Episode 253: Applying the Science of Strength - Integrating Strength Training for Specific Athlete Populations
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Strength and conditioning are an integral part of every Purple Patch Athlete’s training program. It is just one of our four Pillars of Performance: Endurance, Strength, Nutrition & Fueling, and Recovery.
In this episode of the Purple Patch Podcast Matt moves beyond how to build a strength program and the general benefits of strength training, and instead focuses on strength training as it pertains to three specific groups of athletes:
Endurance Athletes
Female Athletes - 35 to 60 years of age navigating perimenopause, and menopause.
Mature Athletes - Men and Women over the age of 45.
Matt provides perspective, backed by data, on how to leverage the benefits of strength training to tackle the unique physiological challenges each group faces.
An Outline of the Discussion
Defining strength and conditioning: A brief overview of strength training and the resources Purple Patch provides.
The benefits of strength training for Endurance Athletes:
Improving coordination, power, speed, endurance, and muscular resilience.
How to integrate a structured and progressive program.
Navigating perimenopause, and menopause:
The benefits of strength on body Insulin regulation, energy utilization, bone density & cognitive health.
The benefits of heavy lifting and muscle recruitment.
Mature Athletes:
A focused look at cognitive health.
Positive impacts of strength training on mood, daily energy, and reduction of disease risk.
We hope this episode will encourage you to embrace strength and conditioning and integrate it into your program, to improve your body, your mind, and your performance no matter what stage of life you are in.
More on the data provided in this episode:
The Effect of Strength Training on Performance in Endurance Athletes
Explosive-strength training improves 5-km running time by improving running economy and muscle power
Exercise beyond menopause: Dos and Don’ts
Information on Next Level by Dr. Stacey Sims
Purple Patch Podcast Episode 146: Strength Training is Not Weightlifting - With Coach Mike Olzinski
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 8:39 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
08:46 - 12:17 - Matt's News-ings
12:32 - 16:05 - Word of the Week
16:13 - 52:35 - The Meat and Potatoes - Episode 253: Applying the Science of Strength - Integrating Strength Training for Specific Athlete Populations
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Purple Patch and Episode Resources
This episode is sponsored by our collaboration with INSIDE TRACKER. Inside Tracker and Purple Patch - Receive 20% off their services with code: PURPLEPATCHPRO20
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Full Transcript
Matt Dixon 00:03
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 00:25
Hey, folks, I want to talk to you a little bit about InsideTracker and how it relates to this week's show. So we are going to focus and hone in around strength and conditioning, but specifically around three main groups: endurance athletes, female athletes that are navigating perimenopause, and menopause, and the mature athlete, those that are less labeled at over 55 years of age. All of these groups are ideal candidates to take a look inside to establish a baseline of their biometrics, and then hone in on focus, so that they can get precise around the biggest yield around their performance gains. Now, from today's show, we're going to encourage you to embrace strength and conditioning and integrate into your programs. So if you do fall under the banner of one of these populations, it's a perfect opportunity to actually get a baseline with InsideTracker. Integrate strength, as well as some of the other habits and strategies that we talked about in today's show. And I will be surprised, not only will you feel better, and perform better, but you're going to see measurable gains that you can track in all of the elements that are aligned with improved health and performance, we use it a Purple Patch with our athletes. And of course, we really love it with the populations that we talked about today, it's very simple and accessible to all you don't have to be a Purple Patch athletes get involved, all you have to do is head to insidetracker.com/purplepatch, that's insidetracker.com/purple patch. And we even have a special code for you. That's PurplePatchPro20, Purple Patch Pro two zero, and that gives you 20% off everything at the store. And so I hope you enjoy the show, I hope you get on board with the strength conditioning train. And also, why don't we see if it really moves the performance needle, take advantage of this offer, get involved with InsideTracker. And then three to four months time, have another assessment. And you can see whether you're actually making gains on the elements that really do yield performance. Now if you do decide to give it a crack, feel free to reach out we're happy to align with you and see if you want to add a consultation with myself or one of the Purple Patch coaching team that can help you make sense of all the results but also facilitate integrating this with your own performance journey. But today, folks, it strength and conditioning. So let's crack on with the show. It is a goodie. And it's, I guess it's over to me, isn't it. Enjoy the show.
