Episode 246: Winter Health - Building Resilience & Minimizing Risk of Sickness
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Tis the season to be jolly, but unfortunately tis also the season of sickness. Be it flu, cold, Covid, or RSV, everywhere you look you can see the signs of illness. For those in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are getting shorter, darker, and colder and all of the elements needed for a winter bug to spread are perfectly aligned.
So what can you do this holiday or postseason to avoid getting sidelined with the sniffles?
In this episode of the Purple Patch Podcast, Matt provides a game plan to help you build your resilience and bolster your immune system to avoid sickness or at least minimize the impact if you end up under the weather.
Matt offers insight into illness prevention through a coach's lens, using peer-reviewed research, and the expertise of medical and sporting professionals in his orbit.
He discusses supporting habits and best practices you can use to build up your defense, considerations in how to approach your training, and other tips and tricks to apply should you start to feel symptoms.
The three main topics of this discussion are:
Timing: Components and Conditions of the Season
(10:31) "It is a time of the year where there is a lot of high sickness frequency...We come into the holidays and we're having greater travel, typically...A lot of times we're switching environments going from cold to hot or hot to cold, and that's always an additional stress on the body. And also, it's a time that we get together with friends and family and so we tend to congregate inside...And so it's a relatively high-risk environment."
Habits and Approaches: Building a Platform of Resilience
(18:35) Many of us always feel like we must be on. But we can really, really thrive if we allow ourselves a little bit of luxury, a little bit of pampering, a little bit of Spa. And so over these next couple of months, I think that is a very simple but really important component to actually help promote health."
Addressing Symptoms: Reducing Longevity and Severity
(46:45) "We must realize that whether it's viral, or bacterial, infection is a huge additional stressor that now you must handle and it is often the thing that tips the applecart. Your very best chance to meet and beat viruses and bacterial infections is to reduce your overall stressors as you go through these winter months."
The aim of this episode is to provide you with tools and techniques to develop systemic resilience and health, and to help prevent sickness from derailing your performance journey.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 05:56 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
06:04 - 49:21 - The Meat and Potatoes - Episode 246: Winter Health - Building Resilience & Minimizing Risk of Sickness
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Full Transcript
Matt Dixon 00:00
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.
Matt Dixon 00:20
All right, guys, today's show is all about winter health, building your platform of resilience so that you can navigate any sickness that you might get with maybe minimal interruptions to your performance journey. But one of the tools that we use to help build resilience for our athletes is a little bit of focus that comes with InsideTracker. By taking a look inside and assessing your biometrics along with the recommendations of the team of experts and scientists at InsideTracker, we get to get the right focus for you, whether it's around your nutrition, your stress levels, your training, or potentially any supplements that might help bolster your immune system and your performance in the long term. And now is a great time to do it. Before we launch into the new year, with all of those aspirations and inspirational quests that we look on for the next year of performance, take stock, assess where you're at, and get precise focus on what you should be thinking about to help you yield great performance. And it's easy. You don't need to be a Purple Patch athlete to get involved, all you need to do is head to insidetracker.com/purplepatch. And we even give you a code, Purple Patch Pro 20. That's Purple Patch Pro two-zero, and that gives you 20% off everything at the store. All right now let's get on with the meat and potatoes. It is the podcast enjoy.
Matt Dixon 01:39
And welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast as ever, your host, Matt Dixon. And this week, well, let me tell you, in bike class this morning, it was a rather muted atmosphere. There are 20 folks all engaged and happy to be there looking to strive to be the better version of themselves. But more than half of them were emerging from a recent sickness and there are a few others that were well, let's say managing efforts, perhaps feeling a little bit on edge. And the truth is that that experience in bike class this morning was a litmus of what is around all of us right now. Tis the season, but tis the season of sickness. Be it flu COVID, RSV. Pick your poison, ladies and gentlemen. The key is that there is a lot of sickness around. So I thought it was timely if today I discussed building your resilience. Yes, a platform of help to help you avoid sickness or at least minimize the impact if you do end up succumbing. Now, this isn't medical advice today. This is purely a coach's lens. And I think it's both timely and a goodie. I think you're going to enjoy it. But Barry, before we get going with the meat and potatoes, I would like to bring you out of semi retirement. I love your ukulele. I've missed it. And so therefore, when you ladies and gentlemen stand up and help me in introducing Barry. Yes, it is Word of the Week?
