Episode 274: Integrating Strength Training: A Practical Framework to Boost Your Health and Performance
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Although endurance athletes typically focus on strength training during the off-season, it's important to recognize that strength and conditioning can benefit performance all year round.
In this episode of the Purple Patch Podcast, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon explains the value and significance of strength as a performance enhancer. He provides a framework for integrating functional strength into your training program and easy-to-use techniques for executing your workouts almost anywhere.
Whether you're an athlete striving to cross the IRONMAN finish line, looking to boost your energy in the boardroom, or simply aiming to improve your overall health, strength & conditioning should be a key component of your training regimen.
Matt breaks down the discussion on strength into three categories: sports performance, healthspan, and performance in work and daily life.
Matt also provides details on how to access a free video-on-demand session from our functional strength training program. This is a great opportunity to experience a practical and dynamic strength training workout that you can easily incorporate into your program.
If your goal is to show up faster, stronger, and healthier in all avenues of life, then integrating strength into your year-round program is imperative. Our hope is that the resources and methods Matt shares in this episode can help you jumpstart a strength program that works for you.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 04:05 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
04:12 - 08:08 - Matt's News-ings
08:16 - 42:35 - The Meat and Potatoes - Episode 274: Integrating Strength Training: A Practical Framework to Boost Your Health and Performance
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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
The Purple Patch podcast is all around performance. We care about how you improve for your sporting goals, but also how you show up in life. And ultimately, by adopting the performance journey, it should enable you to improve your quality of life and how long you get to live that life. Well, at the baseline of it all, is your lens on how you apply your focus. There is a lot of distractions and a lot of opportunity for confusion in your own performance recipe. One of the tools that we use at Purple Patch to help refine our focus and ensure that we are getting return on our investment of energy and time is InsideTracker. By assessing your biometrics and then combining it with the advice and insights of the team of experts and scientists at InsideTracker, you can get precision. You can actually get measurable results on your efforts and inputs, whether it's around nutrition, supplementation, or even how you're pitching your performance habits. And it's very, very simple and accessible. It's useful for the whole spectrum of folks that are interested in performance. Whether you're chasing world-class athletics, or you're simply chasing the kids around the house. All you need to do is head to insidetracker.com/purplepatch, that's insidetracker.com/purplepatch and use this code Purple Patch Pro 20 for 20% off everything at the store. You don't need to be a Purple Patch athlete, but you do need to be determined to improve your own lot in life. All right, enjoy the show. It's a goodie today.
Matt Dixon 02:04
And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast as ever, your host, Matt Dixon. And here we are, we're holding hands and we are edging our way into summer. Now for endurance athletes, the focus is naturally all around training, preparing for your races. And for other folks just performance chasing across the life and health, well, it's kind of the time of the year to be outside. The sun is out and it's shining, it's fantastic and all of that is great. But today, I want to serve an important reminder to you to stick to, or if you haven't started yet, commence strength training. Done properly, it is very easy to integrate and also simple to execute almost anywhere. And the results are powerful. They're powerful on your health, your body composition, your energy, and your performance in sport and life. So today, we're gonna dig into strength once again. And we're going to persuade you of the value and the importance. Whether you're chasing the finish line of an Ironman energy in the boardroom or even that little beach body. Yeah, I did just say that. I promise you the Purple Patch team asked me to say that. It's not something I would usually say, folks. Anyway, it's a goodie today. And so today, you are going to learn the value and the importance of strength training no matter what your goal is. And out of that, I'm going to deliver a framework and some advice on how to integrate it into your training. It doesn't involve you needing to get a membership at the gym. And finally, I've got a special giveaway for you so that you can experience a video-based strength workout from Purple Patch from anywhere where you live. You don't need to be a Purple Patch athlete to participate. But we thought we would extend the education today by allowing you to actually execute one of our workouts. All good. We are ready to get a little bit of Arnie in the gym, aren't we? Let's do it. But first of all, let's do Matt's News-ings.