Matt Dixon 03:03
And welcome to the purple Patch Podcast as ever your host, Matt Dixon, and team it is time to revisit the pillar, strength, and conditioning. Remember, strength and conditioning is an integral part of every Purple Patch Athletes program. We talk about four pillars of performance, endurance training, strength and conditioning, the focus of today's show, nutrition, and everything that falls beneath that. And of course, recovery, including sleep, and that makes up the Purple Patch pillars of performance. All driven by a smart and pragmatic mindset that is seeped in education, and developing athlete autonomy to make smart decisions. Today, we're going to focus in on just one of those pillars. We're going to talk about strength and conditioning, but we're going to do it in a slightly different way. This is going to be a little bit let's call it a "what about me" edition of the show. What I mean by that is we've already spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about the global benefits of strength, and in fact, even how to develop your own strength program. Just a few months ago, we had two great conversations with Purple Patch Pro Coach, Mike Olzinski. And so I'm gonna leave those in the show notes. And I encourage you that if you want to dig into some of the basics on strength and conditioning, you should go back and listen to both of those episodes. They're terrific. There's no need to trample over to well-trodden ground already. They are great resources there for you. But today what I want to do is get a little bit more granular. I've decided to focus on three main target profiles. Okay, now, as I thought about this show, I thought okay, who should I really hone in on here? Who should we filter and talk about strength and conditioning as it relates to this group? And ultimately, it came out with three main groups that I thought would be beneficial. The first is endurance athletes globally. Why you should absolutely if you're or an endurance athlete integrate strength into your training. That was a big argument about 10 or 15 years ago, it seems like the argument is one but I do want to start the show off with a little bit of an overview with endurance athletes, then I want to go to a special population, females and a special focus on perimenopausal and menopausal women, let's call it 35 to 60 years of age or so, really, really important. But what's the role of strength? It's an additional layer on top of everything that we're going to talk about, with, of course, the endurance athletes. And then finally, we're going to have a specific focus for the mature athlete. So that's men and women, female athletes, male athletes, that are 55 years and above, we could argue that it might even start about 45 years and above, but what's the sell the value beyond just the global endurance athlete promise? Where does it really become important for that population? Now, by the time the show is over, I'm hoping that you're really going to have a fantastic suite of information that can ground you in "yes, this is good for me," But also, if you are one of those two population groups, more mature athlete, or a female athlete, you can really say, Hey, this is how I'm going to apply it to my own performance journey. And that becomes really, really important. This covers a lot of listeners.
Matt Dixon 06:29
What I decided to bypass mostly in pursuit of time today, it was, I was really passionate about doing busy professionals and executives, I think we'll table that and do that for another time. Folks that spend a lot of time managing high stress at work sitting how I'm sitting right now, in, in my office chair, with pretty --- bad posture, particularly me with me English posture, that's too much. And then the other population that I decided to bypass today was youth and children. And I realized that we have a lot of parents that listen to the show. And so we are going to endeavor to do another standalone show on just kids training globally because I think that is a really compelling and interesting subject. I think that though, it sort of leads us down a rabbit hole that is too expensive and too deep to go down over the course of just this show.
Matt Dixon 07:18
Okay, so we are going to focus on endurance athletes, female athletes, particularly around that perimenopause, menopausal phase, and the mature athlete. Now over the course of the show, and each profile, what I'm looking to do is to highlight why it's really popular or important for that group number to outline some of the research that makes it really compelling specific to that group. And then develop some of the tidbits around how each, if you are under that profile or part of that group, you might actually approach your strength to really maximize the value because as you'll learn today, it's not all the same across all of the groups. So before we dig into this, I think it's going to be really valuable, a little bit interesting. And if you're not a participant or member in that group, I strongly encourage you to listen because this is going to help you with understanding the overall performance spectrum and how we can apply it to different groups. And so I think it's going to be educational, even if you're not a perimenopausal, menopausal female, even if you're not a mature athlete, I think it's going to be really insightful, a little bit helpful. And I think you'll be able to draw quite a bit from it. Before we dig in. Barry, thank you very much for your support, great camera work really, really good on the audio. But I do want to do some important announcements and some quality time that the folks at home are going to get to enjoy with me if they participate. Let's do Matt's News-ings.
