Episode 309: Understanding Nutrition and Stress
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On this week's episode of the Purple Patch podcast, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon delves into the topic of stress. Dealing with stress is crucial for personal growth, but it can also negatively impact your daily performance.
In this episode, Matt highlights the role of stress in nutrition and eating habits and emphasizes three key areas where your approach and the role of stress can determine your success or struggle.
Matt explains how different stressors can affect athletes' eating habits. He describes how stress can create weaknesses by disrupting regulatory processes that help us maintain healthy eating habits, which can derail adherence to a smart eating plan.
Matt offers guidance on how to adjust your mindset and approach to the quantity, quality, and timing of your meals to better cope with stress, develop a strategy, and improve your overall health. He also discusses supportive habits in other areas of performance, such as sleep and training, that can complement your nutritional approach. Additionally, