Episode 268: Tackling High Heat & Humidity - Preparing the Body for Adversity
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Imagine you are in the midst of a tough race in the middle of hot and humid conditions and suddenly your body begins sending you signals of surrender.
Anyone who has exerted any type of energy in the sweltering heat can attest to the difficulties posed by the conditions. Nothing sucks the speed out of the legs more than high heat and humidity.
So, how do you go about setting yourself up for success when the sun is beating down on you and the humidity becomes claustrophobic?
In this week’s episode of the Purple Patch Podcast IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon breaks down how to mitigate the impact of heat by establishing strategies to arrive prepared and ready to perform in adverse conditions.
Matt takes a closer look at the challenges of racing in the heat and dissects the physiological effect it has on the body and how it impacts your overall performance. He provides tips and resources to help you arrive fit, fresh, and ready to adapt to the conditions on race day.
In this episode:
How the Body Responds to Heat (TheCardiovascular System, Neural Impact, and metabolism)
Thermoregulation and Maintaining Core Temperature (The science behind our body’s cooling system)
Four Key Strategies in Preparing for the Heat
Purple Patch Tools and Preparation Resources
What Matt outlines is not designed to make things easy, or to remove the impact of high heat and humidity, but rather to help build strategies to reduce the negative impact and help you deliver your best performance within the context of the conditions.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 02:47 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
02:54 - 05:48 - Matt's Newsings
05:55 - 53:22 - The Meat and Potatoes - Episode 268: Tackling High Heat & Humidity - Preparing the Body for Adversity
Purple Patch and Episode Resources
Purple Patch Video Podcast and More
Purple Patch Blog - Race Effectively in Hot and Humid Conditions
SWEAT TESTING at the Purple Patch Performance Center with Precision Fuel & Hydration
Join the Purple Patch Team - Director of Growth and Business Operations
The Purple Patch Center is Open - Learn More and Schedule a Visit
Purple Patch Coaching Consultation
Learn more about our Tri Squad Program
This episode is sponsored by our collaboration with INSIDE TRACKER. Inside Tracker and Purple Patch- Receive 20% off their services with code: PURPLEPATCHPRO20
Ask Matt Anything - Leave a voicemail question for Matt
Learn more about Purple Patch Squad High-Performance Training Program
Join Bike Squad - Don’t just exercise and work out; learn to train with our structured online cycling program
Join Run Squad - Increase your running performance through our progressive, multi-sport approach to running
Learn more about Purple Patch Fully Customized 1:1 Coaching
Learn more about Purple Patch Strength Programming
Stay Up-to-Date with Purple Patch News and Events
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 00:24
Well, we know that random approaches deliver random results, but equal to this over complication creates a paralysis of analysis. And that's why a healthy dose of pragmatism, some expert advice to help filter out the noise, and a little focus is the path to your enduring success. At Purple Patch, we leverage InsideTracker. It helps define your best individual path ahead. By gaining insights from your biometrics and combining it with the advice from the team of experts at InsideTracker, we get a roadmap to help you focus correctly on your habits, nutrition, and supplements so that you can create a sensible performance journey. Add to this the trackable results and improvements and the program becomes your partner in performance evolution. You don't need to be a Purple Patch athlete to leverage, instead just head to insidetracker.com/purplepatch, that's insidetracker.com/purplepatch and use this sneaky code Purple Patch Pro 20. That's Purple Patch Pro two zero, you get 20% off everything at the store. All right, enjoy the show. It's a goodie today. It's getting hot, hot, hot.
Matt Dixon 01:39
And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast, as ever, your host, Matt Dixon. And let me tell you, nothing sucks the speed out of legs more than high heat and humidity. You know that feeling don't you? It's almost like claustrophobia. I know I do because I run like a Donkey dipped in cement. But despite the sensation and challenge, if you want to achieve your goals in sport, the likelihood is that you're gonna have to navigate such heat and humidity. Many of the races tend to occur at times of the year when Yes, we get pushed on top of us with high temperatures and high humidity. The good news of this challenge is that there is a pathway. I can't provide to you some portable AC unit so that you can have a nice, cool experience. But what I can do today is help you prepare physiologically and psychologically with some strategies to help you perform despite that challenge. It's all in today's show. But before we get going, I've got an invitation for you. It's a special invitation to join the Purple Patch team. It's all in today's Matt's News-ings.