Matt Dixon 08:46
Yes, it's Matt's News-ings and it's an important one this week, mark your calendar February 15th, it is an opportunity for you to spend an hour of power with me. I'm hosting a live webinar. And it's going to be educational, purely educational focused around the time-starved athlete, and specifically the timestamped athlete that is looking to chase their best performance in Ironman or half Ironman distance. So in other words, it's one for the triathletes this one. Now, I've decided that I'm going to be pretty revealing over the course of the show. Firstly, we're going to talk about the mistakes that occur for a very busy person that's looking to either take their performance to the next level or maybe successfully finish an Ironman or half Ironman distance. We see so many athletes that show up to the start line, highly committed, but ultimately fit and fatigued. But more than that, we want to break the mold, because I don't want your journey towards an Ironman or half Ironman to become a second job, a monkey on the back. Now recently, you heard an episode around leading executives and C-levels who successfully take on the big Ironman or half-Ironman challenge. And the truth is you can too, and I want to help you with that. Now, this webinar is free, it's open to anyone, you don't need to be a Purple Patch athlete. In fact, I'd really be thankful if you would invite your friends. But if you register, if you can't attend live, we're going to send you the recording. So you don't need to miss out whatsoever, I would encourage you to register. But also, if you do get to join me live, we're going to ensure that we leave plenty of time for you to ask any questions you want around your performance journey under the banner of Ironman, or half Ironman racing, okay, it's February the 15th. It's 5 pm. Pacific, if you'd be if you can attend live registration or in the show notes, you can share it wide on your social channels, anyone that might be interested, it's purely education, you know that we have a real passion for spreading the good word and hopefully helping people to integrate sport into their life so that they can leverage to get more their sport and results, but also built on a platform of health and accelerate in a broader component. So that's really, really important, I hope that you attend. I also want to encourage you, if you're Bay Area based, on March the first, many of you guys have reached out and said you absolutely love the episode with Lauren Fleshman. Still, more have gone on and bought purchased the book. Well, at the center, the Purple Patch Performance Center, March 1st we are going to welcome Lauren in the flesh, her and I are going to go through and do an educational session, we're going to talk more about the book, I'm going to of course, reinvent some of the questions so that it's new, fresh material, ask your perspective. And of course, you can hang out with Lauren too. We'll even have some beers and wines as well. That's going to be March the first more details on that. But you can mark the calendar. And of course, you're always welcome to fly in and visit us at the center. It's going to be lots of fun, it should be a great evening, we're going to do that early evening time. Just mark your calendars for that, more information next week on that. All right, Barry, that's Matt's News-ings. We've had a couple of weeks off due to some very meaty episodes, a roster of great guests that we've had. But I do want to highlight one quick word this week. And so you're gonna have to get the ukulele out Barry, it is time for Word of the Week.
Matt Dixon 12:32
Indeed, it is Word of the Week, folks. And this week, it is gratitude. Oh, I'm gonna get all touchy-feely on this one, aren't I. Now that word kind of goes both ways. I just want to mark it right here on today's show that we're really thankful for your trust, and your loyalty listening to the show. I know we have a tremendous audience, people that reach out to us consistently saying that they enjoy the show that they love sharing it that they receive so much information and education from us. And we're really thankful that you do enjoy it that it is helpful to your performance journey. And it's fantastic. So we're have a lot of gratitude for that. But now, I'm going to ask you for something and express that gratitude in a way. If you could help us a little bit. You see one of our missions, our goals for 2023 is we actually really want to grow this show, and who get support from the education that we provide over the course of this year. So if you enjoy the education, which is pretty much free outside of a little bit of advertising it's pretty much free, isn't it. So I hope you enjoy the education. But if you do, here are a couple of ways that you can help us. The first is the episodes that you enjoy or you find insightful, we would really like it if you share those episodes far and wide. Of course, you can do it on your Instagramables and your Facebookees, so all of the social medias, but go beyond that - personal invitations to listen to the show from friends, associates, etc. A great example I mentioned Lauren Fleshman before. Who would benefit from that? Parents that have kids, maybe high school coaches of your teams. Anyone that you think might benefit it goes well beyond "I'm a triathlete". Your local baseball team or softball coach, whatever it might be. Parents, coaches -- share and share wide because I think it's really beneficial and I thought that conversation was really interesting. So if you can share, thank you so much. Secondly, engage, leave some comments, maybe a positive review on our YouTube page or wherever you listen to your podcast. It really, really helps and encourage you and your folks and friends to actually follow or subscribe. That really helps us grow the show and ultimately get it into the hands of more people that can benefit from the education that we provide. And so engage with us, enjoy it. And more importantly, help us by allowing us to understand what would help you. What do you want us to cover? What are we missing in the show? How could we improve, we want to hear from you. So you can do that in two ways, you can do it through all of the Purple Patch channels. So you can always tag us at Purple Patch fitness at Instagram, at Purple Patch Fitness on Facebook at Purple Patch on Twitter. But also, you can just reach out to us and let us know info@purplepatchfitness.com, we'd always like to hear your feedback on how we can improve. In the meantime, I'm just gonna get into lean into our Word of the Week gratitude. And I really am thankful for your ongoing support. And now I'm just asking for a little bit of help. I think that I'm going to get a little feedback this week of "Can you just get into the meat and potatoes a little quicker. Blah blah blah he's going on and on." But folks, this week, it was important. So thanks for bearing with me. Now let's do strength and conditioning. Barry, it is time it is The Meat and Potatoes.
Matt Dixon 16:13
Yes, folks, it is The Meat and Potatoes. And the topic today is strength. So let's start with this, let's ground ourselves, every single Purple Patch program that we build has fully integrated video-based strength. And that's taken a lot of effort. And in fact, there's a lot of ongoing effort that we keep the content fresh, we keep improving the videos, we want to ensure that wherever you are based or wherever the Purple Patch athlete is based, they can benefit from some real coaching, don't just do it but do it properly. And we appreciate at the same time that a lot of you folks listening, you say, "Well, that's great if all of your programming is integrated with with video-based strength, but I'm not coached by you. I'm a coach, myself or a self-coach, I don't need a coach right now." And we realize that and so we understand as we're going to go through this topic today, you might finish and say, "Goodness me, I'm sold, I want to integrate strength into my broader program. But how do I do that? Either my endurance coach is not really an expert, so I find myself just doing a little bit of supplementary stuff that might home gym, maybe some core work, maybe a little bit of strength-based work at the gym, but I don't really have a year-round structured program." Well, guess what? It's actually really simple to integrate. There are a few ways that we can help you if you leave today's show and you're inspired. The first of course is folks in the San Francisco Bay Area well you've got it golden because we have treadmill and circuit strength-based sessions, we've got strength classes at the center, the Purple Patch Performance Center in San Francisco. And of course, we have highly customed personal or small group training sessions with a personal trainer. So that's great. And you can check that out on the website, purplepatchfitness.com, we are also happy to have a call with you if you'd like to talk through it. For you folks that are further afield the vast majority of people listening or watching, well, you guys actually have an opportunity to leverage and get involved with our strength and conditioning program. It's all video-based, it's year-round is progressive. It's very simple. And it's designed to be able to be executed from anywhere. And so same as the folks in San Francisco, head to the strength tab on the website, or of course, reach out to us info at purple patch fitness.com. And we'd be delighted to set up a conversation on how you might integrate it into your training. But let's wade into the subject at large.
Matt Dixon 18:42
You understand by now that strength and conditioning is a pillar of all of our training programs. But let's first define what we mean by strength. So I think this is really important. If we're going to talk about leveraging strength in special populations, we need to think well what does a strength and conditioning program really entail? Well, in no particular order, it is a focus on core and stability. So that's a lot of work establishing and retaining really good posture. And as an athlete or a person is set under fatigue that they can retain very good posture. And that's across sports as well as of course life so let's call it core and stability, very important. We also do a lot of work on joint mobility and stability. So that's working on your chassis, if you want to think about that a lot of mobile activities so that you can get into good positions retain good positions, maximize perfor-- power potential etcetera. So joint mobility and stability. We have general muscle strengthening against a load or resistance and that can be delivered in many, many ways of course. We have coordination, so getting your brain to fire and synchronize movements, your brain sparking up dialogues in a really synchronized fashion with your muscles. And we have power, that's a huge component. Force is mass times acceleration. And so when we think about this as it relates to strength and conditioning, that can include explosive jumps, Plyometrics, a little bit of eccentric and eccentric load, very important. And I would argue that the argument on whether strength and conditioning should be integrated into an endurance athletes program is somewhat won. So instead today, rather than me going on and on and on about a cell of you should integrate strength, I want to just dig into what the yield is. Why it's important, and what the focus should be for each type of athlete. And so we're going to get going today with a pretty broad, special population. And that's endurance athletes, that's probably the majority of the folks that are participating in the show today. So what I want to do is start with the basics, because this is pretty broad. And when we go into the female athletes, the mature athletes, it's going to build on top of this one.
