we care and we want to show up well is just to say, "Let's tough it out. I've got so much to get done, and in fact, to get myself through it, I'm going to fuel myself with more caffeine, more sugar. I'm going to lean on toughness. But here's the message: grinding isn't the same as thriving. We used to have a saying with our pro athletes: it takes courage to recover. Well, I ask you. Do you have courage to recover, to take a performance reset when there's just so much to get done? Let's break down what a reset is. When we break it down, it's not 10 or 15 or 20 minutes to turn your back. It's not stepping away from performance, it is an investment to fuel your performance. It is a gateway to get more out of yourself. And the good news around a reset is there is no fixed way to do it. In fact, we like to break it down into three main options. The first, which is probably the most powerful, is a short meditation. The second is something that I love and do every single day-a very short nap. And the third, which is the most accessible, and we'll dig into it, is walking or active mobility. Now, these three tools, if you want to call it that, that sit under the banner of a reset. They don't all deliver exactly the same benefits, but they do have positive impacts on the following. And let me lay it out. Number one, processing stress. Okay, that's a good thing. Our our resiliency is directly tied to our ability to process stress, so these tools process stress. Number two, mobilizing energy. Okay, that's a good thing because when we have greater energy, then we're better equipped to perform. Number three, and this is important, giving your brain key recovery from the accumulating loads, even enhancing brain function, as we talked about before, focus, information processing, decision making, and this isn't a short-term spike. It's not like a Red Bull. Oh, I feel great. Oh no, I'm crashing. This is for multiple hours following. If you just think about it, in terms of investment, I say, give me 10 minutes. I'll give you four hours of greater performance. You're going to get more done than you can ever imagine. Well, that's a pretty good ROI. Most savvy investors would jump all over it. The interesting thing about this, as well, is by embracing a reset, bravely investing in a reset. Research also shows that these can enhance your sleep quality at night as well. Now the reason for this is pretty simple. If you and I ask the question of all of the audience, do you get broken sleep at night? I bet that 90% of you would say, "Yeah, I do. Well, there's a couple of reasons for this.
Matt Dixon 12:46
Now, there is a whole section, a whole category which we won't talk about today, for women that are navigating perimenopause and menopause. Yes, sleep disruption is a part of that, not something that you're powerless to actually impact positively, but it is a very real thing. So we have to embrace that. But let's put that aside, just for the sake of this conversation. There is still a big impact on the fact that the vast majority of people that are under enormous demands. The reason that sleep quality is so impacted is because we bring too much accumulated stress into our nighttime sleep, and when the body is overstressed, it tends to disrupt sleep. A good example of this is let's go back to our Ironman example. Just this last week, I was at an Ironman watching many Purple Patch athletes have tremendous performances, by the way, but each of those athletes they went through grueling, grueling physical demands. Getting up at 330 in the morning or so, then going through that two and a half mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and a marathon on the end. You'd be exhausted, yeah. Can you imagine how well they slept the night after the I met. The answer is terribly, because their body is in such a state of over stress it can't settle down. That's the same as an over busy parent or a very busy executive.
Matt Dixon 14:15
If we don't take care of stress in the day, it's going to disrupt sleep. If it disrupts sleep, we wake up more exhausted the next morning, and the cycle continues. So the reset has a key role that in the day we have an opportunity to process stress with a 10-minute investment, and that means that you're going to have more energy to bring to whatever is important to you at the end of the workday. Number one, number two, you've got a much greater chance of actually having pretty good sleep quality when you're locking it in. So let's just do a quick sweep. I don't want to give away the castle today, but a quick sweep through meditation, naps, and walking, just to give you a. A little bit of context, okay? Now, I can't go through every detail here. That information is reserved for our Purple Patch athletes and also for the teams that we work for our wind cycle program. But here's a little snapshot: meditation. I think the important part of meditation is defining what its use is, because many people fall into the trap of thinking meditation is almost just clearing your mind and stopping thoughts, but that's actually not really its purpose. In fact, that's not what you're trying to do whatsoever. The vast majority of executives that I work with embrace some kind of meditation, and the reason for it is it's an incredibly powerful tool for stress processing.
Matt Dixon 15:44
It also, likes we talked about under the banner of reset, gives your brain a break, and that's a really important part to recharge the battery of it, and it lowers your stress hormones. Now you start to build a relationship. It's okay when you're meditating to have lots of thoughts. The difference when you become skilled at meditation is it starts to mold your opportunity to have a different relationship with those thoughts, and rather than feeling reactive, empowering you to actually be responsive to it. And so meditation not only processes stress, it also energizes you, and as we talked about, ensures that you're carrying fewer stress hormones into the end of the workday, and so it allows you to show up back at home a better version of yourself, and also fuel better, less disrupted sleep, and so when you start to build this in as a practice, 1015, 20 minutes at most every single day, you begin to see how it compounds interest day on day. You're not only getting afternoon performance; you're getting better sleep, meaning you're showing up better in the morning performance. You got less stress carried into the next day. You process a bit more stress, you get better quality of sleep, and before you know it, just these two practices are helping you build in overall better energy and capacity. The second reset of choice is a nap. Now this isn't quite as powerful as meditation. It doesn't have quite the same benefits, but it still does do a couple of things. Firstly, it does re-energize you, and that's really key. It also does process stress accumulation systemic on the body, and can have a multi-hour function impact on your brain function. The key thing about the nap is you've got to keep it short, okay? Nothing more than 20 minutes max. I often talk about seven to 15 minutes, so you just have a nice lie down. The important part of a nap is, in order for you to yield benefits, you actually don't even need to fall asleep, okay? For it to be beneficial, you don't have to fall asleep, so it's not pass or fail. Your job isn't to actually sleep. What it is is to remove the inputs, find a quiet place, and then invite sleep if it wants to come. Even if you lie there in that weird lucid state that we're all familiar with, you're going to get a yield from it. You're going to get the same impact, and the final component of a reset is walking. Now, this is the easiest option. It's often the most accessible. It's very much culturally the most accepted, and we don't get quite the same benefits here. I would say this is third on the less. The bronze medal still lots of value, but the bronze medal when it comes to reset. But the key here is you're really doing two things.