Matt Dixon 04:12
Yes, folks, Matt's News-ings, and this is one that well we've had waiting to bubble up for quite a while now. And so I want to give you this little bit of insight. It's something brand new from Purple Patch and it's something that we have decided to do by request because I know a lot of the listeners and the viewers for you folks that are at home watching. You enjoy the show. You get a lot of value from it but you aren't necessarily a Purple Patch-coached athlete, and many of our listeners have reached out to us asking more questions around our video-based coaching and that's because we've spent so much time talking about it, the value of it, the potency, etc. And it is really pretty special. Based on a brand new platform. We are able to coach you in cycling with two-way video, you can actually be coached by me live from anywhere in the world. And not only can you follow along with my guidance and instructions around the session, but I can see you at home and give you feedback in the live sessions. And if you can't attend live, you can participate in the on-demand workouts, in other words, Netflix style, anywhere you want. And under that, that is perfect execution of how you should go through every single workout that we do, structured and progressive that they are, and integrate and ensure that you're not just doing high-value intervals, but you're doing them right and getting coached along the way. This type of coaching is typically very, very difficult to get, particularly if you're not geographically close to someone like me. But now we can do it all via video. And the great thing is, we now are releasing a very affordable subscription, that you can participate and easily integrate these sessions into your own training. It is perfect for a time-starved athlete. The great thing is the platform links up to your smart trainer. So if you have a bike on a smart trainer or a smart bike, we can integrate and right on screen can see your power, your heart rate, your metrics, your cadence, and I am coaching you to it. If you would like to understand more and appreciate more, you now can have access. You don't need to be coached, you can be self-coached, you can be coached by someone else, and easily integrate these coached workouts into the session. In fact, we love to have you join us live from anywhere in the world. I promise you, I'm going to pick on you, but most importantly, I'm going to make you better. This is the Purple Patch bike program, it is brand new, we would love for you to give it a little bit of a test. And right now, you can do that. We are offering a 10-day free trial. If you want to get on board, you can join with no cost, give it 10 days, come and do a few workouts, come and hang out with me. Let me coach you a little bit and if you find value then you can convert to the full program. It's terrific. The link is in the show notes. If you have any questions at all, just simply reach out to us. info@purplepatchfitness.com should be high value. This is one and I say this. And let me say, I hate this phrase, but I'm going to say it right now. This is a performance game-changer. This is a catalyst for you to become a smarter, stronger, and faster cyclists. I promise you, if you participate, you will become a stronger and faster cyclist. That's how confident I am on our coaching integrated with this platform. It is a magical recipe. And it's a tremendous amount of fun. And so feel free to reach out to us info@purplepatchfitness.com Or just simply click on the link of the show notes. We've also of course, got it on the website and you can join us the Purple Patch Pro Bike Program. It's super, and it's super fun. All right, Barry. With that, let's get on, ladies and gentlemen. It is time for the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 08:16
Yes, folks, it is the meat and potatoes and I'm going to be frank, this might be a little bit of a strange time for me to release a podcast on the value of strength training, particularly for you folks that are endurance athletes. After all, the vast majority of you don't really have strength training right at the top of your mind right now. Typically, it's around off-season, I'm going to commit this year, I'm gonna go and do strength and conditioning. And here we are right in the middle of the summer. And I'm saying we need to talk about strength. And the reason I'm doing that is this is the perfect time. It might sound counterintuitive, but it's really important. The question is why? Well simply put, executed correctly, proper strength and conditioning can be the gasoline on your performance fire. In other words, even at this time of the year, in fact, right at this time of the year, it is a direct performance enhancer, and we're going to talk about that today. I think it's important to get across. But beyond athletic performance, how fast you go in a 5k, a 10k, a marathon, an Ironman a half marathon, an ultra distance, a gravel, race, whatever it might be. Beyond athletic performance, strength and conditioning is also massively important as a part of any performance program. If you want to be healthier, if you want to feel better, if you want to go faster if you want to be better, if you want to get leaner, embrace strength and conditioning. So let's begin. Why is strength valuable? Let me tell you right now why you should be embracing strength and conditioning year-round. Strength training is not something that you should pop into, and pop out of. No matter what your level or goal is.