Matt Dixon 21:14
So integrating strength for endurance athletes, let's start with the basics. Alright, first, I want to talk about elite athletes. There are some athletes who are just terrific, elite, endurance athletes, they are just great, pure athletes. And you can imagine great coordination, speed, strength, of course, and a really large engine that's highly effective and economical, that they have the great ability to retain power and speed over the course of long distances. They have great muscular resilience. So you can think about that archetype of a great, elite endurance athlete. And they might get away with a rather limited approach to strength and conditioning. But if we look at the majority of folks that actually do endurance sports, the general theme will look very, very different. And every coach will tell you this, it is incredibly common that most endurance participants, the majority of endurance athletes have incredibly poor posture, very low competency in core and stability. They have questionable coordination and synchronicity of movement. It's really underdeveloped. There's a growth opportunity here. And many of them have ongoing issues with tissue health, in other words, propensity for injury. And so strength training for an endurance athlete is a critical and proven to assist with all of this by adopting a program in strength and conditioning as an endurance athlete, particularly, if you are the norm. As vast majority of people participate in this, you're going to establish muscular development, neuro muscular acuteness, so you're going to get more synchronized, and you're actually going to have improvements in your energy system efficiency. So all of these so far, getting better core stability, getting better coordination in movements, developing your strength, tissue integrity, all of these improvements are positives, obviously. But for an endurance athlete, the role of strength in economy is one that I think deserves a little attention here because it's often not really spoken about, but it's actually really important. Your economy as an endurance athlete is an essential component of success. And a nice way to think about your economy. The first question is, what is economy? A really nice layman's way of thinking about the economy is using the analogy of a car. If you've got a car, you've got the size of your engine, and you might heard of terms of things like VO2 Max, so in other words, your body's maximal ability to uptake and utilize oxygen, and of course, that's really good. The bigger your engine, the higher your VO2 Max, the greater your ceiling of potential, the greater your potential to actually generate high power. So that's a really good thing for an endurance athlete. You've often heard of goodness me Lance Armstrong had a huge engine, a large VO2 Max, or maybe the Nordic skiers, the highest recorded VO2 Max ever. So they're talking effectively using our car analogy of the size of the engine. Well, your economy is an endurance athlete is, stick -- staying with the car analogy, is your miles per gallon. So in other words, your effective cost at any given intensity. How much fuel you're using. Not necessarily die directly how many carbohydrates, but that's the way to think about it. We have so much energy, and we want to distribute that over the course. And that can be improved, we can tinker and improve your economy so that at any given intensity, the cost can go down. So a really primed, elite endurance athlete is going to have a pretty large engine up to a very large engine and is trained to have as lower cost as possible across their intensity range. Makes sense yeah? You wanna have a big engine, you want to have a good chassis, that of course is not prone to injury, because we want to create consistency of training. And we want to keep training that engine to become more and more efficient. So that's fantastic. That makes sense.
Matt Dixon 25:48
Well, the way that you can improve your economy, so one half of the big equation of being an endurance athlete, you can do it in many ways. You can train in endurance activities. And this takes quite a while to improve. And it's really important you do it over many, many months. In fact, you could argue you do it over many, many years. And a good amount of that training should be pretty low intensity because that's where we're building efficiency and improvements in your economy. Great. But guess what another vehicle to improve your economy is strength training. Why? Well, when we think about strength training, when it pertains to economy, particularly if we're thinking about heavier loads, and actually I would add to that to that plyometrics -- explosive type training, when you do that type of activity, it's forced overload. And that creates a big overload in muscle fiber recruitment. You actually bring more fibers in to be recruited. And you simply cannot recruit that number of fibers, when you're, for example, riding a bicycle or even running. And so over time, when you do repeated strength training, heavier load, and or plyometrics explosive type activity, you actually improve your neural recruitment, your coordination between your brain. So that's the driver and your muscles. And that's really good. So ultimately, that's going to lead to better coordination, better synchronicity, and therefore, you have a gateway to improve and amplify the miles and miles and miles and hours and hours and hours, you do have training to become more economical. It's also going to improve your power. Power is an outcome of force times your velocity. So when you are doing that heavier load strength training and plyometrics, it actually increases your ability to produce force at any velocity, and therefore, it's a gateway for you to improve power. Great. This means that lower force requirements such as riding a bike or running up a hill, you can actually utilize the more efficient muscle fiber types. So, therefore, it's going to be a gateway to become even more economical. Great. What this all means is that while athletes and coaches don't really think about driving up power is actually related to economy to economy gains, it absolutely is. Because you have greater recruitment, more fibers into the usable mix, and as you increase your power potential, as I said, you can draw on the more emission-efficient muscle fibers. And that's really important. So there is some several other areas that can also lead into economy stuff that we're not going to dig too much into today. But things like high-load strength training that are going to evolve components, such as muscle stiffness, as they call it, or I refer to it often as tensile strength. In other words, the rebound effect of when you're, let's say, running along the ground, the rebound effects of muscles, which actually lowers cost across intensity gains. So in fact, for endurance athletes, especially the majority of amateurs, that we're talking about today, integrating strength just because of this should be an absolute non-negotiable because the argument or the discussion has shifted away from the age-old injury prevention. In other words, trying to avoid a negative, and instead, it's a direct link to becoming more economical, which is a huge catalyst of you becoming a faster athlete. Pretty cool, huh? Of course, we still have muscle health, tissue health. So in other words, reduction of injury risk. We also have improvement of components such as your posture, which is a critical element. When we think about any sport, when we're talking about swimming form, riding on a bicycle really well, establishing running form, and being resilient to drops in or increases in cost when we come with fatigue, we always think about stability and posture, in other words, retaining four months of fatigue. So that becomes really important. So when we wrap all this up for an endurance athlete, boosting economy, improve tissue health, retaining, and gaining great posture, and stability throughout all of your sports, it becomes a non-negotiable. Of course, the biggest argument I hear is, "I just don't have time for strength and conditioning, I'm already busy enough trying to get in my swimming, biking, and running", or whatever your endurance component is. So don't take my word for it, let's pull in an interesting piece of research.