Matt Dixon 03:27
Yes, guys the Word of the Week. Good For A Girl. Yeah, she did pretty good - for a girl. Many of you guys know that. I coached Jesse Thomas. He was a world class triathlete. And infact I got to partner with Jesse throughout the entirety of his professional career. But always while I was coaching Jesse, I loved my favorite joke, Jesse, you're pretty good as an athlete, but you're not even the best athlete in your household. And why was that? Well, Jesse was married to professional runner Lauren Fleshman. And of course, over the course of Jesse's career, I got to know all of Jesse's family very well. Lauren is an exceptional athlete. In fact, she was one of the leading professional runners in the whole of the sport. She's also a great spokesperson, and I would label her a thought leader. And I wanted to tell you all about her upcoming book, Good for a Girl is the title. Now written as an autobiographical memoir for running career. I think this is really important reading. If you're a parent, if you're a coach, if you're a young athlete, if you're a part of the administration in any sport, this is required reading. It provides a very personal story to Lauren and also emerging out of a sword story is the whole fabric of sport. Now, I'm not going to talk more about this now, but all I can say is this is a really important piece of writing. I've been lucky enough to get my hands on an early copy. And I gotta say it's a wonderful story.
Matt Dixon 04:59
It's inspirational but it is also, for me as a coach, it made me stop, it made me pause, it made me reflect on how I have coached female athletes. Now, I'm really lucky to announce that I'm going to have Lauren joining me on the show, we're going to release that episode in very early January, and it coincides with the release of her book. It's good for a girl, but you can pre order now. And I tell you, if you're any one of the population, if you're an athlete, if you're a young female athlete, a coach or parent, whatever it is, I think this is required reading, all you have to do is head to Lauren fleshman.com. And you can pre order the book there. It is fantastic. And I'm incredibly excited to have Lauren, join me on the show. And with that, that is why Word of the Week is - Good For a Girl. All right, Barry, thank you very much for the tunes, let's see us out it is time for The Meat and Potatoes.
Matt Dixon 06:04
Yes, it is The Meat and Potatoes and the topic du jour - sickness, illness, there is a lot of it around. Go in to any store, you're going to hear lots of sniffles in a movie theater, you're going to hear coughing. Yes, there is a whole bunch of sickness around. And of course, we want to build our platform of resilience so we can try and mitigate risk. We can try and reduce our chances of actually getting sick in the first place, and if we do, can we do anything, and I believe that we can, to try and take an impact on the severity and the longevity of that sickness. And so today, it's all about building our resilience and trying to give ourselves the best opportunity to resist that nasty, nasty sickness that derails not just your performance in sport, but of course, your enjoyment and performance across all aspects of life. Now, of course, I have to start with a disclaimer, when I start talking about a subject like this. I am not providing medical advice today. I have the greatest respect for medical doctors and all of my advice is built around the best approaches that I know, to develop systemic resilience and health. And so in other words, I'm aiming to reduce risk. And I do that through some peer reviewed research and a lot of my experience of my own coaching, and of course, drawing in such of the expertise of many of the medical and sporting professionals that I have surrounding me. And so of course, nothing I say today is a promise - a guarantee, but I think it is worthy of your consideration so that you can adopt the pieces that are appropriate to you and apply it to your own performance journey. So what we want to do is we're gonna go through a few sections today. The first is I want to talk about the time that we're in, particularly for you folks that are based in the Northern Hemisphere. And as the days get shorter, and they get darker, and they get colder, some of the components that really align with our - part of the season that many of you guys are in, but also some of the environment that we're entering in. And so that we can sort of lay the groundwork of the whys and the hows around sickness. And then we're gonna go into some of the habits and approaches in part two of how you can build up your defense, or as the americanos would say, D-fence. So we're going to try and look a little bit into how you approach your training, some of the supporting habits we talked about, some other considerations and tips and tricks. And then finally, a very quick piece at the end where we just talk about the approaches that you should do if you start to feel symptoms, you start to feel that sickness and cold coming on or effect if you venture into a full sickness or cold. And so those are the three big subjects that we're going to go through today. So let's launch with part one. And let's talk about timing, let's frame this little bit. And the main subject today isn't actually about sickness, it's about you building your systemic resilience. Okay, that's really the subject that's the drive what we're looking to get - to build a platform where you are as resilient or anti fragile as you can be to stressors