Episode 273: The Four Pillars of Performance - Case Studies of Purple Patch Methodology in Action
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It’s been 15 years since the start of the Purple Patch journey. While many elements of the Purple Patch program have evolved, and we continually seek to grow, improve and enhance our coaching, our central belief and approach to coaching have remained unchanged.
We believe athletes of all levels can achieve optimal endurance performance by following a balanced training approach. Our methodology, based on four pillars of performance, is designed to provide a simple framework that helps athletes understand and commit to their athletic journey.
The Purple Patch Pillars of Performance:
Endurance
Strength
Nutrition and Fueling
Recovery
On this episode of the Purple Patch Podcast, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon gives us a look at the Purple Patch methodology in action through 3 case studies that illustrate how the four pillars of performance are put to use and how they deliver performance for athletes across all skill levels, age ranges, genders, and goal sizes.
We look at these principles through the lens of a pro athlete building their sports career and recovering from injury, a time-starved executive pursuing lofty goals in sport and in the office, and a busy executive reaping the rewards of a strong platform of health.
The four pillars drive our long-term success with the Purple Patch Pro Squad and our approach with C-Suite executives and leadership teams. These pillars guide time-starved athletes to thrive in both sport and life and help develop a predictable and sustainable high performance for those in demanding work roles. They are the backbone of our success.
The aim of this episode is to help you apply many of the practices and lessons of our methodology to your own journey, to create more purple patches in your life.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 03:26 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
03:33 - 06:52 - Matt's News-ings
06:59 - 01:04:35 - The Meat and Potatoes - Episode 273: The Four Pillars of Performance - Case Studies of Purple Patch Methodology in Action
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Full Transcript
Matt Dixon 00:00
I'm Matt Dixon and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.
Matt Dixon 00:24
We all appreciate that high performance doesn't occur by accident. But at the same time, it doesn't need to be overcomplicated. As you're going to hear today, building your approach around a set of principles and a guiding methodology is appropriate for the world's very best athletes, but also for everyday folk that are just seeking to thrive across health and life. Now at the elite level, it's always a constant tension, a balance of the incremental gains, the finer qualities of high performance, all built around the other side of the equation of just repeatable, basic, fundamental habits. For an executive, it might be as simple as establishing four to five habits under each of the four pillars of Purple Patch performance that we're going to break out today. Or, as we like to say, four pillars, 21 habits. But there is a way that you can build on all of that and supercharge your results to help make them quantifiable. It's InsideTracker. By assessing your biometrics and then following the guidance and advice from the team of scientists and experts at InsideTracker, you can nail down your focus, you can increase your performance yield. But better yet, over the course of time, you can get measurable results so that you can see improvements. And that's really validating. In fact, it's quite fun on top of it. We use it, our Purple Patch athletes use it, and I encourage you to do so as well because you don't need to be a Purple Patch athlete to take advantage, all you need to do is head to insidetracker.com/purple patch and we've got a sneaky code for you, Purple Patch Pro 20. That's Purple Patch Pro two zero, and that's going to give you 20% off everything at the store. All right, let's get on with the show. It's a goody.
Matt Dixon 02:14
Central to everything Purple Patch is our methodology. It was the heartbeat of our long-term success of the Purple Patch pro squad. It's the driver of guiding time-starved athletes to thrive in sport, but also across life, and it is the backbone of our approach to C suite executives and leadership teams seeking to develop predictable and sustainable high performance, enabling them and equipping them to meet the demands of their role at work. I'm Matt Dixon, and this is the Purple Patch podcast. Welcome. And for you regular listeners, yes, that is the first time that I haven't introduced the show in my normal way. And so today, we are going to highlight a few case studies for you. And the reason for this is to try and educate and showcase how our methodology, the Purple Patch methodology is put into action the living application so that we can drive performance. And I hope by listening today that you'll be able to apply many of the practices in the approach to your own performance journey, and hopefully create some more purple patches in your life. Now before we get on to it, Barry where you're going to do a little dose of Matt's News-ings.