Matt Dixon 30:51
A group in Finland actually took apart a study and they released it in the Journal of Applied Physiology, where they looked at times in 5k, run. And they took some really experienced runners and they integrated strength training into one of the groups. Now they replaced total training hours, with a third of those training hours taking up now strengthen conditioning. Now, I'm not suggesting that you should participate or build your training with a third, 33% in strength and conditioning, but for the sake of this study, that's what they did. And guess what happened with that group, they improve their neuromuscular recruitment. So in other words, improving dialogue between brain and muscles, their running economy improved measurably. And they include this paces and splits faster and way greater than the other group that just retained their regular training schedule. And that was without any increase in their VO2 Max. Remember, that's the size of your engine. So in other words, that group got faster by just integrating strength and conditioning. So that becomes really interesting. And there are many other studies that show similar results. But the question is for you, if you think, okay, that's compelling. And what Matt talked about, there was heavy load and plyometrics. So let's just start dumping that on top. That's not the way to think about this. If you're an endurance athlete, you need to ensure that you do it in a really patient and pragmatic way. The research absolutely shows that the biggest gains that we can make the biggest improvement comes from an endurance athlete, not doing 80, 100, 120 repetitions of low resistance, but instead doing heavier load with explosive movements. So that's what we want to get to. But we don't want to just simply add this to your training. Instead, the way to think about this is to go on a journey and integrate strength and conditioning in a really smart way, year-round. What that means is that first, the first chapter of all of this is, remember what we talked about, let's get stable, and let's improve your movement patterns. At the start, I talked about the archetype of the elite athlete highly coordinated. But I also said the vast majority of athletes doing this sport, if I said to them, "Hey, take your finger, and place it on your nose", there's a pretty good chance that you might poke yourself in the eye. In other words, neuromuscular coordination and synchronization movement patterns aren't necessarily great. And so there are huge gains for most athletes to be made for a while by just getting stable, getting the movement --- patterns dialed, and improving your synchronization of movement. And that's a bigger yield and greater economy and itself, then, and only then, can you progress to the heavier load stuff, and the potentially explosive movements that are the holy grail of an integrated strength and conditioning program. But you also then have to manage that load of focus of when you are in the hearts of your race season. If you then are training for your race season, you need to ensure that you're not overloading your endurance training with heavy strength and explosive strength because that can become a net negative. That's why integration is so important.
Matt Dixon 34:30
So let's highlight it three principles. Number one, it's a year-round. It needs to be structured and progressive. And most importantly, meet yourself where you're currently at and be honest with yourself and then develop patiently. What does that mean? Well, I'll tell you that many many Purple Patch athletes might have a year two years, even three years of integrating strength and conditioning before they transfer up and hit very heavy load. And I can't overstate the importance here, year-round patient development that aligns with your training. That doesn't smell like just going to your local Pilates class. And it certainly isn't at-home yoga. And in honesty, it's really tough if you're not on some form of a program, or you don't have real guidance. If you're interested in reading more about this, if you want to check out some of the references, we've put a whole bunch in the show notes today, we've got a few studies that integrate and link specifically with the endurance athlete, including that piece of research that we talked about 5k time, which I think you might be quite interested in. And of course, it's a pretty clear picture endurance athletes generally. It's non-negotiable. It's not a "nice to have", it needs to be critical.