Matt Dixon 02:54
Alright, guys, Matt's News-ings. And something that we don't often do here because we're, we hire quite a lot of employees. But this is a special one. So we wanted to share this with you today, I've got an opportunity for the right person an invitation to join the Purple Patch team here in San Francisco. The title of the role is the Director of Growth and Business. And this is, for us at Purple Patch, a key leadership position. So we thought we would take the opportunity to share it with you our audience as maybe a route that can be a great understanding and source to actually fit the role. The candidate will take the reins on all of our marketing and related operational assets to grow our platform. So the keyword in all of this is leader, we will be working directly alongside myself and Kelli, and teaming up for the next chapter in the Purple Patch journey. We always talk about evolve or die, we always talk about a growth mindset. And yes, we're pretty ambitious. But we need to add to the team, someone that can be the proverbial third leg of the stool to help us accelerate. Now I do want to point out if you go and check out the job description for yourself, or maybe you think of others, that might be a good role. This is not a remote role. So we really feel like it's important for folks to be based in the Bay Area. So please consider this if you do think about applying. Or if you're going to send it to folks that might be a great fit. They need to be here in San Francisco. We think this is terrifically exciting. We're really excited about it. It's important to us as a team. And so if you think of anyone, feel free to check out the job description, we've posted it in the show notes. It's also on the base of the website, under the career section. You can read all about it right there. We would very much be thankful if you could send it to friends or family or perhaps even you feel like you're a great fit. You know us we're performance driven. And guess what? There's even one even one sneaky little addition here. Thing Talk about it. If you're the right candidate, and we ended up partnering up, you're gonna get to meet Barry in person, the privilege. Folks, thanks in advance. Thanks for listening. I know it's a little bit out of bounds for regular programming. But this is a key role for us. And so we thought we would turn to you, our community, and our audience to say, hey, for the right fit the right person, this is a tremendous opportunity, a great passage for growth and to be able to really help us go to the next level. And that's really exciting. It's going to be a fun next two to three years ahead of us. All right, folks with that, it's all about hot, hot, hot today, we're talking about performance in the heat. And so Barry, I spoke about you in this but now it's time for us to hold hands because it is time for the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 05:55
All right, folks, it is the meat and potatoes. Just think about it. You're training your booty off don't ya. You're fit, hopefully, you're fresh and it's race time. You look at the race day weather, 88 degrees and 85% humidity. It's going to suck right? Well, the truth of the answer is it kind of is. Racing in the heat is tougher, and it delivers more challenge. But our quest today is to set a path for you to arrive to race day more prepared to actually perform under these conditions. Now in order to achieve heat readiness and success, I think we need to understand what's happening in the body. Because with that knowledge, we can start to lay out strategies and some principles to help you arrive really ready to go. So what I want to do is I want to start today's meat and potatoes with a little bit of physiology to give you some of the things, the symptoms that are occurring with our cardiovascular system, what's happening neurally, what's happening metabolically, then we can get into a little bit of the why and some of the impacts that occur with that, and then we're going to get in and strategize on to it. And so hold hands because I think this is important knowledge transfer to begin, and then we get to strategize on the back end of the show. So very simple, let's start with the physiological side of things. And what I want you to imagine, when we're going through this as you are right in the middle of a tough race, let's say that you're doing a marathon, but it's very, very hot, conditions are humid, what's actually happening to our body, we're going to get into the why a little bit later, but what's actually going on with our body, when we start to feel the impact -- it's claustrophobic, we have a high perception of effort, everything feels like it's really unraveling and the body is under extreme challenge, because of maybe a little bit less of preparation. We can break it down into three main sections. The first is we need to think about the cardiovascular system, what's actually occurring, when you're right in the middle of that high heat experience, you've already got some fatigue, and you're driving it -- what's occurring? Well, at any given pace or output, you are going to start to experience higher heart rate, we all know that when you operate in heat, heart rate is higher. Okay, that's important. We also have under those same conditions, a lower cardiac output and a cardiac output, what that means is the amount of blood that's circulating out of the blood or pushed out of the heart to be circulated around the body over each minute. And that's a division between the amount of blood that is pumped per beat and the amount and amount of times per minute that it is pumped. So we actually have lower cardiac output. Now we're gonna come back to that a little bit later. But that's another important component that's occurring. A third element that's occurring is increased blood flow to the skin. And the reason that that is occurring is so that we can dissipate the heat from the work that we're generating. So when you actually put the muscles to work, they generate heat, we need to get rid of it. And so there's a lot of blood flow to the skin to do that. We have, in comparison there, a lower blood flow of variability to the muscles. And that's really important because we need blood flow to go to the muscles to deliver oxygen so that we can generate the energy to go and do the work that we're asking our body to do in the racing conditions, but we have lower blood flow to the muscles. And also finally we have lower blood flow to both the abdominal area to help with absorption and we have lower blood flow to the brain. So therefore we have decreased cognitive function, focus, and motivation could all be impacted by that. So you got a high heart rate, high skin blood flow, and lower cardiac output each minute and also then we have less is blood going to the key areas to help us define performance. So that's what's going on from a cardiovascular and blood standpoint.
Matt Dixon 10:06
We've also got neuro considerations. So what's actually occurring neurally here? Well, we have an increased perception of effort, it feels harder, and normally that's because it is harder. We have an increased perception of efforts and we also have a decline in voluntary activation of the central nervous system. Now, what I mean by this fitting under this banner is a decreased level of coordination, muscle recruitment, that becomes important to actually go and implement the exercise or the work that you want to do, and overall you've got a decline in the patterns there. So the whole neural recruitment pattern is starting to decline. So we could bucket that up, in course terms or saying you're basically slightly less athletically coordinated. Now that can increase a cost, it can decrease your economy. So there's a lot of neural considerations that are occurring. And then finally, we've got what's going on with the metabolism. Under high heat conditions, that this type of fatigue, you're gonna have an increase utilization or burn rate of carbohydrate. So we're going to be more dependent on a fuel source that is finite, versus being able to actually leverage more fat. Now, there are some trainable elements here. But overall in heat, we tend to have a higher increase utilization of carbohydrates, we've got greater metabolic accumulation, and we've got an increase in inhibitory feedback. So there's a lot of blocking processes that are occurring with the body. If we wrap all that up together, we can say with a nice bow, something very, very simple -- under heat, we have performance decline. Now a nice way to think about this, and I'm going to use this analogy a little bit as we go through today's session, we can really parallel performance in heat similar to performance in altitude. There are a lot of sort of sister and brother-type things going on when we think about this. The good news is similar to having to operate at altitude, when operating in heat, there are some strategies that we can mitigate the impact of this. Okay, so let's drive into why some of these factors are occurring. Why do we have blood flow, increasing to the skin, less blood flow, therefore going to the stomach, the muscles, etc? Why do we have some of these factors occurring? And it already happens or is happening, when our body is seeking to retain homeostasis. A nice way to think about homeostasis is keeping the body in balance, in check. The body likes homeostasis, it's always fighting to regress to the mean. That's where we perform best. And so when it comes to high heat, we need to discuss thermo regulation, because really, in this context, when you're operating in heat, thermo regulation could be labeled as our body's cooling system in a way.
Matt Dixon 13:09
Let me give you a little bit of an explanation here. Okay, with thermo regulation, we have the central nervous system actually in our body has sensors that are measuring the body's temperature, okay, and that's the internal temperature, you might have heard of core temperature before, well these sensors, they're from the central nervous system, send a signal to the hypothalamus in the brain if your core temperature changes, and that hypothalamus in the brain receives the signals and activates hormones and other body mechanisms that are designed to bring the core temperature back into check. In other words, seeking to regress back to that mean, balance homeostasis, okay. And the result is stability. So for a human being, what we're looking at, is trying to maintain a core temperature of somewhere around 98.6 degrees. Okay, and that's the temperature deep inside. And it doesn't matter if it's really, really chilly out. Or if it's extremely hot out. Let me give you a really pragmatic example. You go down to the sun lounger. Yeah, you've gone off to Mallorca for your holidays, haven't you? You lie down, it's a very hot day. And you lie there baking in the sun, you're not even exercising, what starts to occur here, where you might start to have a slight rising in your core temperature. And after about 10 or 15 minutes, you begin to sweat. That's thermo regulation in action that your body looking to call itself so that it doesn't have an increase in core temperature. But let's think about things conversely. You decide you know what, the summer in Mallorca was great, but I want to go to Colorado and go skiing. And of course, when you go skiing, you say let's do a little bit of après ski so you strip down into your underwear and you go and roll around in the freezing cold temperatures in the snow. What occurs there with your body over, you start to shiver. That's the body's response to try and heat itself up to ensure that core temperature doesn't drop too low. So that's in its essence, what thermo regulation is. Remember, underwear, snow, Colorado - Shiver. Okay, warming up. On the flip side, in your little Speedos on the sun lounger in Mallorca, okay, that's sweating, because we're looking to keep the core temperature from going too too high.
Matt Dixon 15:36
Now, we're not doing that. That's not what today's show is about. Because what we're doing is racing. In other words, we are pushing our personal boundaries. And what we're doing is ultimately having to override this mechanism in pursuit of speed. Makes sense? So let's imagine running. You are doing some serious work. We go back to our marathon example and we're in high heat, high humidity. You're doing serious work here, and your muscles are, of course, producing heat, it's not just the ambient temperature, your muscles are producing heat. So we must, by definition, dissipate that heat, we must get rid of it. That's why if you're racing in even cold temperatures, you go and do the Boston Marathon, and it's very chilly out -- well you're still gonna sweat. And that's because of the work that the body is doing, and therefore the heat it is generating from that work. So that's what we're doing in racing. We're not just lying on the sun lounger in Mallorca, we're actually generating heat from the muscles to produce the speed that we're doing. So that's driving it. So how do we dissipate? This is where we start to get to the high heat, high humidity, and having an impact on your performance. In general conditions globally, we get to remove heat from four potential mechanisms. And those four mechanisms can help us each with their own role maintain core temperature.