Matt Dixon 03:33
Yes, folks, it is Matt's News-ings. And I'm going to do something a little bit different today, we're going to talk about tri-squad, our flagship program. Because our sweet spot or Purple Patch is working with time-starved athletes. And unfortunately, there are loads of good training programs out there lots of great coaches, but the majority of them just take their methodology and dump their programs on top of life. We appreciate that you have limited time and you want to, with your training time that you do have, get the biggest return on investment. And the Purple Patch tri-squad is the only program out there that is designed and built from the ground up specific to the needs of the time-starved athlete. It's our sweet spot. So it makes sense that our flagship program is designed and constructed to meet your demands. As a time-starved athlete, your time is precious, you want to get the best return on investment out of your limited training hours. And tri-squad helps you do that. Not only providing a world-class training program but also with a set of tools to help you execute every session as intended. We need to draw the moisture out of the sponge with every single opportunity that we have. And this goes well beyond just a suite of intervals. Instead, we are going to help you prioritize your training in the week so that you maintain specificity but also have some flex with your ebbs and flow of life. On top of it, you're going to get access to some interactive video bike coaching so that you can not only execute the intervals but also improve as a bike rider. We're going to help you and coach you through enhancing your form, your technique, your terrain management, so it links outside, and even your pacing. You are going to become a smarter athlete and how that is going to help you get faster. Best of all, the entire program is wrapped around an undeniable amount of flexibility, and a host of education to make you smarter, to equip and empower you to be able to self-manage, to remove the monkey off your back so that this whole process isn't just a burden and exhaustive, but it's something that not only gives you the promise, getting faster arriving to your key races ready to shine but also additive to the rest of your life. That's tri-squad. It's the only program that does it. And it's central to Purple Patch. So if you listen to this show, and you draw a lot of value from it, why don't you come on board and help us coach you, guide you, to your very best race performance? It's all for $129 a month. That is considerably cheaper than most local coaches. But we believe with a bigger impact. And so all you need to do is head to PurplePatchfitness.com/squad and guess what? You can have a free call with us. No pressure, book a time, we'll get on the blower with you, as we like to say in England, and we'll see whether we're a good fit. Reach out right now. Let them know that I sent you from the show and we will take it from there. All right, Barry, it's a cracker today. We're talking about the four pillars. We're going through some case studies. They are going to be some fun stories, but also educational. It is time folks for the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 06:59
Yes, folks, I rub my hands with excitement. I like this one, we're talking methodology. But we're talking about the living application of a methodology so that it can help you apply it into your own performance journey. Purple Patch is 15 years old, 15. That means that I must be getting a little bit long in the tooth. It's been a journey. Many elements of the program have evolved over those 15 years. In fact, one of our central sayings at Purple Patch is evolve or die. We are continually seeking to grow to improve to enhance our coaching. And we're always ambitious in that. But we haven't shifted in a central belief, and an approach on how we coach. That is our core methodology. And it remains the heartbeat of everything at Purple Patch. As you're going to find out today. There's a very good reason for that. And I believe that this approach has been the driver of our constant success across genders levels and goals. And so why don't we dig in?
Matt Dixon 08:07
Now we need to start, if we're going to talk about the living application of this methodology, we need to start at the beginning of the journey. How did we get to this methodology, because without that context, I don't believe that we can appreciate the case studies that we're going to dig into as we go through today? And in fact, it all begins with me, my struggles, my athletic failings in some ways, or my lessons, there is no failure. There's either victory or growth and opportunity. Now, my elite career is by now pretty well documented. I had a very high work ethic. I was pretty good on the toughness level. I certainly was highly committed. And yet at the same time, I absolutely drove myself into the ground. What I failed to do is embrace the other side of the Performance Equation. I overtrained, I under-recovered, and I under-fueled, and as I got fitter, I got more fatigued to the point of complete exhaustion. My body ultimately just became non-responsive, and I fell into some form of a chronically fatigued state. I'll never forget, as a doctor said to me, Matt, you can choose would you like to identify as a 4-year-old boy or an 85-year-old man? Because your testosterone levels are on a part of either of these two groups. I think you get the picture. Now this was all at a time when training and racing, while overtraining was very, very common. Underperformance relative to the input, the effort that people were in was manifesting itself across all levels of the ranks. I happen to be racing professionally, but goodness me, did I under-yield on the input or the effort that I put in? And so when I began my coaching career knee-deep in the ashes of my own pro career, I reflected, because I saw so many folks around me that were just like me, very fit but fatigued. And maybe my chronic fatigue was an amplified version of it, but I saw a lot of zombies out there, athletes zombies, and I observed a host of very poor and destructive habits. I noticed pros and amateurs alike with massively high instances of injury, sickness, and low-performance yield. And so I thought, as I ventured into coaching, I'm going to go a different path. And I had a single commitment, my driver, I want the athletes that I'm going to coach to be healthy. It came to me. And I realized, and I believe after all those years of very hard swimming, and at an elite level, coaching a very high volume, age group swimming program, and absolutely tearing myself to shreds as a professional endurance athlete, I finally woke up and realized that optimal performance, sustained performance was going to be built on a platform of health.
Matt Dixon 11:12
Now, the training methods commonly adopted at the time, those very same training methods that I adopted as an athlete absolutely flew in the face of common sense to me, let alone all of the research and education that I received while I was studying clinical physiology at the masters level. And so when I finally adapted these little epiphanies, my own experiences, my educational background, and I got coaching in triathlon, I was very lucky that the early athletes that I was working with were competitive. In fact, we had a building squad of professional Ironman athletes. And we also had a suite of very serious podium-chasing amateur triathletes. And so for these athletes, demands were high. But I wasn't interested in short-term success. Instead, what drove me in the early ages, was long-term development and results. Call it greedy of me, but I wanted my athletes to go fast, or fast if you're American, but also keep getting faster over a long period. I kind of wanted it all in a way. And I believe the best route for that was for my athletes to develop a wonderful platform of health. Now, I realized at the time that there were no shortcuts to this world-class performance is not easy. And so we couldn't lean into hackery or quick fixes or anything else. I was just simply pragmatically looking for long-term success. And that was the early phases of the methodology that we put out. And goodness me, I was vilified.