Matt Dixon 35:54
But what about female athletes? Profile number two, because we need to now build on this and start to think about perimenopause and menopausal females. Now, let me first say something here. This is an unavoidable chapter of life and it's normal, every woman is going to go through it, and it can last a decade or more. And unfortunately, it's ignored, it's pushed away. It's almost dismissed as a topic. And worse when we think about perimenopause or menopause, and female going through it, some of the advice out there is conflicting, contradictory, confusing, and sometimes outright bad. In fact, I had a very close friend who is really dealing with some body composition issues, and some sleep issues that were just directly related to the changes that occur hormonally despite her having fantastic habits. And so she went to her OBGYN very well respected and the advice she got, well, it's probably a good time to go on antidepressants and seek liposuction. Seriously, that's madness. And that's from a highly respected doctor. Now, this isn't a show on perimenopause or menopause, okay, we're gonna do that actually as a standalone. But this segment is focusing on strength training for this population. So let's just go through why strength training should be a non-negotiable for any female, as well as any female athlete who is 35 years or older. All right, number one, your metabolic rate, let's just commence with the basics. Muscle is your fuel burner. Now, body composition is a very common challenge for females across this profile, but adding lean body mass -- and I'm not talking about bulking up, don't worry, that's not a concern -- but adding lean body mass is an optimal pathway for you to improve your body composition and your energy utilization. So many women fall into the trap of thinking about caloric burn. But ultimately, strength training is a vastly and I mean, vastly more effective pathway for you to improve your body's burn efficiency. It's much greater than simply endurance. You are going to get a bigger yield from embracing strength and conditioning. So that's pretty simple. A second key component is to prevent, or in some cases, even reverse some of the negative potential side effects on bone health. So I think you're gonna agree with me here, this is absolutely critical. Let me tell you, it's not just granny's bones that need protecting a postmenopausal woman can lose 20 to 50% of bone density in two years. Let me say that again, more than 20% of bone density in two years, boom, gone. And it becomes very, very difficult to reverse this. But strength training, particularly high-load strength training, can really help prevent this. And it's going to reduce the impact of this. And this is really, really important. So your bone density demands it. Body Composition, you becoming an effective burner and utilization of energy, and your bones pretty compelling so far. The third is also a biggie. We're gonna talk about insulin. Okay, with all of the radical and variable hormone shifts that are occurring, insulin instability tends to go haywire, becomes really component. In fact, if you did were a CGM or continuous glucose monitor. I'm not necessarily suggesting that you do. Although it has much more relevance to a woman going through perimenopause than it does an athlete in my humble opinion, but if we were to track glucose spikes if we were to do that, over the course of this chapter of life, we can see a huge reduction in the normal imbalance, insulin in response to eating. And this has a really bad knock-on effect, it can impact your sleep quality. And in fact, you can be lying awake at night and your insulin is surging. And of course, that tends to lead to an influx or a retention of body fat, including tummy fat, that's not that fun. So body composition changes can as much be about insulin regulation as anything else. And so there are some positive habits that you can do to try and manage your insulin responses. There are some changes that we can do in our diet conversation for another day, you can integrate some walking or activity post-eating, that helps control your incident response. You can even consume some leafy greens and salads before you have your main meal. And that tends to stunt your insulin response. But the Queen intervention, the big thing to do is to deploy strength training. So that becomes another ingredient in you managing your insulin response, which is hugely important so far as components like sleep quality, energy in the day, mood, as well as body composition. And ultimately, look, strength training is just making you healthier, includes the all-important insulin sensitivity, but it also helps reduce blood pressure bolsters your immune system. So for a female, this becomes really important. The key, and here's the key, is that if you're going to embrace strength training, you've got to do it, right. Because I want to underline this, this is not about just going to Pilates, or doing a TRX class. To be honest, for this profile. It's about doing bonafide, big lifting, recruiting a lot of muscles, a lot of muscle groups, and doing it against heavier load. But just like the endurance athlete, it needs to be done correctly. In other words, you have to once again, meet yourself where you are, be really honest with yourself, and ensure that you start with great movement patterns and stability first. Dial that in. Boom. And then you progress to doing bigger body movements, compound movements, under guidance under supervision, making sure that you're getting it right. But exercises like deadlifts, squats, lunges, in other words, any exercise that really demands recruitment of many muscle groups together. And yes, you want to ensure that you're doing it and staying safe and under guidance, but heavy is good. And guess what, don't worry, because of your profile, and you're in phase that you're navigating, you're simply not going to bulk up. Instead, it's a catalyst for you to feel better and be better. I cannot overstate this, honestly, for this profile, this group, I cannot overstate the value and importance of strength training. In fact, let me narrow it down a little bit. And let's talk about female endurance athletes. And I would say any female endurance athlete that is, let's say 40 to 55 years or above. So that's a pretty broad range. Let's shift your lens on your endurance training, which I know is very, very important to and you probably love, and your strength and conditioning. Here's the lens of how you should think about strength. If you are a person that tends to just love being outdoors, chasing miles chasing the hours, seeking boosts in your FTP or your threshold, or whatever it is, you need to pivot. If you want to get performance gains, and you want to navigate this chapter of your life really, really well, you need to pivot. And instead of supplementing the all-important endurance training with a little bit of strength work, it is a radical shift in your training. What works with you 10 years ago, isn't the thing that's going to help you now. Instead, what I would do is build your strength first in your program, two to three times a week, boom, boom, boom, strength and conditioning, and then wrap the endurance activity around that strength. That's pretty different. And if you start your programming from that lens, you're much higher in likelihood to actually adhere to your training program but also yield the benefits. In other words, your bullseye. Now, if you're 40 or above, is your strength two or three times a week, the endurance activity needs to come behind that. All right, that is a critical component. Once again, for reference, I dropped a couple of interesting research articles but also I would recommend a really pretty good book on this and It's a good friend of mine, but she's a fantastic expert in a field, Dr. Stacey Sims, I'm sure plenty of you folks know, she did a great book called next level. And so I'll leave the link for that in the show notes, I recommend if you are a part of this group that you should maybe have a read of Stacey's work. She's also got some great courses. I think we'll have Stacey well hopefully, she'll accept the invitation. But, we'll perhaps have Stacey on the show to navigate and tackle this as a broader subject. But as it relates to the show strength and conditioning really, really important.