Matt Dixon 17:07
Okay, these pathways are very simple. We have radiation, which is the transfer of heat by electromagnetic waves, very simple. We have convection, which is airflow over the body. And that's one way to transfer heat out on a bicycle that obviously has an impact. We have conduction, which is the dissipation of heat through physical contact, that's less appropriate unless you really stick your wrists and arms into an ice bucket, for example. And you have the big one that you all know, evaporation, in other words, sweating. Okay, so we've got four main elements, we've got convection, we've got conduction, we've got evaporation. And what I talked about on the top is radiation. So four main elements, when we are now racing in the heat, and when it is humid, we need to get rid of the heat, and it becomes a mountainous challenge much more difficult. Why? Well there's now suddenly with the temperatures outside, and that's wet to the humidity, there's much less of a heat gradient. And so it becomes more difficult to offload. And of the four methods or pathways that we talked about radiation, convection, conduction evaporation, three of them become instantly severely impaired. And so, therefore, the heat becomes a blocker of the heat exchange from the body to the temperature. In other words, we're trying to get rid of the heat in our temperature outside to the environment, the fact that it's high heat is a blocker to that, and we see a huge drop in radiation conduction and convection. And when you add humidity to this, so in other words, not just hot temperatures, but also a high amount of liquid fluid in the air, water droplets in the air. So high humidity, we all know what that is. Then we also see the evaporation effectiveness, also severely decline. And so if you're hard-charging in a race, and you're really impaired at dissipating heat, what's going to occur? We're going to have an accumulation of core temperature and heat in the body. And that is going to ultimately create a lot of the symptoms that we talked about what's happening physiologically. You have an increased perception, you have a higher heart rate, you have blood flow rushing to the skin desperate and ultimately, tip over a certain point, if it starts to go towards 104 degrees Fahrenheit internally in your core temperature 40 degrees Celsius, not only do you have performance decline, it can become seriously delirious to your health. And so we need to if we go unchecked and the core temperature rises, it becomes ultimately dangerous. And so we need to do all that we can do to prepare ourselves and mitigate the impact to try and keep the core temperature low, to try and manage core temperature and set up strategies to help us perform and to ultimately do what we want to do no matter what the conditions are, which are nail our goals. Let's come back to altitude. Now, let's take any random city in the world I could say Detroit, I could say Miami, I could say Berlin. Now let's choose this one El Alto a pass. Have you heard of El Alto, La Paz?
Matt Dixon 20:39
Imagine if I said to you, you're gonna go and run a marathon. And this nice little Bolivian town is going to be our host city for it. And what I want you to do is I want you to go and run your best marathon in El Alto, La Paz. You'll never forget it. What would your performance expectation be? Well, if you haven't visited this town before, and you had no knowledge of it, you might try and come up with a number that will be close to your marathon PR if you're a marathon runner. But then what if I said to you El Alto, La Paz sits at almost 4000 meters of elevation? In other words, thirteen and a half thousand feet high. It is the highest known town in the world. Thirteen and a half thousand feet, goodness me. Well you, intuitively know from all of the knowledge and information, that your performance expectations are going to decline as you get up to those sorts of altitudes. Everything that you do at that type of elevation is going to be considerably harder. Now we know that we can adapt to that. If we think about a Sherpa that has grown up in the environment, they are obviously well acclimated and adapted to the thinner air that's up there. And we also know that an alpinist can actually adapt by going up down up, down, up, down, up, up, up, up, up and then start to perform higher. But ultimately, ultimately, their performance level, even though they are acclimated to altitude is never going to be exactly what it could be at sea-level conditions. And that's very similar to let's say, I pulled you out and said, Now you're gonna go and do a triathlon, perhaps the Hawaii Ironman in the Big Island of Hawaii. And that is, of course, oppressive heat and humidity. And so it's still going to have a performance impact, similar to going in to try and run a marathon in El Alto, La Paz, we’re not going to expect you to actually mitigate the impact, where you have sea level performance, or you have perfect conditions in the environmental performance, where you'd expect. High heat and humidity is going to have a performance impact. And so what I'm going to outline today isn't designed to make performing in the heat easy, it's not going to remove its impact. Instead, what we're going to try and outline is strategies that will help reduce the negative impact and give you your best performance within the context of the environment. And I think that's really important to keep this in mind as we go through these principles. All right, so are you ready to go? Let's do this, we have a few key principles to get through.