Matt Dixon 12:56
I was labeled very quickly, the recovery coach. And all I heard was that I was selling cheap tricks, that I was a snake oil salesman, that I was more interested in sleep than hard work. And none of that was true, although not far off, in some cases, because while I wasn't promoting sleep was more important than training, I did think it was equally important to the hard work and training that an athlete had to do. In other words, I knew that I had a framework internally that would help build a platform of health but also long-term performance. And I realized as a coach that I needed to help educate my athletes, in fact, almost drive or build a framework to help my athletes both understand the approach, commit to the approach, and create a sense of accountability, but also a compass when they strayed off track to come back and do it. And what emerged from that need was four simple pillars of performance, endurance training, strength, training, nutrition, and recovery. And if you're going to be coached by me, this was the playing field. While every athlete and coach out there, absolutely focused swim, bike, run, swim, bike, run, swim bike, run the endurance pillar, we said the program is an equal level playing field, where recovery nutrition integrated strength had as much emotional and practical value, as did the prerequisite of hard work. And we knew that when we could get an athlete's recipe right, then this was going to be the thing that created the positive results. And that's how the initial methodology for the pros emerged and ultimately was utilized throughout Purple Patch. So the first phase of this was really about building and utilizing the methodology for our professionals and our very serious amateurs. Now, as I said, there is absolutely no shortcut to world-class. You can't make it easier. You can't reduce the load, you can't accelerate it. It takes commitment, work ethic, toughness, grit, but it also requires patience. What did they say every overnight success is 10 years in the making. It also takes patience. And there's a reason at Purple Patch, that very reason, that we say embrace the journey. So in other words, this methodology, these four pillars became our guide ship. And it enabled us to frame out to the athlete a multi-year progression of doing the right work repeated time and time again and keeping them healthy. Now, when I reflect on the 15 years of the pro squad, a few elements of those athletes that I was very lucky to work with, give me the most pride.
Matt Dixon 16:10
The first is that we had equal success with male and female athletes. And I think that's relatively rare. That's something I'm very proud of. We also had an incredibly low incidence of overuse injuries, so musculoskeletal injuries. And also while the typical coach-athlete relationship at the pro level tends to be about 18 months to two years, our average coach-athlete relationship netted out at about four and a half years, that was the average, most athletes stayed with us for five, six, up to 10 to 11 years in duration, the whole entirety of a professional career. And we had many of our athletes that progressed to Ironman champion, Ironman 70.3 champion at the professional level, who commence their athletic journey with Purple Patch while being an amateur. For me, that is development. And that's the greatest source of pride that I have.
Matt Dixon 17:10
Now, we're going to be talking more about our pro squad over the course of the coming weeks. But here is one of my favorites. The first case study, I've chosen to talk about Sarah Piampiano here. Because Sarah is a great example of an athlete that joined Purple Patch as an amateur. Now, Sara is always committed, she was highly committed. And when she decided to take on the journey towards becoming Pro, she interviewed a lot of coaches. And technically she had already qualified, she's done a few races, she managed to come close to the top of her age group, she could take her pro card, as they like to call it. But I told her when she interviewed me as a coach, that if she wanted me to coach her, it meant starting in the amateur field. In fact, if she decided to race professionally, it proves probably best that I wasn't her coach. And the reason I asked her to do this is because I felt that she needed more development before she was racing in the pro ranks. She needed physical development, mental engagement and strategy, a little bit of emotional development, and learning how to be professional in a sport. And we built this program, with Sarah from the ground up as an amateur with an eye of becoming Pro.
Matt Dixon 18:32
Now, the endurance component. When we think about these four pillars in action, the endurance pillar was highly progressive. She came from a running background, so we had a heavy emphasis on swimming and cycling focus. Swimming was her clear weaker discipline of the three, biking we felt like had a huge opportunity for to convert from moderately good as an amateur to very strong as a pro. So we put a lot of emphasis around swimming and cycling. We also realize that Sarah had a pretty high propensity for risk of injury. And so the weight bearing higher risk training of high intensity harder running, we decided to dilute that as an emphasis in the program. We wanted to keep her healthy. And so we emphasize the harder work coming in the non-weight bearing sports, particularly for the stuff that was around harder intervals.
Matt Dixon 19:29
The second pillar was around strength. And right from the start with the pursuit of long-term development, we fully engaged in season-long strength. In fact, Sarah spent some of her very scarce resources, which is common for an athlete trying to make it in the pro ranks, she invested in working with a one-to-one strength guide to ensure that we could have a tailored program exactly to her needs. And when we started with Brendan a great - and then later on in the Journey it was Charlie - two great friends and great strength experts, the common consensus was a few things. Sarah needs strength development, a lot of work on core and stability, and a huge amount on joint mobility. In other words, everything. Athletically, her global conditioning, her root athleticism was the thing that was holding her back from optimal returns in sport-specific training adaptations. So as equal of swim, bike, and run that we had as a focus strength was an absolute equal priority in our overall program.
Matt Dixon 20:41
Under the nutrition pillar, we required a complete overhaul. We needed to educate and teach and help Sarah implement habits to not just eat healthily and eat well but to actually fuel the training demands. Of all of the pro athletes that ever joined Purple Patch, more than 80% of them incoming, didn't eat enough calories to support their training demands. It's very, very common. And a part of that is it's really challenging. You're doing a lot of training. And it's very logistically and emotionally and even physically stressful to consume a right the right amount of calories and the right type of calories at the right time, in any given day of training. So nutrition was from the ground up critical, Sara had to consume more calories, we filtered out some of the less favorable foods for her, particularly the ones that didn't agree with her, she had a few allergies. And on top of it, she had a massive increase around protein consumption. Now beyond that, we also started to implement some performance habits around nutrition, post-workout fueling, daily hydration. But while this sounds quite a lot, and a large project, a lot of it was really quite simple. In fact, we aim to keep it simple and repeatable. The broad focus was eat a lot more of higher quality food with a keen focus on hydration.