Matt Dixon 45:36
All right, it's pretty meaty. But one more to go. We're going to talk about strength for mature athletes. So as we go on this journey, we progress, I find myself saying this. Okay, everything I've said so far in today's show, mature athletes, everything that we've already said. So if you are over 55 -- Instead, in fact, I would say if you're over 45, male or female -- think about everything I've said so far. It all applies to mature athletes. But let's go beyond that as well. Okay, let's go on. And let's think about a few components. All right, body composition, and we talked about that in perimenopause and menopause. Absolutely. Bone Health really critical for mature athletes. Increasing your health profile, including the prevention or delaying of diseases such as heart disease, and diabetes, strength, and conditioning is great. If you want performance enhancement in your economy, improving your power, etc. as the endurance athlete. It all fits under this umbrella. But what I want to anchor in on in this group is something that becomes really important. Cognitive health. Why strength training, so important for older adults and their cognitive health? Well, studies have strongly displayed that strength training led to overall benefits in cognitive performance, and also benefits that are linked to the protection of degradation in specific sub-regions of the hippocampus. And that becomes really interesting. The hippocampus is a part of your brain that's a complex structure, with a major role in learning and memory. Sound familiar? So strength training studies show have a link to actually promoting and protecting the hippocampus from degradation. Think about that. So let's put some real context behind this profile in this group. Let's think about memory, depression, and components like that.
Matt Dixon 47:38
United Kingdom, the leading cause of death amongst women, is dementia. It's quite mind-blowing, isn't it? One of the groups that has the highest increase in depression, this profile, mature adults. And perhaps you know someone, because it's very, very common, that has passed away from an early death resulting indirectly from a fall that's resulting in a broken hip or some component like that. So bone health becomes a really important component. And that becomes really challenging. Now, we should align here, when I think about maturing, the success for anyone as they get older in age is not how long you live. It's really anchored in your health span, the quality of life yes, we all want to live to an old age, but we want to be thriving, we want to be living life, we want to be bringing growing, performing. And we've got some great examples of that under the Purple Patch umbrella. In fact, there's a whole group called the AARP anarchists. But for every one of those inspirational athletes, strength is a central pillar. The goal here for us isn't just to reach our 80s or reach our 90s. It's about reaching these ages with great health and opportunity to still lead a fulfilling life physically and mentally. And of course, to achieve this, it's complex. It really is complex. But one of the central things that we can do to improve that can, that can heighten our cognitive function, our daily energy, reduce disease risk, improve our global function, and heighten our mood is strength and conditioning. Now, just like all other programs, I remind you again, that strength and conditioning must begin where you're currently at whatever level you're at, it must be structured and progressive. You need to be really patient. But for this group and population as well, the biggest benefits come while safely under real lifting, and heavier load. And so when we think about strength, yes, all the stuff I talked about with the endurance athlete but cognitive function, that's a huge sell. If you want to be vibrant, have good mood, good to have good energy strength has a direct link in this.
Matt Dixon 50:10
And so in summary, I hope today that by focusing on these three groups that you realize that ultimately integrating strength and conditioning into your program isn't a nice addition. It isn't something that's supplemental, it is a pillar of your performance. To become your personal best, and produce sustainable high performance, I encourage you to get on the program, for your body, for your mind, and ultimately, for your race results. And so I encourage you or I thank you for listening today. And once again, feel free to share with anyone that you think might benefit. In fact, you could be quite democratic here, post it on your socials. And of course, if we can help in any way whatsoever, reach out to us info@purplepatchfitness.com. We are here to help. And I hope I see you next time. Hope it was useful show. Take care.
Matt Dixon 51:06
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 commenced 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 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
strength, endurance athlete, athletes, important, strength training, conditioning, heavier load, improve, integrate, patch, purple, female athletes, other words, big, group, component, economy, perimenopause, performance, profile