391 - From Base to Race: The Ironman Training Shift Most Athletes Miss
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast! On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon from Purple Patch Coaching discusses the transition from Q1 to Q2 training, emphasizing the importance of building race-specific fitness. He highlights the need for a new full-time coach, detailing the job description and application process. Dixon outlines the Q2 training focus, including tougher swim sessions, high-intensity bike workouts, and controlled pacing for running. He stresses the importance of maintaining strength training and proper nutrition, including increased caloric intake and hydration. Dixon also introduces the "Sunday Special" for effective time management and encourages athletes to reach out for coaching consultations.
If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
00:-2:54 Promo
3:24-6:39 Episode Intro
6:40-End Meat & Potatoes
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
Today we're going behind the curtain of purple patch coaching, diving into our approach for q2 but I got a couple of things to tell you just before we get going with the show. The first is things going pretty well at purple patch, and we have got a really engaged, high performing coaching team, but it is that time. Yep, this is an exciting time. We want to add to that team. We're looking to add a full time coach to the purple patch coaching team roster. Geographically, it's easier in the US, but you don't need to be in the Bay Area with myself, but we are looking for a very, very strong, seasoned coach to join our team, someone that's aspirational, someone that loves to work in a team, someone that wants their career to go beyond just coaching a set roster of athletes and instead have an impact over a broad range of athletes, of all goals of all levels that are united by a common desire, and that's to improve at purple patch, everything we do is driven through the spirit of helping people get the most out of themselves. And so we're looking for a coach who wants to help with that, who wants to be a part of a team and is going to work directly under my guidance with the team of purple patch coaches, we're going to add the link in the show notes to the job description. It's pretty clear on all of the assets that we're looking for. In addition, please, if you're not one of the candidates or the time is not right for you, perhaps you know someone that is it is only one position.
Matt Dixon 01:42
That's all we're hiring for, and we would love you to join. Please share it wide job description, the show notes. You can also find it on the bottom of the front page of the website, purplepatchfitness.com, secondly, q2 this is a fantastic time to become a partner with purple patch on your performance journey. If you'd like to reach out and learn more about all of the purple patch coaching programs, whether it's individual coaching or one of our squad programs. Run squad strength, squad, bike squad and, of course, tri squad. And then feel free to reach out for a complementary needs assessment. It's a pressure free chat. You just have a coaching call with us. We want to understand you your goals, what you're looking to achieve, and see how we can help. But if we're not the right fit, I promise you, we'll give you plenty of advice and guidance to help you accelerate on your path, no matter whether it's with purple patch or not, all you need to do is reach out info@purplepatchfitness.com reach out to us, set you off on a journey, complementary needs assessment, and you can become a part of a journey. You know what we do? We help purple get faster and without the compromise of your health or broader life. That's our special source. Alrighty. Enjoy the show today. It's a cracker. I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the purple patch podcast. The mission of purple patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.
Matt Dixon 03:24
Welcome to the purple patch podcast. As ever, I'm your host, Matt Dixon, and today we get to do a little bit of a rinse and repeat with evolved education. Because just before we launched into q1 that's January, February, March of this year, we did a little bit of a preview. We actually took a step back, and I pulled the curtain back on purple patch coaching and said, This is what we're looking to achieve with our athletes, and perhaps most importantly, this is how we're going to go and do it. And the goal of this was to help you as an athlete or as a listening coach, maybe apply some of the principles in your journey. And so now, as we're coming up to the end of q1 where it makes perfect sense, we're going to do the same again. But for q2 things start to get a little bit more serious. Now, April, May and June, big months, particularly in the northern hemisphere preseason is over. It is time to ramp up training. It's starting to build. That's my lovely phase of the year. Build for race season, and like every phase of training, there are core components that you want to as an athlete get right. It doesn't matter whether you're a first timer or you're gunning for Kona qualification in an Iron Man, or perhaps you want to qualify to the Boston Marathon, you want to get this right. My team has told me that since one of our main goals is to educate and empower triathletes to tap into their potential, it's not right that we keep things to ourselves on how we do things.
Matt Dixon 05:00
And so with that, here we go. I'm going to share what changes we're making to training right now in our tri squad program to help you navigate your training and your triathlon journey. And I want to give you a little bit of a quick background if you're new to this show, tri squad is our more autonomous coaching ecosystem. It's not a plan. It's not some auto generated, AI, machine driven plan. This is human coaching. It's supported by the entire purple patch coaching team, including me. We are all deeply immersed in it. The program is the most up to date version of the purple patch methodology that's been refined year on year. Remember, evolve or die over the course of the last 20 years, the methodology was born out of, first, my struggles, but most importantly, the very methodology that fueled the purple patch pro athletes, including so many winning World Championships, trisquared tracks the course of the season, progressing athletes to get ready and get faster, but also show up to your chosen races, whether it's a half Iron Man, whether it's an Iron Man primed and ready to go. And so we've built a foundation. We've built a foundation of strength, of readiness and, of course, skill acquisition, and now we build on that. And so we are going to dig into in today's show q2 training tri squad style, it's in the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 06:41
Yes, the meat and potatoes. And let me take stock here. If you didn't listen to our off season episodes, that's q4 and then our preseason, that was q1 I really recommend that you go back. And the reason for that not is because I want you to hear what you've missed, unlucky. But instead, remember, the off season is coming at the end of this year. Training is cyclical. It's a journey. It should be integrated into your life, and it's not only going to provide really, really helpful context of this episode today, but it's also been going to be a catalyst of inspiration for the future months once this year is over for you. So if you've been a part of the program for the last months, then you've done a great job of building a foundation, not in that old school base building style, but a foundation of strength of tissue resilience. So great health, skill development and cardiovascular conditioning that's been building. You've also had, over the last months, a little bit more freedom, a little bit more flex in the program. But now it's time to get going, because we start to dial it up here. This is always one of my favorite parts of the year. We start to shift to phrases like power, speed, development, threshold, all of these components. And in fact, as I was preparing for this show today, I thought back to the Fast Track triathlete, a book that I'm sure many of you have read. My second book, and I think it's a key re shining of the light on this. And if you want to go and read it for yourself, you can go back to page 53, of that book, because I mentioned in there a common mistake, and what I write in the book now, this is more than a decade ago now, but it absolutely still rings true is that athletes often make the mistakes of forgetting the elements that worked in EVOLUTION Up to this point of the season, and so what they do is make a massive shift to weeks of training that's just dumped full of event specific, intensity, Ironman, distance athletes. That means that they just repeat sessions, steady, long, slow versus half. Ironman, it's just going to be up just sub threshold, boom, boom, boom, and what occurs is fatigue and underperformance. But what we consistently learn up to this point is athletes are developing really well with a wide range of training across the full range of intensities.
Matt Dixon 09:18
And so we want to keep this in play, even when we start to dance towards race specificity, because we are in this phase q2 starting to have a shift of mindset. I want to get race ready, and that means that you do want to integrate some race specific fitness, race specific skill development. I'll give you a simple one, siting in swimming, across all elements, swim, bike and run. And so as we go into this phase of the year, it is time to start tuning the engine. That's a phrase that I want to imagine. You're tuning the engine, you've built, the chassis, you're building up some. Conditioning now we want you to start to feel really fit, to start to see progressive development in those fitness metrics. And most importantly, we want you to feel fast. And it all wants to remain on a bedrock of fresh freshness. Remember a purple patch saying looks great on a t shirt, but has real depth and meaning fit and fresh, that's what we start looking on. And so we're going to start to lock in, and we're going to start to talk about a different set of focus points as we go through each of the disciplines. We're going to talk about swim, we're going to talk about run, we're going to talk about strength, and we're also going to dance into some of the habits, some of the supporting habits that fuel performance that I as an athlete completely disregarded and ended my career in frustration and correct fatigue. So let's go in order this time swim. What are we focusing on as we go into the swim workouts? Well, we spent the last months doing a lot of work on skill development. In fact, there was an overweighted emphasis on drills. We did a lot of timing drills, a lot of single arm type work, a lot of work on posture. We were looking to help athletes start to learn what good posture looks like in swimming. We also wanted to have a mindset of take no bad strokes. So we did a lot of very, very short intervals. Over the last months, we had athletes swimming pretty fast, but they were doing it with a series of 50s and 20 fives. We also wanted to help athletes start to build up a shift of gears that correlated that when they increased effort, that will correlate to an increase of speed. So we wanted to do this while preserving technique. So there was a lot of foundational awareness that we were doing in our swim program over the last few months, set the body, make sure that you can swim well and repeatable so short interval work and start to be able to increase speed with increase of effort. So this is a really key component that's foundational, but that's not really race readiness.
Matt Dixon 12:24
That's not going to help you show up to your race and have the very best swim split possible, as well as at the lowest cost. And so how do we do that? We start to have an implementation of different types of sessions and a different focus on skill development. So here's the headline news in our swimming for q2 and I hesitate to say this for all the purple patch athletes, it's going to get a little tougher. We're doing some tougher swimming here, and that's good. Conditioning is a core part, and here's why this is important. It's not just about building cardiovascular conditioning and muscular endurance. That's one half of why we're going to do some tougher, longer, stronger swimming. But the other part of it is no matter how good our technique is getting, as we've been really focusing over the last few months, if you don't have the muscular conditioning and the cardiovascular conditioning to carry that over the course of the distance of your race, half Iron Man or Iron Man. So give or take 2500 strokes you're going to take, or 5000 strokes you're going to take in a race like that. If you don't have the conditioning, it's going to fall to pieces. And so you got to be pretty fit to not only navigate through the swim successfully as fast as you can, but also make sure that it doesn't have an impact on your bike and run performance, hence your overall race performance. And so we're going to do quite a lot of conditioning. We're going to have some swims that are a series of one hundreds with shorter rest, not just doing high speed at 95% effort or easy conditioning at 70% effort, but a lot of work that goes under, at and above that 85% or threshold effort, a lot of 7080, 90% work. We're going to extend the distances, intervals of 101 5200, yards on meters. And we're also going to look to try and extend that out where you can hold that effort and very close to the pace for longer distances, four hundreds, six hundreds, eight hundreds. So very challenging work. And so this is the time where at least a couple of the swims a week, you feel like when you leave, I owe me a bacon on that very, very simple. So this is where a lot of classical swim sets start to come into play.
Matt Dixon 14:58
But that's not all of the pro. Grooming there. We also want to in parallel and integrate it into all of these, introduce and integrate race skills. So all of the workouts that we do, and let's just pick a simple 115 times, 115 seconds rest, 85% effort. Every fifth one, we simulate a buoy turn by heading 95% very strong and trying to settle back in. Okay, so that's a very typical type set. We want to integrate this a dynamic open water environment. Because I'm not training poor swimmers, we're not training pool swimmers, we're training an open water swimmer that's got a bike and run afterwards. And so how do we reduce postural stress and help some at the fastest pace possible in a straight line, the biggest predictor of race day performance? And so we start to integrate siting where we're helping people actually do the conditioning of what it takes to have your head lift out of the water, but also the skill development, where you can do it without losing rhythm. When you are sighting, if you're watching me here, your eyes come out of the water, and then you rotate your head to breathe. We consistently see people breathe and then try and rotate forward and they sink. So lift, rotate, breathe. We also do a lot of work with takeout speed. Whenever athletes start a race, it is high octane. Gun goes off, even if it's a rolling start, nerves, excitement, exhilaration, maybe a little bit of trepidation. Boom, takeout speed. We want to get you familiar with the hubbub, the Whirlpool, the turmoil, the situation. Because if you can get familiar with swimming at a very strong, high stress environment, and then settling down and getting calm and into your rhythm, you're going to have a more pleasurable experience, a faster experience, and it's going to unlock bike and run performance. So we do a lot of work of simulating the start of races. We also, through these sessions, try and build your awareness around pacing. We'd love athletes to do this in absence of things like form goggles. Form goggles have their place, have their role. They're useful. But I want to help you feel pace and control going through a series of three hundreds and four hundreds, where your best swimming isn't hanging on at the end of the last 300 or 400 but is occurring in the middle to the back end of the swim, progressively building through and then, for the reason of doing some extended distance is I want to train you to hold tension under the water for sustained high pressure swimming. You want to become familiar with the discomfort. So this is an incredibly important phase. It doesn't mean that every swim go swim that you do is tough, is hard, but it does take a step up. Now, a question I always get with triathletes swim is in this phase, is these swim sessions are very, very valuable, and yet many athletes will say, I don't want to swim. Number one, I don't like it. I'm not very good at it. Number two, which is very, very fair, it's logistically the most challenging. And besides, in my prior years, when I've really committed to swimming, it's only made a 32nd difference, so I haven't got much faster. I want you to set the tone here, logistics aside, understanding that it's challenging, there is real value in you investing in this phase of swimming really, really valuable. It's not just about In fact, the outcome isn't really primarily about swimming faster. If you're a 40 minute half Iron Man swimmer. If you get to swim 38 this year, that's great. If you get some 32 wonderful Yeah.
Matt Dixon 19:06
And so some people make huge leaps, but that's not the primary benefit. The biggest benefit of investing in swimming is what it does to unlock your bike and run readiness. A lot of athletes don't swim because they think, you know what. It's not a big ROI, but it truly is a big ROI, because my role is to help you get through the swim and finish it as fast as we can, hopefully faster than before, but also with a close to zero impact on your ability to express your bike and run fitness. If you don't have that, you're going to run into trouble, even though, even though you're not probably aware of it. When we see athletes struggle on the run, the first thing we look at, as well as their fueling and hydration is, what was the. Swim conditioning going in. It has a direct through line on this because you're not training swim bike and run, you're training swim bike, run, it's one sport. So what does that mean? Well, you swim as much as you can. For some people, that's 3456, times a week. For other people, it's one or two if it's one session that you get, and then make it meaningful if it's two sessions, make them both mean. Both really meaningful if it's three sessions, and then you've got one of those that can be reserved for more technical development, skill development and recuperation. And so those are the sort of levers that you look at without going into too many details. Okay, let's talk about the bike. It's a great little fun phase that we're going to build on again. Once again, we have not spent the winter at purple patch doing just zone two. We haven't been asking our athletes to ride for 234, hours on a trainer, nice and smooth, to build the base, because we realize that that base is being developed throughout the year. This is not old school Tour de France cycling. We've been while the days have been short, the days have been chilly.
Matt Dixon 21:23
Conditions are typically nasty for most athletes, and it's far away from the endurance development phase of the season. We've been working a lot on Terrain Management, on high speed, on high power. In fact, we've been building potential vo two, Matt's work, but now we want to convert the performance potential and the skill development we've gone through over the last few months into race specific fitness. So what does this look like? It looks very, very different than last few months. Number one, we're going to be doing a lot of work just under, at and above our functional threshold, if we want to call it that as maximal steady state, okay, very, very strong, high alternate effort at around eight, eight and a half out of 10. Zone four, for you folks that love to talk in zones, and we do this for an extended period of time. We're having intervals where outside, they might go up to 20 minutes in duration, we have a series of 456789,
Matt Dixon 22:35
minute, 10 minute intervals inside. But we do these with real world application. So there's a couple of types of personalities over the course of a three week cycle that we would include in these longer duration, strong to very strong efforts. The first is, we'll do at least a couple of these intervals over the course of a three week cycle, at a lower cadence, high torque, what we call strength endurance work. This is the purple patch special sauce. It is the greatest catalyst to help people improve on the bike period, very, very strong, sustained, low cadence work. In fact, what I like to say synthetically low, a lower leg speed or pedal stroke than you would ride outside, 5545 even 40 RPM, very low, high torque. Efforts, strong, okay, we also
Matt Dixon 23:36
like to do variable intensity over variable terrain, using velocity and our bike platforms coach through them, we like to make these very real world. How do you manage power output, where you don't just sit at a fixed outcome intensity and instead think about input? So we'll simulate indoors on a trainer variable terrain, and naturally, as people are riding up a hill, and then power is going to go up a little bit, it'll be up a zone four, as we're cresting, we're going to build speed and go over into zone five as we've got gravity on our side, if you believe in gravity, and then it becomes your friend, and you might drop down to zone three while carrying speed. So we like to do real world application at very strong intervals where we're coaching you through them, so that when you meet that type of terrain outside, you're equipped to navigate the right intensity. And you've done it from a physiological conditioning to yield the best speed. And so we like to marry two things that become very real world. What are you training from a physiological stimulus, and can you partner that with the real world application to help the athlete get faster? It turns out you can. We also then have. A outside of the endurance of the thunk of the threshold type work.
Matt Dixon 25:04
So the very strong, sustained efforts, we don't want to turn our back on the super short, high intensity. And so we do some high power work, some activation work, because it turns out that the vast majority of amateur athletes, and not necessarily that great or that familiar with doing short, sharp intensity. And so this is just a thing that we touch on because we've been working on it for months, and so we don't want it to dissipate and dissolve. This is very much the same as when you get into race specific strength. By the way, we do a lot of heavy lifting, but if you just stop doing any strength training, it just evaporates. And so you keep doing strength training with a little bit of heavy work to keep everything primed, all of those gains that you've achieved over months, it's the same on the bike with short, high intensity. So we do some of that. And then here's the key thing, we start to build our endurance, our muscular resilience and race specific intervals. And this becomes really, really important. We start to think beyond what are the intervals, and we start to align what race day is going to be like. This includes your posture on the bike. Can you sit for an extended period in time trial position if you're a triathlete? Number two, how do you navigate terrain to get the best wheel speed at your race specific intensity? Number three, what does your fueling and hydration look like? Let's practice it. Let's put it in systematically so that that can remove cognitive load and decision making, you start to understand yourself. And finally, number four, what's your mindset?
Matt Dixon 26:49
Because on race day, you're not going to rise to the occasion, you're going to fall to the level of your training. And so therefore, on your mindset, when you don't feel good, what are you saying to yourself when you struggle a little bit. What are the tools that you pull out when you feel under pressure? How can you navigate that and get through and so these elements we put into place, and it's called something very simple, dress rehearsal. Let's put it into action. And so we even have intervals and workouts right now in some of the indoor sessions where we simulating riding with a headwind And conversely, the next interval is riding with a tailwind. Now we don't put fans in your face or fans that you're behind, but we're simulating how you would actually ride those types of intervals with a little bit more tension, a little slower leg speed, a little higher power going into the headwind, and then a little faster leg speed, a little bit more flow, we should see a little bit lower output when you've got a tailwind, and you start to build this tool kit. This is how we start to take trained potential that we've done into real world physiological readiness, but also a toolkit of how I'm going to fuel, hydrate, think, adapt, and apply this tool kit to help me go faster. And finally, underneath it all, this is a wonderful time to actually go out on adventures. Guess what? The clocks are going to spring forward. This clock this quarter. Guess what? If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are getting longer, the days getting dry, the weather's coming. It is a time to go back out and explore. Now. Here's the biggest mistake. What we tend to do it as we work with a lot of busy people, is we like to put a lot of the intensity at least two of the weeks out of every third week, three week cycle, we do quite a lot of the tougher work indoors on a trainer, because that's where a lot of our athletes train with great, specific specificity and high purpose.
Matt Dixon 28:57
The biggest mistake that athletes make is when they go outside, they start to spend longer time on the saddle. They start chasing too high of an output outside, proving it to themselves that they're ready. If a ride is an endurance ride outside, you better make it endurance. This is where zone two does come into play. Zone three, going up the hills, for the most part, that's where it does come into play. And so there is a real value in zone two work. This is the type of approach that we start to do. So the personality of the bikes really, really shift. How about running? What do we do with running here? Well, it's q2 we're building towards race readiness, and we start to lay a technical speed, and we have a much greater emphasis of what you are going to do on race day, which is what's called Brick runs. Yes, running off the bike. We want to ensure that we can start to get the body and the mind familiar with running off. The bike. We want to add greater running load in a time sensitive fashion. We want to build your durability and shorten the time from going to that time trial position to running with great posture and flow, and the only way you do it is through familiarity. Can you achieve great form and your best speed under a state of fatigue, because that's what racing is. And so we do this with purpose. Let's just talk about the brick runs quite often. We might say, Okay, you're going to run off the bike. Really easy for let's make it up. 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes. It doesn't matter the duration. Too much. You're going to run off the bike, but don't just run off the bike. Let's actually develop tools to train the body, to get from TT position and accumulator the fatigue to flow speed, great posture on the run. And so let's give you a couple of minutes to settle in, and then let's activate 20 seconds, building leg speed, 40 seconds, easy. 20 seconds, building leg speed, 40 seconds easy, into a nice state of flow. And then you go through and you start to shorten the time from poof to ah, and that's how it's an unlock a second. Part of our running in q2 is really developing controlled pacing. This is inner animal rate of perceived effort awareness. This is such a catalyst for race execution if you don't have a connection between how you're running and how you feel. You're reliant on metrics that fall and so really getting a sense of awareness, building your run by feel, and having the best run in terms of form and pace occurring into the middle of the back end is a superpower. It is a superpower metronome.
Matt Dixon 32:05
This is so important, I'll give you an example that's been really prevalent just over the last couple of months, with some athletes that I've trained in marathons. Now, both of these athletes, one of them first time marathon runner, one of them recently on the show, has done a couple of marathons. Never been under I think 310 Chris Harris, David Farsi, all of their training that I did leading up to their marathon in the key sessions I want you to do by feel. And I would have them progressively build ruts. 40 minutes easy, 30 minutes steady. 20 minutes strong. 10 minutes very strong. I want you to build through two hours where the last 30 minutes. I want you to run with what feels like not what your heart and aspiration tells you, what feels like marathon pace. I'm going to have you warm up, then we're going to go three by three miles. And I want it to feel like you're running 10 seconds a mile faster than your goal pace, all of these things. And then we would say, what comes out? What's the output? And the first time that Chris Harris did it, it was a disaster. He was hoping to be somewhere close to three hours. He was running at 320 pace. But over time and repetition, he started to dial it in, and then we leveraged the strategy that we intended to use on race day for both David and for Chris, you're going to walk through every single aid station. Crazy as it sounds, you're going to walk through every single aid station. Let's rehearse that right now in training, because I want you to come out of this longer run that you're going to do 90 minutes, two hours, with zero impact on the big, heavy strength endurance bike session that you're going to do two days later. And so we're going to do walk breaks. And they implemented that well, both gentlemen. Chris Harris, 257,
Matt Dixon 33:59
David Farsi, 258, great marathons even splits, even splits, their best running occurring that only occurred because they had the bravery to integrate walk breaks ahead of when they had to. But more importantly, I think they developed a sense of awareness. So this is the time of the year that we do that, a lot of brick running for durability, shortening the curve, and then that pacing and perceived effort. It is an unlock, of course. Then we want to get resilience. We retain the frequency, but for athletes that can handle the volume, some people can't handle the longer duration stuff without getting injured. It's not a necessity, but we do release the leash a little bit and allow you to run longer. It's a myth that we don't have athletes run long. We have them run long if they can do it without creating mechanical injury. It's. So we do some of that. And the final thing that we start to ings is the catalyst of greater speed, some hill repetitions, that's to produce greater form, greater propulsion, activation of what they call the posterior chain, and getting some of that strength endurance component into the running. So what's the big mistake that athletes make in running, going too hard. That's the biggest thing in the easier runs, whether it's the easy brick runs or the first part of a longer run, or a progressive building run, or the warm up going into a tempo session, or priming for the intervals, or perhaps you just have a soul filling run that you're just going out for stress processing. People run too hard. Have the courage to run easy, high value. So that's our running focus.
Matt Dixon 35:53
Alrighty, what? Two more things to get through as we hit this strength. We've been lifting pretty heavy, but now we want to hit power, and so we go to explosive, moderate load power to enhance tendon stiffness and force transfer when the foot lands on the ground. We want it to rebound. We want to create propulsion. Now there's an important catalyst on this, because strength training has a role in broader life as well. It's for health. It's performance across life. It has a huge, huge catalyst in cognitive function and stress processing. And also, we want to make sure that it continues to be a performance enhancer. So as a general role, it's true, we shift from the heavier lifting to more explosive and moderate load. But we have some athletes stick with the heavy stuff right now. The first is those athletes that have access to heavy lifting sessions when their a race, their key race of the year is way out where it's further out. And so they're thinking in more in terms of September, October, November. And then we're going to keep those athletes lifting heavy, still keeping that as a bedrock, even if it comes to a little bit of a compromise in some of the sessions. And then for our athletes are a little bit more mature, particularly an older female or a female athlete going through perimenopause and menopause, with some hormonal changes, we're going to make sure, even with the race ambitions, you keep at least one, if not two, heavier strength sessions in really, really high value. And that's a shift of perspective. So a lot of our athletes that come in, it's not just here's the purple patch strength, but relative to what your goals and needs are, we might amplify the focus of the strength training and then wrap the endurance around it, even at this phase of the year. The final thing I'll say on the strength training is we really want to reinforce and continue on with our Single Leg stability.
Matt Dixon 37:59
So we're going to do a lot of work, single leg right, single leg left. And that's because our sport includes running, and so quite often you are, quite often many, many steps in a row. You are landing stabilizing, and we want to have that single leg stability and strength. We're also doing a lot of work, just like a security guard going through the airport, you're going to do a lot of posterior chain sweeping strength to support efficient bike and run mechanics. Really, really important stuff here. The key message of this, the biggest mistake with strength is that athletes that commit to it in off season dial it in, and then it dissolves. It's the very worst thing you can do, because it renders everything that you've done over the last 345, months, completely useless. Strength training is a year round endeavor, and so dial it in. And so I promise, I promised that I would add this in to finish the show habits. Let's talk about nutrition. So there's an important layer here in the off season and even in the preseason. We love athletes to create this really robust foundation of high quality daily eating protein at every meal time, tons of fiber, layering on and then throttling with some greater carbohydrate, the classic carbohydrates, breads, pastas, potatoes, rice, etc. You layer that on to meet the demands. But generally the training demands are not big, huge, race specific sessions. There's now a shift of mindset, and here's something that might be helpful. We retain the bedrock of really high quality nutrition. You have protein on every meal. You make sure that you're consuming close to your body weight in grams of protein. So your body weight in pounds you're eating that grams of protein, if you can, tons of fiber, tons of fruits and vegetables. That's where you get all your macro and your micronutrient. As you go through your vitamins and minerals, but now we start to ramp up total calories
Matt Dixon 40:07
and more carbs and more protein to support the training load. One of the biggest mistakes that athletes make, and quite often it's completely subconscious. They don't realize they're doing it, is to fail to ramp up caloric intake to meet the demands of training, that is going to create potentially short term, Oh, I feel pretty good because you might get little bit tremor, but very quickly that'll reverse, and it will be catastrophic. You're going to be underperforming in key sessions. You're going to have a higher risk of injury, a lack of recovery, you might even have some poor composition changes. Yes, it doesn't make you leaner, and so nutrition is a huge component. Hydration is critical. We make sure that we retain three liters of fluids every single day, but that is in addition to the greater demands that the increased training is going to have you do, and so you want to make sure that you're hydrating during sessions, to make sure you don't get too dehydrated. So hydration is a factor, and this is the time of the year that we start to integrate a little bit more electrolytes in our daily fluids, typically when we first wake up, and also bookend when we go to sleep at night. I tend to use the precision stuff. I feel like it's tasteless, has a little bit of personality, and it matches the chemistry of your body water much, much better. So that's a really high quality option for you. And then finally, this simple principle and tool that we always use, that we encourage athletes to integrate, but now it comes and meets its purpose, the Sunday special, as training ramps up and your mind shifts, because this is what's going to happen in q2 to more and more. Okay, here comes my race. It's race season.