Matt Dixon 22:14
And finally, in the early years of Sara's development, was the pillar of recovery. Now this pillar was absolutely against Sarah's natural inclination. And that's normal. She was committed, she was ambitious, she was tough. But I insisted on a very regular three to four days of blocks of lower-stress training. And in addition to this, every few weeks have this real clean-out component. I also insisted that Sarah aim to try and go to bed at the same time every night and sleep for at least nine hours. That's a lot of sleep. But I realized as we were accelerating the training load, her body needed as much restorative time as possible to absorb and adapt to that training. Now to Sarah's credit, her commitment extended to being highly coachable on this. And so while she never wanted to back down, as soon as she saw deep fatigue, she did so. She didn't enjoy it, she didn't like it, it went against her ambition, but she allowed herself to be coached to it. And that's a huge asset to someone that is seeking world-class performance, to leverage coaching to help them find their own blind spots. And Sarah was a living manifestation of this.
Matt Dixon 23:38
Now, outside of these very basic principles, the whole program was built around, there was a little focus on equipment and aerodynamics, and other key elements that are essential to consider when you're thinking about world-class performance, the very thin edge of performance, but almost everything else we simplified. The mission was to declutter so much of the confusion, the distraction, and build it around the basics. And you know what? It worked, because Sarah experienced a year-on-year progression, quickly becoming one of the best amateurs in the world, making the step up in her very first race, getting on the podium, her second race, winning an Ironman 70.3. And that was fantastic. And it worked until it didn't, because she broke her femur. And that's terrible. It's destructive to her career. And it was right at the point of their career, that I felt as a coach, she was ready to step up from a successful Pro to truly world-class. So after the initial bedrest, a broken femur isn't fun. You can do nothing. But after those few weeks, this was the time that we paused, stepped back, and leaned into the four pillars in a even more a meaningful way.
Matt Dixon 25:02
So how did this show itself? Well, the first is strength. We're going to talk about the strength pillar first because I think this is a great endorsement of Sarah as an athlete, she doubled down on completely reimagining her body and the strength program. In fact, I would say that from here on out, she prioritized it even more. We decided to try and reprogram her movement patterns, and ultimately take this opportunity when she wasn't chasing Ironman races, to rebuild, how her movement patterns occurred, and her overall program. So before even thinking in terms of being a triathlete, we decided to try and rebuild the athlete. And it was a nine-month program under that banner, build an athlete, then build a triathlete. Her endurance training load was minimal. But we focused on two main things. And these were the two things that we could do.
Matt Dixon 26:05
Number one - conditioning, because she was professional athletes. So what could we do to make the pump the heart and build up muscular resilience, and we had to think out of the box. She could do a bunch of swimming, that was good. But we also had to think about things that maybe weren't directly correlated. We leveraged the elliptical trainer, the rowing machine, aqua jogging, a little bit of stationary biking, to slowly build up conditioning.
Matt Dixon 26:36
And the second element, the important element was technique. If you can't train really hard, you can become smarter. And she became a student of how to ride your bike - terrain management. In other words, learning how to yield speed from whatever the fitness is, rather than doing the common thing for athletes of all levels, which is to just try and chase horsepower. I'm going to become an artist of terrain management, of technical development of great posture throughout all of the disciplines.
Matt Dixon 27:11
Her nutrition needed another overhaul again. She needs to add even more calories, and we introduced a relationship with Scott Tindal. Some of you guys might know Scott Tindal. He's one of the founders of Fuelin, and that's our nutrition partner. But the way that I got introduced to Scott Tindal is via Sarah Piampiano, he became instrumental on helping rebuild her platform of health and setting herself up to absorb even more training load in the future and yield bigger performance from the training that we were delivering. And so that was a ground-up experience with the nutrition pillar.
Matt Dixon 27:52
And finally, the recovery. And this was perhaps the most important thing because what happened in recovery was a light switch. There's nothing like adversity to stimulate growth. And this is what happened with Sarah. Do you remember how we talked about recovery before Sarah? She didn't like it. She was committed, she was tough. And she was enabling herself to be coached to it, but she could never fully embrace it. But this broken femur was the catalyst to change, to growth, to evolution. And it was a massive shift in the mental game. She repositioned recovery, not as a necessary evil, but as a tool. Not something to battle, but a point of leverage to help amplify her results. And by building this new recipe, what emerged was a new athlete, a new Sarah, and from that point on, on the platform of good training before, but this evolution of approaches across these disciplines, it was like gasoline on the fire. And it was then that her journey ignited. Two top 10 finishes in the Hawaii Ironman World Championship, multiple Ironman wins, the second fastest female American Ironman finish ever. Not bad for an athlete that started with us as a 28-year-old deciding to quit Wall Street banking, and go and give it a crack to go on the journey towards world-class and nine-year commitment of fully embracing and leveraging these four pillars to find performance. And so that's our first case study. And that's great because that's a wonderful expression of world-class performance.
Matt Dixon 29:44
But guess what we very quickly realized it wasn't just for the pros. So let's talk about the second phase of the implementation: time-starved athletes. This became a hugely interesting and topic of passion for me. What about all those athletes that are chasing high performance, but are also equally under great demand in broader work and life? Now, I distinctly remember the catalyst for this. Why did I become passionate about helping time-starved athletes? I remember providing a presentation to a triathlon group. And I asked them a question. I said, How many hours a week does it take to be successful as an amateur in Ironman racing? And the large group of people 75 100 People came across various responses. But the middle of the bell curve was most people believed amateurs, that for them to be successful in an Ironman would take somewhere around 18 to 22 hours a week. Some people set more, maybe some people said a little less, but that was the average 18 to 22 hours a week. And I thought, goodness me, who in heck has that many hours beyond work, social sleep, family, or downtime? How many people do you know, have 20 hours a week lying around? I don't, I bet you don't. Most people I know don't. So, therefore, it's no wonder that underperformance sickness, injury is so prevalent in the amateur field. And so adapting the very same methodology was simple. It was pretty easy. But I would add that I had to be a little pragmatic when doing this in the early stages, and even a little bit brave.
Matt Dixon 31:31
So let me provide my second case study to this. I'm going to give you an example. No more than that. I'm going to give you the example. My work with Sami Inkinen. If you didn't hear of Sami, Sami had recently founded a tech startup, Trulia.com. Now he was acting CEO, and we started to work. It was the early stages of the organization. And his business was growing. It was going gangbusters. He was building the team, he had all of the operations. It was a proverbial rocket ship. But in parallel to this tech startup and everything that it takes to be a founder and COO. Sami was also a really keen triathlete and a good one at that. There's a reason that I call him Sami The Bull. He had high aspirations in sport and so he had a very clear challenge. In fact, he was the epitome of what I labeled the time-starved triathlete, because he was navigating the blizzard of high demands, and stresses that come with everything at work at the same time, he was trying to achieve very strong sporting performance. So how the hell can we do this? Well, ultimately, what we did collaboratively, I'll say, is we built the approach around two simple truths.
Matt Dixon 32:50
The first is that the training and supporting habits that I felt are essential, remember, we're going to come back to the four pillars here, the training and the supporting habits could not become a second job. pragmatism and sustainability was absolutely central to success. And the second truth, we believed, was a traditional program, a 20-hour week program remember that we would just water down, would simply provide diluted results. So in other words, this truth forced us to think out of the box to be creative, to adopt what I like to label an optimization mindset. And so we hatched an approach that was built around the very same four pillars of performance, the same long-term consistency approach of development. And we needed the program to be sustainable, dynamic, with some flex to it, because he had fluctuating work and life demands, but also designed, and this is where my job really amplified, designed to provide the best results within the context of that life schedule. That was the big challenge. That's why we call it an optimization challenge.
Matt Dixon 34:05
Now, clearly, when we were creating this, we couldn't just look from side to side. We couldn't just look at what other people were doing, because that would just employ us taking 20 hours a week and trying to cram it into a life schedule that simply didn't provide the time to execute it effectively. And so instead, we decided to begin at the other end of the spectrum. And there were four main elements of implementing the four pillars in Sami's case, very simple.
Matt Dixon 34:34
Element number one, planning. Every week of training that we designed for Sami began by plotting out the other side of the coin first, Sami sketched out all of his commitments -family, work, travel, all other meetings, and that gave us a landscape. We then designated blocks that we would preserve for sleeping, downtime, social engagements, eating - Yes, we preserved preparation blocks for optimal nutrition was a part of the planning. You see how integrated and infused this is? Then what was left over was a set number of hours in any given week. And with those hours, we could build a training program and get around endurance and strength training. Now, what that led us to is, we never ever, ever chase the outcome of X number of hours a week that we had to accumulate. Instead, we simply aim to optimize the plan for however many hours Sami happened to have in that week. And it typically netted somewhere between eight to 10 to 12 hours. His average over the course of his career 10 training hours a week. Now, this approach introduced recovery into the planning, nutrition. And then on top of it, finally, we could infuse endurance and strength training. And that become a really workable solution. So that was element number one very simple.
Matt Dixon 36:06
The second element of how we introduced this was to create some flex into the unpredictability. Because when you're COO of a major tech organization, it's not going to go as planned, it's important to plan. But then you have to make smart decisions, you have to flex, you have to actually be able to manage through situations much like competing in an Ironman. So if Sami had six or seven training sessions in a week, we would designate two or three of them that we labeled very simply as key workouts. And these were the tougher ones typically. These are the ones that were designed to drive the performance needle. Now the rest of the training sessions were more supportive in nature, they had their role, they were important in the overall program, but they tended to introduce less mental and physical load. They were easier to execute and they were also designed to easily scale up or down, depending on life commitments. And in fact, if he had to make a decision, these were the workouts that he would bypass and move on to a key session in another day. What this did is empower some, it helped him self-manage if things got really crazy. Or if he just showed up and he realize I'm just not fresh enough, I can't hit this really tough set of intervals. I know it's a key workout but that's going to be better tomorrow after a good night's sleep. I'm going to make it more of a soul filler today. And this prioritization proved to be the key training management tool that he had to equip him to maintain consistency.
Matt Dixon 37:43
The third element or principle was, if you can't go long, you better go hard. So with the reduced training hours available, relative to his peers, Sami executed a much higher ratio of high-intensity training. Let me give you an example here. He only had an opportunity to swim twice a week for about 30 minutes at a time. So each one of those swims was hard, high intensity, short intervals, period. Was it optimal? No, it was the best return on investment. We leveraged the bike trainer so that we could get some very focused intervals in, low cadence strength endurance intervals, short interval high intensity. And we tended to cluster a lot of training sessions together with a short swim, maybe a short run coming off of a really short run coming off of most bike rides, a run following every single strength and conditioning session. And that started to build consistency and enough frequency of load that it established the progression that we were looking for.