Matt Dixon 10:11
Now I want to break this down into three main sections. We have a lot of athletes that listen to the show. And so the first of course, is enabling me to help you understand why strength is an integral part of your conditioning and readiness for racing, no matter what your level is. And right now, as you're prepping for racing, as many of you folks are, so suppose performance is the first banner. But the second bucket we're gonna talk about is healthspan. In other words, your quality of life, ensuring that you can not just live as long as you can, but live great. Live better longer is the nice, cute phrase is. And then the third component, something that I'm very passionate about as well is your performance day in and day out. How you show up in your workplace, to your friends, to your family, or quality of life day to day so that you can have performance enhancement, and show up better than ever. Okay, so those are three big buckets that we want to break down. And through these, we've integrated some really interesting research to help bolster the case and amplify the education a little bit.
Matt Dixon 11:16
So the first area we want to discuss is sports performance. And no matter whether you're getting ready for gravel races, marathons, 5K's triathlons, whatever it might be, under the banner of sports performance, resistance training, strength and conditioning has a key role. And many people just jump to a preventative measure, tissue health, and that's great injury prevention, there is a role of strength and conditioning as it relates to maintaining health, being able to equip you to absorb and adapt to more and more of your endurance activity. But I like to broaden our perspective a little bit and talk about performance enhancement. And the key catalyst here as it relates to being an endurance athlete is your economy. A nice way to think about your economy is your miles per gallon if you're a car. In other words, at any given output, can you reduce the cost? And how does that work? And what does it do? How does strength and conditioning play a role? Does strength and conditioning play a role in the economy? Well, it turns out that it does, it provides really, really good additional benefits to the endurance training that you're doing. It's almost the gasoline on the fire of your endurance activity.
Matt Dixon 12:29
In fact, a team out of Switzerland wanted to investigate the relationship between strength training and running economy as well as running biomechanics. And this is a from a 2022 study. Now, they reviewed at least 10 studies with well-trained runners. So this is studies that are done on athletes, where it's quite challenging to improve performance, if you took sedentary people, and then we just applied a program, assuming they stayed healthy, they should see gains, but these are already in well-trained runners. And they integrated into their existing endurance training, some strength training interventions, and that intervention was lasting somewhere between, depending on the studies, eight and 12 weeks, and they had a variety of load somewhere around 85% of their one repetition Max, and for some other athletes somewhere around 70%. So some pretty good resistance training in there. The evidence consistently showed that lower limb resistance exercise is highly effective for improved running economy. Now, when they combined regular strength training with plyometric drills, you want to think about those as leaps, bounds, bouncing off of components, they had an amplified improvement in running economy. So that tended to have a sizable impact, and it was statistically significant. Now, what were the gains on this? Over the course of 8 to 12 weeks, the addition of strength training on top of an already pre-existing endurance activity training program, tended to increase running economy by somewhere between 4 and 8 percent. And that is incredibly high, incredibly high in your economy. That's something that if we were looking for horsepower gains, it will be a long, long-term process. So strength training appears to consistently improve all of these components without providing significant changes in body composition, particularly around muscle mass. And that's often a fear of endurance athletes, that they're going to bulk up, they're going to get stronger, they're going to get big, they're going to gain mass. But this wasn't the case over the course of more than 10 studies of hiring athletes. And this is a hugely important factor. And this aligns with all of our observations. So the headline news from this is, if you're a training athlete, that is applying -- let's use a triathlete as an example -- swimming, cycling, and running, you're looking to improve your fitness, and your muscular endurance so that you can be equipped for your race. But imagine if we can fine-tune your engine so that you need to utilize less energy to go the same speed. In other words, helping you go longer, farther, et cetera, that's your economy, and the quickest catalyst to get 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 percent improvement is by integrating strength and conditioning. So if you're eight weeks out of a marathon, 12 weeks out of an Ironman, whatever it might be infusing this now this time of the year, is likely going to be really productive, as long as it is an effective program that is meeting you at your current state and growing from that. Now, of course, as I'm going to talk about later, year, round strength and conditioning is preferable, but even now, if you haven't started, boom, you can use it as a little bit of an additional performance booster. What about form under fatigue, as I like to call it, or another way to look at it time to exhaustion? There is a 2008 study that came out looking at maximal strength training. So this is heavier load strength training, and linking it to improved running economy once again. And they were assessing an athlete's time to exhaustion. Now, this was a randomized controlled trial with nine men and eight women. And we like to say that because most of the studies tend to be done just on men, but this was actually pretty balanced about 50%. And once again, it was looking at well-trained long-distance runners. So these are athletes that had PRs in 5K's somewhere between 17 to 20 minutes in average, so pretty good runners overall at an amateur level, super. And they integrated into the study an eight-week heavyweight training intervention, and they measured running economy, and they also measured time to exhaustion. A really interesting study to look at it and the findings and notes was the fact that an eight-week intervention of heavyweight training on these world-trained endurance runners had an increased running economy of 5%, once again, but also a postponed time to exhaustion. So if you're an Ironman athlete, if you're a marathon runner, 'Ding', you should be hearing something here, postpone the time to exhaustion, and there were no changes once again to body mass. So integrating heavyweight, all the research shows and our observations endorse this is that you are not going to get the feared bulk up, you're not going to be carrying mass on this. Instead, you're just delaying your time to exhaustion, and improving your economy. And of course, those two things are directly related. Well, this is really powerful stuff here.
Matt Dixon 13:01
In addition to this, we have improved skill acquisition because of coordination, and great neural connection between the brain talking to the muscles improving on your skill acquisition, your ability to adapt technique, and so many other factors. But even if we just pause as we will, on economy and time to exhaustion, that should be enough. If you're ambitious, as an athlete, you should be looking at strength training and thinking, I cannot do without this. This is absolutely integral to me improving as an athlete, so I need to integrate it into my daily and weekly recipe. The question is how? We'll come to that a little bit later.
Matt Dixon 18:58
Okay, let's broaden our perspective a little bit, and talk about healthspan. So this is a very nice phrase, it's something that's become more and more into the public consciousness, and it can all be under the banner of looking to live better for longer. So we're not just chasing about people trying to live as long as they can. We're focused on the quality of life while you're living as well. Strength training, it turns out combined with cardiovascular conditioning, but strength training has a bigger role in the reduction of the risk in the big illnesses that we talked about. I saw a fantastic quote the other day, those that think they don't have time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness. That's fantastic. That was a quote by Sir Edward Stanley, but it's in sync with several major studies that clearly link the protective impact of physical exercise, including strength and resistance work against major and common illnesses. So what are we talking about here? We're talking about cardiovascular disease, dementia and Alzheimer's, depression, cancer, type two diabetes, yes, all of these major components that not only come to a huge societal cost, and of course, personal cost two those illnesses, certainly personal costs, my mother and father dying are passing away from each of those. But there is a protective element to keep these at bay. And by far, by far, above any other intervention is physical activity. Now, there is some scientific debate. Which one provides the highest protective quality? Is it cardiovascular conditioning, swimming, cycling, rowing, riding, etc, or is it strength and conditioning? And there's some debate around this, we're not quite sure yet. But guess what, they both have an impact. And why would you possibly not integrate strength and conditioning, especially when we've just talked about the sports performance and we're gonna talk about cognitive function and performance across daily life? In other words, functional living? So strength and conditioning has a role in your health span, a huge role.
Matt Dixon 21:19
Now, strength training goes beyond though some long-term reduction of risk. What about something that you can touch, that you can feel with more immediacy? What can we as listeners align to, and immediately feel the impact on our daily living, just by integrating strength into our daily life so that it can improve our quality of life and also amplify what we're able to achieve. Because if you're listening to the show, you're probably pretty ambitious, you're probably interested in showing up better, getting more done, being more productive. So strength training, it turns out has a large role in functional living. If you want to, as you get older, be able to lift up your grandkids, be able to reach into the back of the car and grab the heavy bags of shopping, to be able to get engaged in the family pickle ball game right when you're on summer break. Strength training has a huge role on this. Core stability, neurological conditioning, making sure that you're coordinated, make sure that you're maintaining your balance, strength, and functional movement across all planes. Strength training has a major impact on this. This is about your quality of life. It also has a major impact on body composition. We always think about losing weight, or dropping body fat as it relates to nutrition. The first thing that we hear is, Oh, I must go on a diet. No, please don't do that. Just build a simple backbone of really integrated positive habits and ensure that you're eating really healthily and then integrate smart exercise and training, and that includes strength and conditioning. Because strength and conditioning has a major role to play. In fact, the research proves it around body composition. In meta-research reviewing more than 100 research studies, the link between improving lean body mass and body composition conclusively shows the link. And so yes, yes, it is important to align your body composition goals with smart daily eating habits. And yes, it is beneficial if you are burning calories through cardiovascular conditioning, but the catalysts, the proverbial gasoline on the fire, that shows a considerably more peer-reviewed research showing considerably more positive impact is when you add strength and conditioning. And so yes, watch what you eat, go for a run, or go for a splash and go for a swim. But it's not the most effective pathway to great body composition on its own. Instead, adding strength and conditioning is the catalyst, the important component. And so when we add on top of all of these elements, considerations around bone health, where we know that yes, nutrition is also important to that, but resistance training is absolutely key and the driver to the retention of bone density and reducing prior damage. And we underpin all of this with the benefits that we gain from stability, coordination, and executing a properly designed program for you prescriptive to where you're currently at. Then suddenly you realize that strength training isn't just about getting stronger. It's about living life. It's about living life. And let me give you a very real tangible example of this.
Matt Dixon 25:01
You may have seen this, but there's a very popular it's doing these rounds at the moment, a functional assessment of the challenge of being able to stand on one leg and remove a shoe from the foot that's not on the ground, remove a shoe, put that shoe on the ground, put the shoe back on and tie up the laces. This is really challenging. And it's a more advanced assessment of your functional capabilities. But you don't have to have a pass-fail or something that's really challenging. Let's go even more basic. Standing on one leg and balancing for 10 seconds. You will be astounded at how few folks can do this. Arms out down to their side, looking ahead, balancing spending 10 seconds just standing on the right leg, having a break, transferring to the left leg, and standing for 10 seconds on the left leg. Can you do it? Can you? Are you sure? Because you should be able to because that's all part of being a functional human being. And so if you can't do it right now, guess what? That's okay. Because opportunity knocks, this is a growth opportunity. So this is the umbrella that we talk about strength and conditioning and its role of you just living your life for as long as you can. And being able to do what you want to do and feel great doing it. But let's come back to performance again. But we're not talking about athletic performance.
Matt Dixon 26:36
The third big category is performance in the workplace and in life. And the area of focus for this one is cognitive function. A key aspect of your daily performance is cognitive function, you firing on all mental cylinders, being able to process information, having a good memory, having clarity of decision making, good focus, being able to retain information. Now, we care about exercise and strength and conditioning for a risk reduction in those components that we talked about dementia and Alzheimer’s, and other cognitive illnesses. And it's great, various studies show the impact of resistance training and risk reduction. And that's great, and we talked about that. But there are also lots of studies that show the immediate impact around your cognitive function. Work from scientists to assess the impact of resistance training, and neuro-cognitive change. And the positive results highlighted improvements in neuro-cognitive performance around accuracy rates, ability to process information, and reaction times. So this is what we need for your daily life to be alert to be present in your meetings to be able to take information to be able to move on to other factors and other responsibilities. In a broader context, when you think about functional life, it's not just about what's going on in the brain as well. We spend a lot of time at least most of us do sitting down. Whether it's on planes, whether it's commuting in cars, whether it's in the workplace, as I'm doing right now recording this show. And we have less positive or at least less preferential posture here. And there's a lot of tension around low back neck, and other related, postural related, impairments that come from spending too much time sitting. Well, it turns out that when you were to have extended sitting times at desks or in a plane or in a car, the great antidote to it is daily movement but most importantly, resistance training. Once again, it is the gasoline in your fire. It is going to be the thing that helps you with tissue health, improved posture, and pain reduction to those elements that are related to the office space, your cognitive function, your energy, and more.
Matt Dixon 28:59
These benefits are indisputable. But if you consider yourself persuaded as an athlete, as a C-level executive, as someone that's interested in feeling great and living great for as long as they possibly can. That's terrific. But we come back to the how, how should we implement this? Well, I've already explained the benefits are indisputable. But you don't need to make this central to your life. You're listening to the show because you're time-starved. You've got probably goals, you're ambitious, you want to excel, and at the same time you want to feel better, but your most precious commodity is time. Well, the good news is to have a highly effective strength and conditioning program. You don't have to have access to a gym. You can do a lot of this stuff with minimal equipment from anywhere. So the question is what compromises a strength and conditioning program And how often do you need to do strength and conditioning in every one of your weeks?
Matt Dixon 30:03
Well, the good news is that this doesn't need to disrupt life. And you don't need to spend masses of money in memberships to get the successful integration into your daily routine. Here are the components of what I would consider a really good structured and progressive strength and conditioning program. Now each of these areas will have a different weighting in any different workout, depending on where you're at in your cycle over the course of the year. Right now, as I record this, we have a lot of athletes that are getting race ready. So there's going to be lower high resistance training, and a little bit more coordination and explosive work. But all of that is going to come out in Further Education. Here are the components that tend to make up a proper strength and conditioning program.
Matt Dixon 30:52
Number one higher load of forces against you. And this is prescriptive to you. So for some people, this might be really advanced. We might be doing weighted deadlifts or squats with a barbell. And of course, that's a key component. That's what we think about with strength and conditioning. But for others, it might be simply bodyweight, or maybe just leveraging some very lightweight so that you can find the appropriate load for you. But heavier load resistance training is yes, one component to it.
Matt Dixon 31:21
A second component is your core, and stability work. So you want to think about this as your trunk of the tree, the thing that everything of all of your other movements are based around. And this is something that is really under appreciated and misunderstood. But grounding yourself with a stable pillar of movement and control is going to be a catalyst to improve performance across all the elements we talked about. Strength and functional strength comes from a stable pillar. And so I like to think about this as your performance corset, wrapping around your spine from which your limbs can then go and do the work. So you have resistance training with higher force, you have corner stability.
Matt Dixon 32:06
The third element is coordination and muscle synchronization. We move in life across multiple planes, and movements originate from our brain and our brain is in constant dialogue with our complex muscle patterns that enable us to execute tasks. Think about catching a ball, there's a lot of information processing that's going and then we have to coordinate and effectively clap our hands together as we accept the ball into our palms. So training in these elements is invaluable because it improves the coordination and link between our brain and our muscles. So adding in some proprioceptive awareness training is really, really helpful and beneficial, it helps in sport, and it also helps in life. Now, at one level, that might be someone integrating some highly advanced, very sciency pulse-like training in randomized movements, bum bum, bum, bum. And you've seen these sorts of things, with professional football players getting ready. On the other side of it, it might be you going outside in your backyard with your kid, or throwing a catch and a ball to each other. That is proprioceptive training as well.
Matt Dixon 33:19
And the final big component of the strength and conditioning program is what we were talking about under the banner of explosiveness and power -- some plyometrics jumps, leaps, bounce, really beneficial. And in fact, we've shown that this has great impact on performance readiness, particularly for you guys that are listening as athletes, because this is the economy booster. When it is integrated as a part of a broader and long-term program. Integrating some safe plyometrics can be the big booster of economy, super. So we want to get some plyometrics, leaps bounds, we want to work on core and stability, we want to have some coordination and proprioceptive work, and we want to do some heavier resistance load. That's what makes up a strength and conditioning program. The one other piece that we're not talking about today, but I think we should put it under this umbrella is joint mobility. So your freedom of movement in your joints, that becomes really, really important. I would almost label that your fifth pillar under a strength and conditioning program.
Matt Dixon 34:31
So let's finish with keys to success. How should you implement it? Well, a few things that are important here. Number one consistency, it is queen, okay, depending on who you are, you want to begin, but most importantly, you want to continue. This is a way that you live your life, it's not something that you pop into. In fact, there's very little value, to maybe no value, of you commencing next season and saying, I'm going to do strength and conditioning and stopping after 12 weeks. We want this to be a year-round cyclical program. Okay, so consistency is really important.
Matt Dixon 35:12
How often should you do it, you probably don't need to do it no matter what your goal is, whether it's health span, athletic performance, or life and work performance, you don't need to do more than a couple of sessions a week, somewhere around 20 to 40 minutes in duration. There's a lot of value that can be derived from this relatively small time investment. And as a time-starved, athlete, you don't have much time. So it's really important. That means that over the course of each of these two sessions, you should focus on your whole body. Gone are the days of I'm going to do my backs and me arms, I'm going to do my chest and biceps, I'm going to do my legs day. It's not, it's overall body coordination. And you can supplement these two main days with little supplemental 5, 7, or 10-minute bouts of stability, coordination, and mobility work. And if you get to infuse those in front of the television, just before you have dinner, whatever it might be, those become really good little amplifiers of the overall program. But mostly, the program is built around twice weekly. The majority of this work that we're talking about can be done outside of a gym environment with minimal or no equipment.