Matt Dixon 42:03
We're effectively adding a greater cognitive load and time load, let alone fatigue, inducement to a life that isn't going to dissipate with the demands from family, friends and broader life, but also professionally, those demands stay static. So now we're adding this. This means that in order to be successful, you need to become an assassin of effectiveness. You're going to need to prioritize, in fact, what we call ruthless prioritization. Really, really valuable. That Sunday special, the practice every Sunday in which you plan your license, non negotiables, what you need to do professionally. You prioritize the things that you are going to get done this week, and you hold yourself to account. And then you put off stuff that doesn't have to happen this week. And you can strategically procrastinate on them, push them back so that you can continue to make progression, and then you integrate your training, your habits, your downtime, into one system. This becomes a double down, non negotiable. You are managing your energy here, not just your time. You're managing your own energy, and you're going to adopt this practice that was born out of the purple patch pros, but is absolutely for you the professional amateur athlete in life. That's it. I'm not saying you have to take your sport really seriously. I'm saying you need to think about this in the way that a pro athlete would, to make things easier, to give you control. And this is really, really important, because this sport should not be your full time job. It shouldn't compete with life. It should amplify life. And so I'm not asking you to prioritize and do less. I'm asking you to prioritize through this system, to do more effectively. That's what we're looking to do.
Matt Dixon 44:08
And so I encourage people right now, as you move into q2 Sunday special. Sunday special, if you want to learn more of how to implement the Sunday special, we'll put a link in the show notes. You can also reach out to us info@purplepatchfitness.com the last thing I'll finish with today, very simply, team, is that if you would like to have a deeper conversation, if you'd like to have a coaching consultation with us, we work with athletes that are not purple patch athletes. Quite often, we actually consult with your coach, if you have a coach outside of purple patch and yourself and say, Hey, this is what we see to empower your coach and yourself to have a better journey. If you're self coached, it's a wonderful investment to just spend 30 minutes or an hour with a purple patch coach and say, let me dial this in right and. You can just reach out to us. Info, purplepatchfitness.com we're always delighted to have a consultation with you. That's a paid consultation, a full session. We're all so happy to explore our programming. If you want to have a pressure free Needs Assessment call, just reach out to us. Info@purplepatchfitness.com, in that call, I promise you that if we're not the right fit, we will give you actionable tips and steps that you can go and apply to your journey in sport. We want you to be successful. We want you to be healthy. We want you to achieve your goals. And so info at purple patch fitness.com the same thing. Remember, we're hiring if you want to become a part of the team or you know someone that would be a good fit, feel free to share. Share the job description really valuable and important to us. All right, guys, have a tremendous week. We'll see you next week for another one. 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 at 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
Ironman training, purple patch coaching, full-time coach, performance journey, triathlon, strength training, race readiness, swim workouts, bike intervals, running durability, nutrition, hydration, Sunday special, coaching consultation, job description.