Matt Dixon 38:51
The final element was basic habits, really important. And there were three main basic habits that I insisted on. Number one daily hydration, so that Sami could support his health, his immune system his recovery, and more. The second was post-workout fueling. Every single session no matter how easy or hard, consuming calories following that workout. And finally, implementing a nice 10 to 15-minute nap every day - improving productivity, alertness, information processing, and rejuvenation from the hard training and the demands of life. Now, Huberman right now might say NSDR or some fancy label, but what it was was quiet time, a short nap, no longer than 15 minutes. Spike of growth hormone, spike of productivity and not impacting your sleep at night. And that was it. And guess what? The results were really pretty good. So much so that many people didn't even believe in the approach that we were deploying. He became Ironman 70.3 world champion, Ironman Hawaii, age group world champion, sub nine ours at the infamous Hawaii Ironman, under eight and a half hours in a continental Ironman race, and many age group wins - the Legendary Wild Cloud triathlon, Alcatraz triathlon, Ironman 70.3. And many more. Oh and yes, by the way, Trulia did go public.
Matt Dixon 40:17
And so this was the defining case study of how to actually help time-starved athletes thrive. And the claims out there were prevalent. Just when at the start of my coaching journey, they said, he's the recovery coach, he's a quack. The claims were, this is impossible. Sami and Matt are lying, you can't go nine hours in Hawaii off of 10 weekly hours. And we kind of enjoyed that, proving them wrong. Because Sami became the barometer of how we went on to support time-starved goal-hungry athletes, and the results from this methodology float. We have more than 1,000 age group qualifiers to world championship events, multiple age group winners at those World Champion events, and a suite of podiums. More importantly, perhaps, though, we had a catalogue of long-term development across genders, the same as our pro athletes to achieve success. And that's where coaching gets really fun.
Matt Dixon 41:22
But finally, what about a broader perspective? Because success to me, and I would say extend that to across the Purple Patch team isn't just about helping people get faster. It also becomes really exciting and more meaningful when you help people amplify their life. Look, don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved coaching professional athletes. And I really enjoyed seeking amateurs and helping them to shine. But my biggest passion and source of pride was troubleshooting, and guiding folks to improve in sport and achieve their goals. But more than that yield huge performance gains in broader life, in how they perform in the workplace, how they show up to their families. That's where things get really meaningful. That's the essence of a Purple Patch, a state of flow, and how you can equip people to build their own performance recipe to find this.
Matt Dixon 42:27
And so for phase three, let's talk about the tip of the spear for that. Let's talk about my skill set for helping C-suite executives. And this began more than 10 years ago. And I will say almost by accident. How did I start working with tech founders and CEOs of major organizations? It wasn't something I went chasing. But I happen to have the opportunity to work with several athletically minded executives. Yes, there was Sami Inkinen, but at the same time, there was Max Levchin, one of the founders of PayPal, a certainly lead of the book of faces, we might call him, the founders of stripe, a lead at TPG Capital, and more. And these leaders were completely similar in the fact that they had highly demanding roles in the workplace that included a host of competing demands. This was high-stress environments. And what became clear to me in the early phases of this work was two lasting principles. And that's the fact that in working with a C-level executive, a project like that was strikingly similar to helping an athlete striving for world-class performance. It was parallel. And the pursuit of this, the biggest success came would always be in when you extended the horizon, you didn't look for quick fixes, you didn't look for interventions. Instead, you try to shift behavior to facilitate sustained high performance. That was where I believed you could have success.
Matt Dixon 44:08
And the second thing that would supercharge things almost make things a little bit easier for me, was the simple fact that very early, I observed the traits, the characteristics, the mindsets of the majority of successful C-level executives and leaders, were almost exactly parallel to the same set of traits and characteristics that I saw emerging from the very best world-class athletes that I work with. And so these principles, these two principles, drove home a simple truth. And that is, as I said before, there is no easy path. There isn't a quick fix. If your goal, your ambition, is sustained high performance, you can't create a hack to this stuff.
Matt Dixon 44:58
Instead, success comes when you successfully dial in a sustainable set of practices and habits that equip you to build capacity to facilitate performance improvements, and ultimately enable you to do these over long periods. That word consistency is huge. I had many C-level executives that came to me asking for a recipe to find balance in their lives. And as soon as this occurred, the record stopped. Balance, it's a myth. I asked them always shift the mindset. Because I don't believe in balance. There isn't some utopian harmony. We're not talking about stress reduction here. Your role as a C-level executive is demanding. It is going to include and will always include a host of consistent stresses, but also a whole bunch of stuff that is out of your control and unpredictable. And these external forces, you're not going to have control over. And so what you require, as a C-level executive is a program to equip you to meet the demands of your stresses, but also on top of it build capacity. So that you can manage through and excel, despite those uncontrollable external forces. That's what success is. And that becomes so powerful, transformative. But the truth is, this success is never going to emerge from trying to seek stress reduction, or chasing balance. Instead, it emerges when we are successful in creating practices and habits that develop control. sustained high performance. Yes, those words that you hear off, they're so trendy nowadays, anti-fragility, adaptability, firing on all cylinders, they are the backbone of your performance. It's true, it's good stuff.
Matt Dixon 47:05
And so the four pillars in action, our final case study? Well, when we're thinking about executives and workplace, these are put into action and there is a continuum of the type of executive or leader that you might get to work with. On one end, you've got those that are really engaged with fitness and performance habits. And they get it. Yes, if I'm fitter, I'm stronger and more resilient, I focus on sleep, I think about quality nutrition, and then I am going to show up as a leader, I'm going to be healthy, I'm gonna thrive and I get it, I'm already the converted. That's one end of the continuum. And that's great. And the puzzle with these types of leaders is filtering the noise, helping them see their own blind spots. Because everyone, the highest performers in the world always have blind spots. That's the reason that Serena Williams and LeBron James have coaches, because the best in the world, realize blind spots, and want to get experts to help them with perspective and help troubleshoot those. And so the puzzle with the performance-minded executive is to filter the noise from so many of the performance experts out there, the gurus, and to find focus on the key elements that are going to actually provide performance yield. It's also about designing a daily endurance plan a set of practices around habits. And so beyond the daily plan, it's about the habits of nutrition, hydration, and then also as a coach, being there to answer questions. Should I fast? Should I go out and buy a cold plunge? What supplements do I need? What crazy gadgets can I throw money at the problem for to help me? They seem so cool, are they going to be there, but ultimately might be distracting? So that's one type of performance-minded executive that you can work with.
Matt Dixon 49:02
At the other side is leaders that provide great value to their organizations. But for one reason or another have very little focus or passion, perhaps, for fitness for health, for performance habits. Now, these are the great ones in my mind. This is where the big improvements, the transformation, can truly occur. As long as you approach it right. And if successful, this is where leadership gets amplified. So this is why I'm deciding to build our case study of the four pillars around this end of the continuum with a C-level executive. I work with a C-suite executive of a major organization, her name was Jen. I want to use just her first name here. She asked for coaching because she realized, she believed, in the value of fitness and the performance habits. But prior to us working with each other, she really didn't have any consistent routine around exercise. And the truth is she was lost on even where to begin. It was almost too much to her. It seemed like a mountain to climb. I know I've got to think about sleep and nutrition and hydration, and exercise. But goodness me, I hate exercise, and it makes it painful and it makes me feel, so it's just a struggle and I get really sore, I don't even know where to start. And on top of it,
Matt Dixon 50:33
I'm not an athlete, I don't have competition goals, I don't want to compete. So my mission with Jen was to take the mountain and make it into a molehill. There's a saying that we have a Purple Patch, it's important to meet you where you're currently at. Now, this is very, very different than a saying that is one of my least favorite saying in the performance spectrum -- train like who you want to be. No, that's a route to trouble, to frustration, to injury, and probably failure. And so in Jen's case, we had to meet her where she was. She had a partner that loved to run marathons. And that was maybe in part a source of inspiration. She saw his love, his passion, his fulfillment that he got for it, but also intimidation. And ultimately, I don't want to run marathons, I don't want to be an athlete. And yet, she realized that a sedentary lifestyle, with a pretty poor habit around nutrition, probably wasn't going to be productive for her as a leader. And so what we did with Jen was applying these very same four pillars that we leveraged for world-class athletes, but just simply adapted to her situation.
Matt Dixon 51:53
By way of a brief reminder, remember, around the pro athlete, let's think about four pillars in action for a pro athlete. Endurance training, 20, 25, 30 hours a week, performance nutrition, very detailed fueling/hydration habits, recovery with tools, massage, mobility, sleep, performance napping, and then of course, very detailed strength of that pro athlete, prehab work, core, stability. Goodness me, it's a program and it should be a program because it is the central thing of their driver for a short chapter of their life. Life is wrapped around the four pillars. But the pursuit of world-class performance in one of the toughest individual endurance sports in the world, that's not Jen. Jen is a leader in an organization. And so success for Jen isn't about podiums. Instead, it's more, I want to have stable energy in the day. I want to enhance my focus, my ability to think and make decisions. I want to have greater capacity and management tools. I want to develop a more positive relationship with stress from being something that's really harmful to me to actually can be a stimulant for growth. And over the long term, for me as a coach, if I can be successful with Jen, and then it should make her feel better. But out of that, hopefully, develop some greater self-confidence, and maybe even some lessons of the journey that she's gone through her athletic journey because everyone is an athlete, and commit and draw the parallels to her own leadership and work in the workplace. So the key for me, is in Jen's case, and in every leader or executive or person on that less committed side of the continuum, is the fact that this is not conversion therapy. This isn't about trying to get Jen to be an ambitious athlete. Instead, the whole program is framed in very simple terms that Jen can understand, and most importantly, execute.
Matt Dixon 54:09
And so we broke it down to something very memorable. Jen, four pillars, 21 habits. If you could do these four pillars, 21 habits, if you can deploy these over the course of the coming 6, 9, 12 months, it's going to be transformative to you. You know, the pillars - endurance, strength, recovery, nutrition. Each one of them, we've got three, four, or five actions that we're going to slowly introduce. Four pillars, 21 habits, keep it simple. So the first iteration of this was over the initial quarter or three months of working together. So endurance, it was built around daily movement. So what that meant for Jen because she liked this being outside was walking outside, progressively increasing the duration, starting to introduce some hills into that walk, a little bit of natural terrain-based intensity, making sure she was pairing up each one, and then after a few weeks sneaking her in with a great amount of trepidation and anxiety, come and join one of my bike sessions at the Performance Center here in San Francisco. Just join in. I can't do that. I don't ride bicycles, there's going to be a whole bunch of elites. I'm not good enough, surely. And yeah, that's normal. intimidation is normal. But you know what happened? She quickly fell in love with the environment, the atmosphere, the community, because when she looked around, she saw a whole bunch of people just like her. But what she really loved is how it made her felt. And the confidence that it inspired straightaway of, "I actually can do this". Pretty hard, high-intensity intervals, but there's my endurance pillar. I've got a bunch of zone two work for you guys that like that trendy walking outside. And I've got some short high-intensity intervals. Super. That's it, that your recipe, no more complicated. Keep consistency with that.