impacting you in your life. And this timing is really, really good, particularly for athletes, and there are a few components that we need to break down. The first is the majority of the audience listening or watching today are at a stage of their overall year of training, assuming that we are all training even if you're not specifically training for the demands of an event, but where training stress for most should be lower. And so in other words, we've talked about this over the last few weeks. Most of our training is preparatory in nature right now. We are setting ourselves up for a big year of performance next year. But right now we shouldn't be butting against our overall training capacity in any given week. We should have space, logistical space, more actual time. And so we have actually that opportunity where we're not balancing, really the demands of training for an event and going right up on the edge, while having a little bit more capacity. So in other words, we have that in our favor. At the same time, this is really important, because if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, we're having shrinking daylight. For most of us, our days are getting colder and cooler. And it is a time of the year where there is a lot of high sickness frequency. And we're doing all of that while we come into the holidays and we're having greater travel, typically. Some of it crossing time zone. A lot of times we're switching environments going from cold to hot or hot to cold, and that's always an additional stress on the body. And also, it's a time that we get together with friends and family and so we get tend to congregate inside. There's a lot of holiday cheer, a lot of groups of people going out for holiday parties, whatever it might be. And even if you're going outside to do something really active like skiing, you still often going into those ski chalets where there are 300 of your closest friend breathing fumes everywhere. And so it's a relatively high risk environment. And so while there is all of these factors there, it also happens to coincide that this year, we're facing what they're cutely labeling a triple-demic Yes, there is a triathlon of sickness, not swim, bike and run, but there is a very nasty version of a common cold - the RSV, there is a particularly nasty series of sets of strains of the flu, influenza, and of course, there is a rise in COVID. And while it is less lethal, by a long way than what we first had to counter, it's still not that fun. So you have three sicknesses that are spreading around and passing themselves through the population globally, very challenging. And we also have at the same time, a lot of our younger kids 0, 1, 2, 3 years of age that tend to be at greater risk, because they have gone through the pandemic with much less interaction, much lower cold frequency, so therefore, they haven't had to stimulate quite as many antibodies, they tend to have a slightly lower or less robust immune system that can get on and handle this variety of sicknesses that we always meet every winter, but for the last two or three years, have been greatly reduced. And so ironically, by protecting the weak and the older, through the pandemic, now, we are left with a little bit of exposure here, because we've got our younger kids really coming up and battling a pretty nasty triple-demic of sickness, and we are facing that with maybe slightly compromised immune systems, or at least immune systems that haven't had to navigate the regular annual cycle of seasonal sicknesses. So it's nothing to be fearful of, it's nothing to, for us to throw our toys out of the cot, but it is the situation that we are left with. And so you've sort of got an option as an individual. The one is to become a hermit, and hunker down for the winter, and be bear like and hibernate and not see anyone or the other is to continue with life, potentially with some precautions, and we'll talk about that. But also do everything that you can do to build a platform of resilience. And you can do that in a really simple way. It doesn't cost loads of money. In fact, all it is is about being really sensible with your training, developing or continuing with some really good habits, and try and apply a few other approaches, so that you can generally be healthy. Now, this isn't with a mission of I want to be inoculated from ever catching a sickness. Common colds, even flu sometimes is a rite of passage, it happens to us, we're not going to completely eradicate that. But can we reduce the severity or potentially avoid some symptoms and some deeper symptoms when we are infected with a virus. So I think that most of us listening are probably going to choose option two, which is to build our platform of resilience. There aren't too many hermits that tend to listen to the Purple Patch Podcast. So with that, what I tried to do is get very applied, very simple. We're not going to spend lots of time digging through a treasure trove, I just want to give you some habits and approaches for you to build your defense. Now there are a few elements that we went through here, I want to bucket into training number one, then we're going to talk about supporting habits because that is equally important to your training. And then we're going to go into some other considerations and tips and tricks are sort of bucket of other stuff that goes out of those fundamentals or lays out the realm of those fundamentals that we talk about. Okay. So with that, fasten your seat belt, let's get going with part two.