Matt Dixon 23:32
The first one, is unbelievably simple, but the most important one, I'm going to tell you today. If you want to be ready to perform in the heat, you have to arrive to race day incredibly fit and well prepared and fresh, systemically fresh. The Purple Patch saying for this is fit and fresh. It is the primary driver that we had for our pro squad all the way through their highly successful 15 years of operation and all of our time-starved athletes. Arrive fit and fresh. The fitter you are, the better prepared you are to operate in heat as long as you're systemically fresh. I do not want you to let this bypass you. This by far is the most important thing I'm going to say. If you are fit and fresh, you are more effective at cooling and you are less impacted by the side effects of heat. But you have to be both really fit and also fresh. The challenge, of course, the knife edge that you walk on, is preparing for really demanding endurance events, training for a marathon, training for an Ironman, et cetera, while also keeping the body really fresh and systemically fresh. It's always a tightrope that you balance on. And it becomes even more challenging when you're preparing your fitness and your preparation for these training events, but you're also managing a whole host of other competing demands and stressors -- your kids, your work, travel, lack of sleep, because of so many competing demands, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's really tough to nail this. But it's absolutely critical. If you want to perform in heat, you better arrive fit and fresh. Now, let me give you an example of this, the Hawaii Ironman World Championships every year, the second Saturday in October, it is the big race of the year. Of course, it's the World Championships. And we have the very best triathletes that have qualified for this event are preparing to take on the challenge. And they've done very, very well, at a different Ironman around the world, to earn the qualification to this event. So you would think about the performance level here, very few people blow up yeah? And yet, if you go and stand on the sidelines, there is a staggeringly high percentage of athletes that really struggle, that proverbially explode, blow up, find themselves walking on the run. And a big part of the challenge is yes, some pacing strategies, and maybe management strategies that are occurring during the event. But the truth is, that it's a really tricky thing to train for the demands of a Hawaii Ironman in heat, and get fit enough to really do well there, but also show up fresh. And in fact, the further up the scale you go, when you think about the professionals, those athletes that are on the very pinnacle of human performance, if they show up just a little bit of fatigue in there, just that accumulation that occurred, the risk of blowing up is massively, massively increased because of the environment. And so there really is no greater knife edge in preparation for this event. Just systemic fatigue accumulation at all, your chances of poor performance are radically greater. And so absolutely get fit, of course, but you got to commit to freshness. Now, I want you to staple this point to your heart, you can tell that I'm not letting it go. Because it is the most important thing. And I should say that when we talk about on this show, the Purple Patch pillars of performance, endurance, integrated strength, adequate recovery, and a host of supporting habits, undernutrition, fueling hydration, those four pillars nutrition, strength, recovery, and of course, endurance training. Those four pillars are great catalysts to facilitate this. Those that do the training, but also embrace recovery, are brave enough to embrace recovery, and provide that training, enough support with really nutritious high volume, caloric support, and good hydration. Those are the athletes that tend to show up really fit strong, resilient, and most importantly, fresh. And those are the ones that nail it. That is the bedrock of performance. Okay, so that's key principle number one, pretty simple stuff yeah?
Matt Dixon 28:19
Number two, we need to go into hydration. Of course, this becomes important. We talked about the physiological symptoms, a lot of blood flow going into the skin, less blood flow, going to the muscles, et cetera, et cetera. When you are performing in heat, there is great competition occurring. And it's all anchored around blood. Okay, your total blood volume. As I sit here today, I've got give or take somewhere around six liters of blood, I might have a little bit more because I'm a slightly larger person, maybe an itty bitty person has a little bit less, but somewhere between five and seven liters of blood, and that blood is circulating around your body in hopefully a closed system. Because we don't want blood leaking around the place. It becomes an awful mess, Barry. Anyway, that blood has a key role in your performance. It also has a key role in your thermal regulation that we talked about earlier. When you become dehydrated. We all understand that when you exercise, you can become dehydrated when you exercise in heat, you tend to sweat more you become more dehydrated. When you become dehydrated, your blood volume, that six liters or so that I talked about, shrinks. It lowers, and actually more specifically, it's your plasma volume that's dropping. Your blood is made up or comprised of two elements, your red blood cells, okay, that's binding and holding your oxygen and delivering it to your muscles and offloading a bunch of other byproducts, and then your plasma volume that's the white part of your blood if you put it in a centrifuge that carries a lot of nutrients. And that's your transport system. A lot of important stuff there for your immune system and other components as well. But that plasma volume shrinks because it's kind of your body water. And if we're sweating it out through evaporation, then therefore that blood volume is going to shrink. Now this is as it starts to drop, bad, bad, bad for performance. And let me explain why.
Matt Dixon 30:21
Your blood -- when it relates to performance, your blood has three main roles, and we could even extend it to four main roles. And so get buried, that's a good idea, let's go to four main roles, okay?
Matt Dixon 30:32
The first is what we talked about, your blood delivers oxygen to its muscles so that we can then generate energy for work. Good. So you're riding your bike really, really hard, those muscles drive the power of the train on the bike, we need to actually deliver a lot of blood to those muscles to make sure that we can keep up with that work. So that's role number one, blood going to the muscles. Number two role is blood going to the skin. And we talked about that, because that's dissipation of heat, super, really, really good stuff. The third element blood going to the abdomen area to help with the absorption of the calories that are often needed, particularly as you start to go on extended endurance activities and races, blood goes into the guts so that you can absorb the calories necessary to keep up the workload, your demands, good. And finally, number four, or three B in a way, you've got blood going to the brain. And that's going to help with cognitive function. So decision making, motivation, focus, et cetera.
Matt Dixon 31:32
So those are the four main elements when you start to train or race in heat, and then you start to get dehydrated, and a healthy competition brews, in fact, it's a nasty competition, because we have competing demands going on. And when we generate that heat, remember that we've got less cooling pathways in effect. So we haven't got radiation, very good, convection is lowered, conduction is greatly reduced. And if it's humid, evaporation is impaired as well. So you've got three to almost four that are compromised. And yet, we want to override those systems. And we want to perform, and the body, therefore, is keeping up. And we've got less blood to go around. So now the body's having to make decisions, it's going Hang on, I've got heat climbing here. But my brain is telling me to keep up with that work because I'm motivated and competitive. And also, I've just had a Clif Bar or a gel and I need to absorb that. So there lies the competition. And what will occur here is the winner, there can only be one. And that is going to be the skin. Because the accumulation of too much heat is dangerous to the organs and the brain. So, therefore, we must get the blood to the skin as much as possible. So that's going to be the king or queen. Okay, we're then going to have a reduced opportunity to get blood to the muscles. So therefore we see our workload over time will start to suffer. And you probably know that your absorption rate goes down dramatically because third in line is the gut, which becomes really important. Now, when things start to really go into effect, you start to have cognitive decline as well. And of course, that's really negative on things like focus and motivation and components like that. The key here is that skin is always going to win, remember that the skin will win. So, therefore, your perceived effort and the physiological cost of you retaining your race pace is going to amplify, it's going to have a much greater cost. And ultimately, that means that your performance will decline, and your performance suffers. So therefore, it's important if you want to go and show up and compete and excel in a hot environment, you need to understand your needs and set up a plan for your hydration. And in order to do that, you need to know something about who you are as a sweaty beast.
Matt Dixon 34:14
Okay, now there are two main components to this. The first is how much you are sweating, how many fluids you tend to lose. So let's call that your sweat rate. And then also, we need to understand the concentration of the electrolytes in your sweat. Are you a salty sweater, or your more dilute sweater? Now the sweat rate -- sweat rates can be altered with training a little bit. And the fitter you get, the more that you actually lose because you become a more effective cooling machine. On the electrolyte concentration -- that's a little bit more genetic. So in other words, you tend to be a salty sweater or dilute sweater but that doesn't change too much. So those are components but the good thing about out this is that when you start to plan and test and assess and understand yourself in training, you can show up to racing much smarter with a strategy to go and succeed. Now, we have some individuality around this. There are a couple of helpers that actually guide individual athletes. And let me sort of talk about these. Let's talk about salty versus diluted sweaters first. We tend to leverage the precision hydration sweat test here. And this is a passive test and assessment. So you can just be sitting down in your regular civilian clothing. And we can assess the concentration of your electrolytes that you tend to lose in sweating. And this becomes really, really helpful when you start setting up the strategy of both your fueling and your hydration needs. Do you need to replenish a whole bunch of electrolytes every hour, or just a few electrolytes every hour, and some of it depends on the intensity of your race or the duration of the race, but mostly, it's around your genetic predisposition. So this is a one-and-done assessment and is particularly high value for endurance athletes. And if you are a crampy mccramperson or you tend to be a salty sweater, it's incredibly high value. Now we offer this assessment at the Performance Center here in San Francisco. So you should feel free to check out the link in the show notes. Or you can also reach out to us at info@purplepatchfitness.com and we'll give you information or guide you to your test center. Because there are others that are geographically dispersed all over the world, feel free to reach out and we'll guide you on that side of stuff. But that is a really interesting and high value assessment. So that's the saltiness.
Matt Dixon 36:45
But also, you can look at your sweat rate and start to get an understanding of how many fluids that you need to replenish, depending on duration, intensity, and who you are individually. Now, our partners at FuelIn have a really good protocol for this, where they love their athletes, quite commonly Purple Patch athletes to go through some simulators. So in other words, some medium intense or medium duration to longer duration sessions that mimic as much as possible the intensity of race day and also hopefully get as close as we can to the conditions of race day. And there's some way before - do the training sessions way following - and some other tricks in there that you can start to get an appreciation of how many fluids you lose per hour. And you do two to three of these simulator-type sessions before you go and show up and race and knowledge is power as long as it is applied. And so this is a great opportunity. Now what we've done for both of these, as well as a protocol that I'm going to talk about in a few minutes is we've put together a nice little packet for you. So we can break down the FuelIn - heat preparation simulator. We've also got information on sweat testing. And we've also got a heat protocol that I'm going to talk about - the physiological preparation that we're going to do in key principle number three. So all you need to do is head to the show notes. And you can download that free complimentary packet and it will give you all the guidance you want to help you prepare. If you can't find it, feel free to reach out info@purplepatchfitness.com we will be delighted to send it to you.
Matt Dixon 38:27
Okay, key principle number three. All right, so the third element that we want to do is prepare your physiology. This is all about acclamation and acclimatization. How can we actually, not make it easier, but to get your body heat ready, particularly if you're preparing, in other words, training in an environment that is not high heat and high humidity? So I'm training in San Francisco, it's very clement, it's very nice. Now I have to go and race in Hawaii. How can I start to prepare the body physiologically, not to make it easier, but to equip my body with readiness to have less of a negative impact of those conditions? Well, it turns out there are a few things that you can do. Okay, but it's all under what we would label the heat protocol. There is number one, hot water immersion, and that is a post-training protocol. You have a hot sauna treatment, very, very similar to hot water immersion. It's just an alternate methodology. And that is a post-training implementation as well. And you actually have strategic training in heat. In other words, artificially making your training sessions hotter than they typically would be - trying to simulate some of the stimuli that is going to occur. So we've got a protocol as we talked about in the packet, you can just reach out to us it's in the show notes as a tool and you can download this with all of the juicy details, but I want to give you some high-level stuff on the show.
Matt Dixon 40:02
Let's begin with principle number three of this or pathway number three, which is training in a hot environment. Now, this is one that is my least preferred, in many ways, I think it has application, but I think we need to be very, very cautious. And what I mean by that is if you're going to implement some of your training in a hotter environment, or make your natural environment hotter, synthetically, by either going in and doing it indoors in the bathroom with a hot shower, running or wrapping yourself up in extra base layers, whatever it might be, it's important that we are protecting the integrity of your training. So let me give you a little bit of context around this. Your heat preparation, physiologically, is not the primary driver of you having a great race in heat. Remember, what we talked about, the most important thing is for you to arrive really fit and fresh. And so this comes behind this, it's almost like the icing on the cake as it were. So we want to ensure that we don't compromise the quality of your training, just to get you physiologically equipped for high heat. And what that means is that I would reserve this type of intervention or addition to only your more supporting workouts that are designed to be at lower intensity. So an easy low-stress run that we're adding stress by making it artificially hotter, or an easy spin on the bike very, very low for you guys that train with zones, it will be zone one zone two type effort. In conjunction with that, we want to protect the key interval sessions. So we don't artificially make key specific interval workouts hotter than necessary. We keep our fans on us, we do our key interval and speed workouts at the best time of the day to create the best quality training. A great example is imagine if I gave you a track session. And I said I want you to go and run six by one kilometer very strong. Don't wait to do it at 2 pm under the baking sun, do it at 7 am, when it's really fresh, and you can do it with great form and speed. On the flip side, if I said go into a 40-minute easy run, I don't care about pace, you might choose in your heat preparation to do that run with more layers of clothing on or maybe in a hotter environment or inside without a fan so that you can stimulate some of the physiological adaptations that we're going to talk about at the end here. Okay, so that becomes really important. After you've done this type of training in the heat, it's important that over the next couple of hours, you do a super job of restoring your hydration status. That's always a prerequisite, stress the body and then rehydrate afterwards, so that you can get back up and facilitate adaptations. Make sure you have good cognitive function throughout the rest of your workday. And also be prepared for great quality training in subsequent sessions following so rehydration is really important.
Matt Dixon 43:12
What about hot water immersion and a sauna? So if these are accessible, they're really high value and they might add a little bit of time compression to you but they are huge in a stimulus of heat readiness. Now, what we're looking to do here with your training and heat as well, but this is a little bit more direct here, with a post-workout heat stimulus. What we're looking to do from the science standpoint is we're looking to stress the kidneys, you're going to place the kidneys under stress, and they release hormones that stimulate fluid production. In other words, the net result of doing this is we have an increase in blood volume, more specifically, that plasma volume that I talked about before, so you got more blood in your blood. And that's a good thing. Because if you've got more blood to go around that competition becomes less stressful, you're actually more effective at cooling, better opportunity to deliver blood to the muscles, blood to the gut to help with absorption, etc. And so we become physiologically better prepared.
Matt Dixon 44:16
How do we do it? Well, we want to do it by having your regular training with high quality. So we're not doing anything different. You would fuel, you would hydrate, you would train and you would nail it. What changes is what you do immediately after that training, when your metabolic rate is already high from the work that you've done. You don't rehydrate, you don't fuel, and immediately following. You either climb into a hot bath, which is full with maybe the plug, and done and that hot water still circulating to keep the core temperature up and you line that bath up to your neck for 5, 10, 15, 20 up to 30 minutes. Very stressful. Not very nice. The transplant of that is going in and using a sauna or steam room. Same protocol and over the course of the duration, maybe starting with 10 to 15 minutes and progressively increasing your time as you're getting closer to the race and your body starting to become more familiar with it, you don't rehydrate during that time, because we want to place a lot of stress on the kidneys. Okay? That is going to boost your plasma volume. You want to do this protocol for somewhere between at the very least 10 days, but more 14 to 21 days before the day that you travel. And it should elicit full physiological adaptations to a hot environment. Now, a reminder here, this is uncomfortable, and you need to keep the effect up. So you need to stay in there for at least 10 to 15 minutes, probably. And that's gonna feel really claustrophobic. The key here, just like training in a hot environment is once you are done, and you are finished, and you have a quick shower, and you freshen up, then you've got another job to do, which is to start your rehydration protocol, you go through the next 60, 90, 120 minutes plus, gradually rehydrating and I would highly encourage you to add electrolytes to the potion that you drink. Okay, so that's the protocol. Now we've got a lot more details in that in our package that we've built up for you. And so feel free to head to the show notes or once again, reach out to info@PurplePatchfitness and it should be helpful.