Matt Dixon 56:09
What about strength? Well, it was all anchored around bodyweight movement, getting Jen to understand movement patterns, and progressively building up to where she had confidence and physical ability, then we introduce her into a small group strength class. Once again, intimidation, but tailoring the program to her, building movement patterns and loads that she could complete, and then incrementally increasing them. Mini victories. So the whole training program was about movement that directly correlated to the actions in her life, but that she could do successfully. Because when you're successful at something, you start to get the validation, I'm actually equipped to do this. But on top of that, you get the positives. Not Oh, this is so hard, it's exhausting. But wow this is energizing. This makes me most importantly, feel better. And that's what we're looking to do over the first three months or so, super. And so far from fatiguing, she was energized and repeatedly doing this for five days a week. And you know how I knew it was starting to work. Because she said, I don't like the off days, I need to do something. And so I just said do something soul-filling. Go for a walk in the woods. You live near the trails, go for a walk. She got more steps, she got no more tissue resilience, a little bit of cardiovascular conditioning. It's all part of the quote, training. And so what we managed to do was shift perceptions, from training being something that an athlete does, and from being painful and hard and tough, to something that was a catalyst for energy to be a happy place for her. Dare I say it -- fun. And that's how you start because it's all about mini-victories. But what about the other two pillars? Simple, really, really simple, but valuable.
Matt Dixon 58:19
What I did with Jen is I asked her to go through InsideTracker. I wanted to get a profile of her biometrics and the results, and therefore the opportunities were clear. And what we did is we implemented, by way of that result, not everything we could do off of what InsideTracker told us, but instead just a few things. So in nutrition, there were three things I asked her to do. Number one, eat a lot more protein, a lot more. For Jen that ended up being one gram of protein for every pound of body weight every day. And that was triple what she was getting in. The second thing, just like Sara Piampiano, our pro athlete, I asked her to refuel after every session, and I said consume some carbohydrate, consume some protein. Now what it looked like for Jen, is she went out for a 30 or 45-minute morning walk, or one of my 60-minute bike sessions, or maybe a 15-minute soul-filling walk, whatever it was, it was followed up with a good breakfast. She loved eggs with veggies, and maybe a bagel or a tortilla. And this was much more than she was previously doing as a consistent habit. And it refueled her, lowered cortisol that were associated with that training session, but also gave her brain energy throughout the course of the working day. And finally, for Jen, something that every human being should do as soon as she'd wake up, get into light and get hydrated. I asked her to kick off every single day of her life after a dehydrating night's sleep with one liter of fluid. And after that, I said you need to drink three liters of fluid over the course of every day. No more than that. Don't overcomplicate it, we're not going to do any supplements. This is it for the first three months.
Matt Dixon 1:00:09
And under the fourth pillar, the final one, you should remember it by now, folks recovery, I only asked for one thing. One thing, Jen, I want you to as much as you can, knowing that sometimes you have to travel and that's going to be a proverbial, to be English, spanner in the works, I'm going to ask you to do one thing. And that is simply aim to go to bed at the same time, every night. Now, in addition to that, that means you go to the same time and sleep at least seven hours, that's wrap it up into one. Go to bed at the same time, sleep for seven hours or more.
Matt Dixon 1:00:46
That was it. This was the program. And so it began with 15-minute daily walks, tougher Hills starting to get integrated when she felt confident enough integrating that class. And that was a challenge. But quickly that became twice weekly. And what she had over three months was endurance activity, a little bit of strength work, some high-intensity intervals, That's great, and some core stability, the four legs of a stool, and the result of it was a little bit of happiness a little bit of fun, energy. And it actually helped remove some of the niggles and pains goodness me, I've been at this desk for a long time. Oh, my back hurts when I get out of the car, all of that stuff that is prohibitive to life performance. And for me, this is high performance. Because it's not just about fitness, health, energy, instead what we were looking to do is to shift behavior and create a toolbox and a baseline to enable her to show up as a better leader. Now, this summer, Jen's plans? She's not going to a beach in Mexico. You know what she's doing? She's going hiking in Scotland. The beach will come later I'm sure. This is high performance through the four pillars.
Matt Dixon 1:02:13
The anchor message today, that is how you should think about your performance, whether you're an ambitious triathlete, whether you're seeking to thrive in marathons, whether you're looking to just feel better in your day, you have four pillars, and you apply it to your life and meet yourself where you're at. Those are our three case study guides. From Pro to time-starved, to C suite. The truth is that the four pillars can be adapted and applied to anyone seeking to improve their personal performance. And so I encourage you understand your goals, your needs, your ambitions. Don't try to mimic or be like others. Be yourself. Meet yourself where you're at, build victories, and embrace the journey, endurance, strength, nutrition, and recovery. Simple concept, powerful in application. See you next time. Take care.
Matt Dixon 1:03:04
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'll find it there and you could subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask if you will subscribe and share it with your friends. And it's really helpful if you leave a nice positive review in the comments. Now any questions that you have, let me know, feel free to add a comment and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us 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
athlete, performance, Sami, pillars, work, build, coach, purple, patch, amateur, Jen, life, starved, methodology, Sarah, training, habits, program, strength, ironman