Matt Dixon 15:12
So to kick us off training, training, all right, for once, this is pretty simple when we talk about training, and the good news, and I have to speak to the middle of the bell curve here, I realized that there are people listening that might be on a bill towards a race or getting ready for a very important event in the early New Year. And this might not be the case. But for the vast majority of folks out there right now, the phase of training that most of us are in is what we might label preparitory. In other words, as I mentioned in the introduction, we're not butting up against our training capacity, it doesn't matter whether you're time-starved or a professional athlete, you should have room to grow in your training. In fact, if you're doing it right, that is absolutely the case. And therefore we've got some space, logistical space and also systemic space, we're not actually loading it up. And that's a real positive when it comes to this subject, because we're both reducing the risk for musculoskeletal injury, but also we're having to handle less systemic stress, at least from the specific training. And so therefore, we have an opportunity that we can actually bolster and build better platforms of health. It's very, very difficult if you're right on the razor's edge you're training for let's make it up - your marathon, you're six weeks out and you're trying to integrate the demands of training to get ready for that event, while living a time-starved of life. Well right now, you don't have that. You don't have an upcoming race. So therefore, you've got more capacity. So no matter what it is, you should be able to give yourself space and that becomes really important. The first element that's really critical for this though, is under that banner, if you are in what I labeled the preparatory phase of training, preseason, postseason, whatever your favorite label is, and I am asking you not to butt against, up against, your overall capacity, it's really important that with that remaining space, those hours in the week that you might usually be training and getting outside if you're a triathlete, swim, bike and running, if you're a CrossFit affectionado then you would be in the gym, whatever it might be, it doesn't matter. The first lesson of this is that you must try not to feel that additional time with added stressors. So actually leverage that time by promoting or pushing really positive habits into that space that you have. Actually enjoy a little bit more downtime, reading, it's allowable to sit on the couch or do some projects. But don't think through guilt that you have to ram up the rest of your capacity with additional work or any components like that. If you have the luxury to take that training time that you might apply in regular life, that you're not in these two or three months over the course of December, January, February, use that time to restore. Remember, I'm the recovery coach. So I'm always going to promote that. But I think that takes a little bit of courage, and a reduction of self guilt. Many of us always feel like we must be on. But we can really, really thrive if we allow ourselves a little bit of luxury, a little bit of pampering, a little bit of Spa. And so over these next couple of months, I think that is a very simple but really important components to actually help promote health. That's really good. Number one in your training, I think that we should focus on that. Really, capacity is what we can label that under.
Matt Dixon 19:03
Number two, I really encourage you and it's timely for most of you anyway, to lean into the anabolic side of training. And so endurance training is actually quite catabolic. It's very stressful. It reduces, while it's healthy - at least up to a certain element, it reduces or produces systemic stress. But strength training on the other side is aligned with growth, not just muscle growth, but overall it is an anabolic response, a growth response hormonally and that's really, really helpful. So let's dive into a little bit of the research here. Research shows us, and this is nothing revolutionary - very, very simple, but all of the research shows us that endurance activity is something that is really really healthy. But it acts a little bit like a J shaped curve. And that's a normal scientific method. In other words, as we introduce endurance activity, your risk of sickness goes down to a point. And of course, there is an optimal level. And for everyday life, that's a moderate level. For an athlete, that could be a much greater amount of training hours and intensity than a regular sedentary person. This is an individual systemic component. But ultimately, moderate activity has, provides, a health promoting and a resilience promoting impact on our systemic health. But as soon as we start to get to more aggressive training, long, long hours, and or high, high intensity, and then we see that protective mechanism wane a lot. And it's no wonder if you think about this in applied sense, folks that are getting ready for oh,
Matt Dixon 20:48
I don't know, the Olympic Games, the Ironman in Hawaii, there's no surprise that athletes for sick in the last few weeks getting ready for that, because obviously the training demands for that events dictate that we must go past the J shot and we start to stand on the razor's edge between health and fitness readiness. And so we're at this stage that we don't need that. Well the truth - so in other words, it's really important, stay really consistent with exercise, we want the platform of health promoting aspect, but we want to stay moderate. And that's what I just talked about with capacity. But on top of that, now we can talk about strength training, okay, because we're worried about immune function here. Strength training acts in a relatively similar way. In other words, too much can also be counterproductive. But the right dose of strength training, the right dose, can produce a very strong positive immune response. Strength training is timely, from a tactical standpoint. The vast majority of us want to spend the winter months doing a whole bunch of strength work, and that's really good. So that you can be a better athlete as we go down the line many, many months time, but it also delivers a potent dose of immune response. And in fact, it helps deliver and supports muscle health and characteristics that assist immune function. And so that becomes really good. So when we think about your training, we want to retain moderate exercise from an endurance standpoint. We want to introduce and focus strength and conditioning, and both of those are timely relative to your training journey, but they're also really positive to elicit a strong immune response. How about intensity? While higher intensity training is good, as long as we keep it pretty high, pretty short, and we try and minimize those really stressful sessions that include long, sustained intervals at or around threshold. And so what I'm talking about here is some intensity is good, we want to fire up the dialogue between brain and muscle, we want to activate the system, and for short periods of time, we can do work that's actually stressful, and that too can elicit a strong immune response, but we have to be very, very careful with the dose. And so when we think about training, monotony, is not a good thing. You don't want to just sit at very low intensity and think I'm just going to go out and accumulate a whole bunch of miles, because that's counter to the environment that we're in, but also, it doesn't elicit a strong immune response. We want to have short, high intensity once or twice a week. Again, not massively demanding, but short spikes of high work. We want to do some strength and conditioning, really good for that preparatory phase of training, but also eliciting a strong immune response. And ultimately, we want to retain some moderate activity, because that also elicits a strong immune response. The nice part of that is if you find yourself after race season, or if you've finished your year, and you're going into the holidays, and your overall training is taking a little bit of a backseat over the course of the winter months, all of that fits into the overall recipe of a longer term training plan. It is not only appropriate for your longer term development as an athlete, it's also optimal for you to build your platform of health. And it's yet another reason that that training wants to be structured and it wants to be progressive. It wants to be weaved into your life and to have purpose and that's a yet another reason why I really don't like athletes going rudderless and just random over the course of the winter months. Your exercise and training tends to take take a back seat, it tends to be chaotic, and it's not structured and it doesn't elicit the best response for you. Now, the one final thing I will say about training is the outside is really good for the soul. And so as it does get colder and darker particularly for you guys, that a living up north, you should think about, yes, outside is really good for the soul. It's good for us to get outside in the daylight if we can. But we need to be pragmatic when we do this. What I would urge is there sort of the Jekyll and Hyde component to this, I would aim to avoid having all of your training be inside if you can, because that's just a closed environment with more circulating sickness. It's really good for your soul, it's also really good for your brain and your system overall to get outside, but you must be A - dressed appropriately, and you need to be pragmatic. It's not really that smart to go out, or necessary, to go out in freezing cold rain, and run for an extended period and think that that's not going to be an additional stressor on the system. But snowshoeing outside or getting to go for a walk or a hike on a cold winter morning, fantastic. Get outside and enjoy and lean into a whole portion of your training that is all about decompression and soulfilling. Really, really helpful. So that's the training component. And of course, under that umbrella, I hope that I kept it broad enough that you can fit any training methodology and sort under that. Whether your a coach or self coached or a Purple Patch athlete. It all makes sense. We just need to be driven by a little bit of pragmatism. What about supporting habits? Well, the supporting habits under the big buckets are sort of sleep and recovery, and nutrition and hydration. So let's talk about those. Let's talk about nutrition first, and we're going to talk about eating. What you put in your body does have an impact and in fact, really high quality foods are critical at this time. And so not quite so many of the cookies, we want to go and try and fill our plates with some really high quality food options. There are actually foods that contribute into developing or supporting a stronger immune system. A lot of the citrus foods are very good. Bell peppers, particularly red bell peppers, broccoli, garlic, ginger, spinach, yogurts - or yogurts for the Americans - some almonds. Components like that are very, very helpful. Papaya, kiwi, if you can get your hands on the rainbow of fruits and vegetables, it's very, very strong for your immune system. I also believe strongly in retaining protein as being the central piece of the plate, central to your dinner plate or breakfast meal, whatever, proteins and good oils. As your training is a little bit lower. We don't need to run away or hide from carbohydrates, but the starchy carbohydrates can take a little bit more of a supporting role. And so that's a very simple approach. We want to ensure that you are retaining - eating plenty, eating consistently, and as we talked about on this show many times for a host of reasons, both energy and life, a platform of good habits, controlling your energy throughout the day. Breakfast is your most important meal of the day, and so I encourage you to lean into it. I should also add, post workout fueling, critically important not just to facilitate recovery from the strength sessions and the moderate and high intensity that you are doing in your endurance activity but post workout fueling is a really good de-stressor. Brings down the stress hormones, mitigates the impact of carrying stress into the rest of our daily life. So of course that becomes a habit. So pretty simple. I mean, without going into a really key component of deep nutrition to support your immune system, there's my quick and dirty on it.
Matt Dixon 29:07
But now let's talk about hydration. Because this is an area that I think is undervalued by most people, and it becomes important because hydration has a critical role in our cellular health and our immune system. In fact, if we think about our immune system, the whole fabric of a high functioning immune system is absolutely dependent on nutrients that are delivered via our bloodstream. Now our bloodstream is made up of two main components. You have red blood cells, those are the oxygen carrying red blood cells that deliver oxygen to our muscles to help us build energy and of course offload carbon dioxide and other nasty byproducts so that we can get rid of and so yes, red blood cells are important. You've heard of hemoglobin or hematocrit, which is the percentage of your total blood volume that is made up of those red bloods cells, and give or take that's between 40 and 50% of your total blood volume, but the rest of your blood volume is essentially water, plasma. And that is how we deliver the nutrients that support our immune system. When we get dehydrated, that plasma shrinks, and that says, Oh, we have less circulating blood in our system, so it's less of an efficient system. And yet, our immune system relies on the efficient transport of those nutrients. It is dependent on us being properly hydrated. And so as a daily focus, athletes generally are really good when they go for a run, and they get home and they down a big drink, or they're on the bike, and they've got their fresh new purple patch, water bottle bottle, and they're going through that over the course of the session. But ironically, most time-starved athletes are incredibly poor at daily hydration, ensuring that they get one to two glasses of fluid with every meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner snacks in between, and ensuring at their desk, they always have their hydration. Yes, I've
Matt Dixon 31:07
got mine handy right next to me right now. And you are consistently hydrating. It's a really important thing to optimize our immune function. But while I'm here, and I'm in the room, it's also really important for your energy, your focus, your clarity of thinking, it's all boosted when you're fully hydrated. It's why we call it your life water. It's really important and it's an incredibly important and positive habit that you should improve across the day. Oh, if I wanted to add one more thing as well a critical role in recovery and muscle repair, but we're not talking about that today, we are talking about your immune system, hydration, the critical thing that you can do to really support it. Now, as I ramble on here, in the Purple Patch Podcast, there are people scribbling away I'm sure leaving voicemails, right, as I talk saying, "Tell me about supplements, tell me about supplements." Well, just like supplements in the rest of life, they are never going to be the answer. Getting your training dialed In is great. Having a wonderful platform of really healthy eating that we talked about, really important. Hydration critical. So those are your building blocks. But while we're here, what about supplements? Well, the first thing I'll say about that, and I'll say this authentically, I know that I dance into the land where it might feel like I'm being a salesperson, but I think you need to be careful by adding supplements randomly. I'm not a massive fan of the shotgun approach, I'm going to go and get the big multivitamin. Because, without actually having a look inside and understanding where some of the deficiencies might be, or where you do not need additional supplementation, the multivitamin approach is just a shotgun, it's just a hit and hope. I much prefer targeted supplementation based on your deficiencies that you might have, because of either lifestyle, stress, training, or whatever it might be. And so leveraging a tool such as InsideTracker, that's our partnership, of course - being very, very clear, but leveraging InsideTracker, this is a really good time to do it because you have a look at the landscape and whether it's Insidetracker, or one of their competitors, by having bloodwork and looking at your biometrics and then of course getting those translated and adapted for personalized recommendation for you and your needs, you can be highly specific in what will help. And that becomes really important. The key here, the one word of warning, I would not necessarily rush out to your doctor and ask for bloodwork. Because so often most doctors are looking - and there are some fantastic doctors I should say, by the way, that are more sports and performance minded, but the general medical field will look at blood work for an absence of disease. And the tiers, or the levels, the ranges that they have for components such as vitamin or vitamin D or zinc or iron, are really built around the middle of the population and you as a high performance individual, someone that's looking to thrive, looking to maintain energy, looking to perform in sport potentially, you want to have a shifted lens - not from to go from bad to okay, but from good to great. And so it takes some of the recommendations and insights from real professionals, exercise physiologists, longevity doctors, et cetera, that can understand that and that's why I like partnering with InsideTracker. Alright, just a few words of those - over.
Matt Dixon 34:54
Now let me give you some practical stuff if you don't want to engage. There are some supplements that, again, under your doctor's medical supervision, you could consider. Number one zinc, very important for your immune system. Many athletes, in fact, many kids, are slightly compromised on zinc. And so it's worth understanding and maybe considering that. A second component, glutamine. It's an amino acid, it's a really good supplement for endurance athletes, it's quite a valuable thing to add into your recipe, it's also a good component to help promote a stronger immune system. And then one that is really prevalent be slightly deficient, again on that good to great mindset, vitamin D, or vitamin D for the Americanos in the audience. That is another common trait. So if I wanted to highlight three of them, I would probably highlight those. There are others but those are the three that we most commonly see a beneficial to add in to your overall performance recipe. Is there anything else I can tell tell you around those two good habits? Well, I think it's one component is finally eating habits just on timing. I would recommend that you try not to eat too close to bedtime. And that's nothing to do with your physiology as much as we know, and research showed us that when people eat very close to bedtime, they eat dinner at 8pm and go to bed at 9pm They eat dinner at 10pm, go to bed at 1030, that tends to lead to compromise sleep. And if you're compromising your sleep, and then you are going on a gateway to suppress your immune function. And so trying to have a nice gap two or three hours to allow the body to digest and then go to bed on a moderately empty stomach, much better sleep quality. Typically, as you do that. Talking of sleep, that of course is our next supporting habit and a critically important component.
Matt Dixon 36:54
In fact, this might be your number one, sleep quality, and sleep quantity. Simply put, this is your greatest performance asset. And yet so many people ignore it, or they undervalue it. In fact, it's always the first thing to be compromised by you time-starved folk, and it is the simple fact that really poor sleep hygiene is one of the biggest stresses that we can place on our system. And it is undoubted that a lack of sleep, or poor sleep, in terms of quality will compromise your immune system. And so, as I talked about, don't eat too close to bedtime, try and limit screen screen activity right before bed, set up your environment to be relatively cool and of course very dark, and ensure that you have a nice, restful ramping. I protect, more than any time of the year, over the course of the winter months, sleep is the critical component. Now if we go all the way back, and we talk about the introduction, I said this is the time that we're congregating with family, this is when we're traveling more, it becomes more difficult. And so we have to treasure it and protect it and sometimes make decisions. As a personal family choice we're really really protecting Baxter, our 10 year old's sleep quality. And so we might, we don't want to be the killjoys of the party, but we understand that he gets very, very tired and often it leads to sickness when he goes multiple days in a row with late bedtimes. And so we try and protect that for his benefit. And of course, now he's used to it. And we really try and ingrain that habit early. I'm not telling you how to parent. I'm just saying that's our family decision of what we've done. And I think it's paying really good fruition for Baxter.
Matt Dixon 38:48
Alrighty, are there anything else that we can do around supporting habits? Well, I think there are. We understand now, and research shows this, that meditation assists stress relief in the body. Exercise, folks is not meditation. What meditation is, is meditation. Meditation is meditation. It's a lot of meditations, isn't it? But it's true. I don't want to hear you say, I run and that's my meditation. I get it. I sort of used to say that. But a really serious meditation program is a valuable performance asset. And it can help us process and limit stressors in the body. So that might be something that you choose. A second component is trying to integrate into your day, this comes back to the capacity and training component, integrate into your day, some daily downtime 10, 15, 20 minutes, where you just have some quiet time, maybe a short nap. You don't even need to fall asleep. But by doing that, you get greater productivity afterwards, and that's proven by research, you get a huge boost in human growth hormone and other anabolic elements. It is a Strong booster of your immune system. And so that daily downtime becomes really important. I used to just call it a nap, but the key is you don't have to fall asleep for it to be really productive.
Matt Dixon 40:14
Alright, so to finish this show, let's just go into other considerations. Let's just go off and have a quick hit list of things for you to think about for your own individual choice and your family's. Number one vaccines. Now, these are controversial for some, they really shouldn't be to be honest, and they are highly effective. I would personally recommend the flu vaccine, particularly this season, where all of the news and reports and all of the medical experts, and they are that medical experts, are telling us that the strains of flu are particularly corrosive. And so it's pretty nasty. And they tend to have - they managed to have aligned this season, with pretty good effect, the flu vaccine with the strains that are out there. And so you can consider a flu vaccine. You could also consider a fourth booster, if you haven't had it for COVID. And that's going to not necessarily protect you from this highly contagious variant but it should reduce the impact. So vaccines are there as an option. I need to mention that as a performance expert. Masks, again, something that is controversial, which is kind of madness in many ways but let's not go there anyway. But let's learn a little bit from Asia here, because if you're in Tokyo, and you have the sniffles and a cold, then you tend to wear a mask not to protect yourself from the worst symptoms, but to actually protect your fellow human beings, the other members of your society. It's very courteous. And that's a cultural component here. And so you have two options with masks. The first is that if you are worried and you're going into a very busy environment, there's nothing wrong with putting a mask on and protecting yourself a little bit going through airports, travel, shopping malls, components like that. It's your choice, but they can be effective. And of course, the second element is it if you could consider it because it's relatively courteous to others by preventing the sickness, the flu, the colds from actually transmitting quite as easily. And so masks are there for an option. And then the third component is the stuff that our parents told us - wash your damn hands. This actually really works. It really does perhaps the most effective thing for disease transmission. And it's amazing how few folks actually take advantage. I just flew up to Seattle, and I went to the bathroom in the airport. If you don't believe me, this is absolutely true. In Seattle airport, I noticed more than 50% of the men, more than 50%, did not wash their hands after going to the bathroom. I wasn't watching them all going to the bathroom, but I just noticed, boom boom boom was I was waiting for Baxter to finish his business. And I was amazed. And then I had the realization of course it's men, we are disgusting creatures, aren't we? But it's a pretty simple action. Wash your hands. It's proven. And if you don't believe me, I encourage you to say to your surgeon when you're having a knee replacement, don't worry about washing your hands. It's all overrated. Get in the knee and get involved gone. Don't be shy. It's a proven component. And so you might as well integrate it. Already final thing, tips and tricks, anything that we can do to get ready while traveling. Hydration is really important. Movement is key, particularly on arrival. Get active when you arrive, get the system and blood circulating through the system, and if you are crossing time zones, if you are traveling internationally, going from New York to London, from San Francisco to Barcelona, whatever it might be, it's a typically good habit to actually reduce how many calories you're consuming before and during the flight. And then when you arrive, exercise and get a big post workout meal that is time appropriate. If you arrive at 7am, have a big breakfast, arrive at 2pm, have a lovely lunch, a really good component, that's highly encouraging. Second component, second tips and trick around the holidays. I've got to talk about it alcohol. It is a suppressant. And so look, I love my beer. And I must admit I partake. So this isn't evangelism here, but if you are going to enjoy some alcohol over the course of these winter months, and then ensure that that you really double down on your associate and supporting hydration and you really focus on sleep. You need to ensure that you don't give up daily movement and ensure that you are really really careful with alcohol. One - okay, two - compromise, three - absolutely disrupted sleep and a compromise to your immune function, period.
Matt Dixon 45:03
So to finish out, symptoms arrive, you feel it very simply, you've heard me talk about this before, I'm just going to say this as a reminder rather than something groundbreaking - if it is neckline up, so in other words, if you have the sniffles, if you feel just a little bit of a sore throat, but there is that more common cold symptoms that you have a little bit of a headache, generally, movement is pretty good. You're not training, you're not driving the body with a training stress, but some movement is typically good. But while you're feeling those types of symptoms, you want to double down on sleep, daily downtimes on naps, really high value, doubling down on all of the good habits and absolutely no alcohol. Oh, and be courteous, put a mask on maybe. How about if the symptoms are neck line down, in the chest with so far as a cough, feeling a fever, or overall system stress, that is a recipe for no movement, no training, complete cessation. And you do the same thing, you double down on sleep, absolutely no alcohol, good habits around eating, lots of good soups that doubles up on your nutrients as well as of course, your hydration. And of course, really reduce your time and your commitments as much as you possibly can. You're going to need to be patient if it comes but it is something that we must all work through together.
Matt Dixon 46:36
So guys, you juggle stressors in your life, you have family and friends, you have work, you have your training. And we must realize that whether it's viral, or bacterial, infection is a huge additional stressor that now you must handle and it is often the thing that tips the applecart. Your very best chance to meet and beat viruses, and bacterial infections is to reduce your overall stressors as you go through these winter months, and you have levers that you can control. You probably can't control work stress. You've got family commitments, and commitments to your friends wherever they are socially, but you do have control over your training and your positive habits to ingrain. And those are the controllables. So to give yourself the best defense. And the best option, an opportunity to get through this, double down on positive habits is going to be the best path for you. And I hope that that helps. I'll see you next time. And of course, keep smiling, but also please stay healthy. Cheers.
Matt Dixon 47:50
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
sickness, training, component, athlete, important, habits, hydration, immune system, reduce, patch, winter months, bit, good, little bit, coach, protect, performance, supplements, systemic, stress