Matt Dixon 18:50
It's not a massive stress processing impact. Still good, you are doing it, but it's not quite as impactful on that. But you are still giving the brain a break, so you are allowing a little bit of freshen up of the brain, almost like recharging the batteries. The second thing that you are doing, because you're walking around taking steps, there's more blood flow. The heart beats a little bit quicker. Doesn't need to make sure it beats fast enough that you start sweating. It's not going to restore energy, but it does mobilize the energy that you have, and that's really beneficial. It can give a little bit of a spark up, no different than maybe having a hot beverage does. It raises core temperature and makes you more alert. And so those are the categories of resets. Then the question is, well, when do you do it? Typically early to middle afternoon, somewhere in for most people, one 1o'clock, 2o'clock, 3o'clock. Okay, it's whenever you want to really preserve the next three or four hours of high performance afterwards. And don't worry, by you doing it, even that little nap, I promise you, it will not disrupt your sleep quality. In fact. It's going to help, as long as in that nat perspective you keep things short.
Matt Dixon 20:07
One final thing on the reset, really important, and it's important for perspective. What I've highlighted today is just one single tool. That's it, one single tool. So when we think about performance in the workday across life, executive performance. I like to think about the reset as just one of the many threads that tend to weave together to build your what we call performance armor for the day, your daily energy, your capacity. So I've just isolated one today that's not spoken about and discussed very much, but is incredibly valuable. The reset, but it's only one. The real impact comes when you combine all of the practices and habits into short daily routine. Now that's when we're talking about hydration, fueling, sleep. How many steps you're taking beyond your exercise to make sure you're continuing to process stress, so that you start to build this compound impact on daily readiness. It's the same thing for an athlete. Just because you invest in a reset, it's not going to make you faster. That's the truth of it. Okay, you need to think about it in terms of yes, I've got the right plan, but I also need to think about recovery and hydration and nutrition, fueling sleep and more, and then you get your performance recipe through a mathletic lens. So, in other words, whether it's a reset, whether it's hydration, whether it's sleep, none of these things are individual game changers, but together, what they are is a powerful performance advantage. And so, some of the other things that we think about the threads-it's not a discussion about it today-is yeah, moving your body daily, accumulating more than 8000 steps across a day, so that you can facilitate stress processing, making sure that you're hydrating adequately to avoid additional stress oils on the system, your immune system, your brain, your energy, and also stabilize energy and brain function.
Matt Dixon 22:11
Treating food as fuel so that you actually fuel your body and your brain to show up its best every single day, focused a lot around what you're consuming with proteins and vegetables, and then simple strategies around resistance training or strength training, and sleep. We also even dig into organizational effectiveness. When you get all of this together, you amplify resilience because, as I mentioned, your resilience is directly tied to your ability to process stress, to drive your capacity, and so today I want us to keep in mind. I've just isolated one of them, the reset. And so I ask you this: Do you have the courage to build this practice? The athletes, the pro athletes, we used to say, it takes courage to recover. Super, good. It's the same for us. Whether you're a parent showing up better for your family and kids, whether you're a business professional and executive ensuring that your productivity and effectiveness in the last hour of the days are fantastic, as good as the start, instead of falling into survival mode. And let me say one last thing: you might already be pretty darn good at all this stuff. Seriously, you might even be great.
Matt Dixon 23:34
But there's always room to grow. We believe there's always another gear for everyone. No, there is always another gear, and so the performance reset. If you're not doing this, and then start to integrate it, and tell me how do you feel after a week or two? It's going to have an impact. If you want to learn more details about the reset or our programming for Wind Cycle or Purple Patch Coaching, feel free to reach out to us. info@purplepatchfitness.com. For executives and business leaders, head to windcycle.org. You can check out our program in there. You can also ping us, and I'll send you a custom brochure for you so that you can look at our offerings. And athletes, this is a part of you being a great athlete, particularly when you're busy and living a big life. That's how we unlock greatness in our athletes beyond the swims, the bikes, the runs, and everything else. All right, we'll see you next time. Cheers, guys! Thanks so much for joining, and thank you for listening.
Matt Dixon 24:38
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
Performance reset, Stress processing, Energy mobilization, Brain function, Cognitive demand, Meditation, Short naps, Active mobility, Sleep quality, Recovery strategy, Mental break, Physical performance, Resilience building, Human potential, Daily habits