Matt Dixon 46:33
The final one, folks, let's talk about race day, a few sort of everything else, elements under these principles. So the first thing I want to do around execution on race day is something that is not diminishing, ultimately, your outcomes, I want you to have a great day. But you must if you want to perform great in high heat and high humidity, we must shift our expectations a little bit. Do you remember the story of our Bolivian city, El Alto? Yeah, you remember that place, we had a shift of expectations for a marathon pace? Well, if you're gonna go and race, the Hawaii Ironman, and you've qualified -- let's make it up -- in a really nice cold conditions day, 65 degrees and you go and do a 10-hour Ironman. If you go and stubbornly stick to the same power output, and the same pace expectations in Hawaii, under those conditions, the chances are that no matter how fit, you get, you're going to be butting up against performance suffering. And so a lot of athletes struggle with this, they fail with a little bit of honest pragmatism. Instead, I encourage you, if you want to go and have the best race performance possible within the context of the conditions, and then you're probably going to race a little bit more defensively. If you just stubbornly chase your power and outputs, it's probably not going to end. Great. So under that principle, there's a whole much more that could be said, but I'm just going to leave it in your hands. Are you brave enough to be pragmatic and smart with your race planning? That's up to you folks. And as your Purple Patch, coached athlete, and then we'll help you.
Matt Dixon 48:19
There are a few technical additions as well. Remember this, when you are racing in the heat, the body does best at cooling from the inside. So if you consume cooler liquids, crunched up ice, et cetera, whenever possible, that's the most effective cooling mechanism. Okay, so from an external source. So core temperature, cooling from the inside, ice cold liquids as much as we can. That's high, high value.
Matt Dixon 48:49
What about what you're wearing? Well, performance fabrics make a huge addition. And a lot of these nowadays come in darker colors. But they have a reflective element to them. And they are specifically designed to help you dissipate heat. So it's worth you going out and doing a little bit of shopping not to buy yourself to glory. It's really the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake. But a performance fabric and whatever you're wearing is going to really help. And I would add to that that more coverage of the skin is better because sunscreen is important. But remember this if you're out there for many hours, burnt skin removes heat dissipation. So if you get sunburned, you're going to become dramatically worse in an already challenging environment of getting rid of the heat. And so at all costs, we want to avoid that.
Matt Dixon 49:41
Finally, shade hats, all good things really important to try and keep the core temperature or to keep the radiation from the sun coming off and on top of the body. So remember, a lot of this is individual. There are some genetic components to it. Some people suffer in the heat more than others. Some people thirstily love the heat. But, but it's important that matter what occurs, you understand yourself. Okay? Now we've given you the opportunity to get a protocol for your heat preparation, we've got some insights on sweat testing, from Precision Hydration, you folks based in the Bay Area or nearby, you've got a super opportunity to come and see us here in the center, which is a lot of fun. But also, it's going to be highly insightful. And a special thanks to the team at FuelIn, fantastic stuff on the protocol that you've offered us to help people go through some simulations, to set up their strategies for success. So that is preparing in heat, I hope that helps. We have a great opportunity, you don't want to be fearful, you just want to be smart about it.
Matt Dixon 50:56
Finally, guys, thank you very much for your consideration in our big leadership role at Purple Patch. This is obviously a key hire for us. And we're excited. And so if you know anyone that might be interested, perhaps is a good fit. Maybe we're in work right now. But you think, wow, this is really a wonderful fit of an opportunity of a lifetime for people. And perhaps it's even you, whoever the right candidate is, are going to become a key part and a key cog in the wheel of the future of Purple Patch. And to me, that sounds pretty exciting and fun. As long as you can put up with me every day. It's exciting times. So Oh, one more thing. Remember this role. We do need folks to be in the Bay Area. This is not a remote role. I want to make sure I double imprint that to help save everybody's time. I hope today's show helps a lot of fun, really enjoyable, and you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to see you next time. Take care.
Matt Dixon 51:50
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 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
heat, core temperature, performance, race, body, blood, occurring, patch, training, protocol, purple, athletes, great, good, fit, fresh, talked, nice, muscles, skin