Matt Dixon 36:32
But one thing that's important here, I talked about consistency, that is not monotony. If you consistently do the same thing, you will plateau. And so the third element here is to ensure that it's consistently throughout the year, but structured and progressive. What you do on Tuesday relates to Thursday relates the next Tuesday, and it builds and builds and builds and go through different phases of training, that can provide a different stimulus that build on top of each other to then you're doing the right type of work at the right time, depending on what your goals are, and then at the end of the year or season, you go back to square one, and you repeat it just at a higher level. And that's how you get the big gains on this. And so monotony is the death of performance. We are looking for consistency, but structured and progressive. That becomes really important because, for folks that just say, I've got my routine, I go to the gym and I do my biceps, I don't suppose I do my squats, and I go home, and I'm happy doing it. There's some benefit to that at a baseline health level. But there's not a performance benefit. And that's what we're most interested in.No matter what your goal is, you getting better.
Matt Dixon 37:51
Now, as I record this, we are mid-season, so far as our athlete population is discerned. So we're less worried right now about heavy load. We've already gone through that. Now what we're interested in is a therapeutic focus to keep the tissue really healthy and a boost of economy. So we're doing quite a lot of coordination, synchronization, and plyometric work. Because that's going to boost your economy, that's going to actually help you increase your time or duration til fatigue, in other words, help you go longer. We talked about that in the middle of the show.
Matt Dixon 38:33
And so I want to show you this. To finish the episode today, what I thought we would do is share an example. So what we've done is we've gone through to our Purple Patch strength program, and we've chosen a session. Now this is give or take 30 minutes, it can -- because we like to scale our workouts -- you can do somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes of this video-based workout and it's on demand. It's led by our strength and conditioning expert Marcia, at Team Purple Patch here at the Performance Center in San Francisco. And Marcia is going to guide you through a strength workout. And it's free. It's accessible, but it's going to give you some insight of what you can expect and some of the things that you can integrate into your daily program. Now this has minimal equipment, and we want to share it with you to further your education. So how do you get access? Ping us an email, info@PurplePatchfitness.com. There's no strings attached, we will send you the video, nothing else, we'll just send you the video. And I hope that that's going to help you join the dots of taking this concept that we talked about today and allow it to become the living application. Now Marcia's done a good job of trying to manage the movement patterns to give you a little bit of a tutorial for those of you that might be a bit more advanced on the athletic scale, and maybe folks that are just getting going with it, but overall, it's going to give you a teaser of what it means to integrate strength into your life. So head to the show notes, the link is there. Or alternatively, just reach out to us info@purplepatchfitness.com and say, Oi! Purple Patch, love the show, listened to the strength, can you please send me, please send me the strength session, and we will gladly do so. Now, if you're a coached athlete, this is a fantastic opportunity to integrate one of these sessions into your daily programming, but please chat to your coach first and let them know that you're doing it. If you're not coached by Purple Patch, it's great. We'd love you to give it a little bit of a sample. I hope that helps. Tis the time folks, right at the heart of summer, even if you haven't so far this year, you can still begin your journey and get short-term benefits. But the biggest impact is if you embrace the full journey, and go year-round. I hope that helps. And we will see you next time. Take care.
Matt Dixon 41:03
Guys, thanks so much for joining, and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel of YouTube, and you will find it there and you could subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you, if you will subscribe, also share it with your friends. And it's really helpful if you leave a nice positive review in the comments. Now any questions that you have, let me know. Feel free to add a comment and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com or leave it in the comments of the show at the Purple Patch page and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset as we like to call it. And so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, Let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience. And we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community. With that, I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, doing whatever you do. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
strength, conditioning, integrate, athlete, performance, strength training, talk, patch, economy, purple, training, resistance training, improve, studies, plyometrics, great, coordination, cognitive function, component, workout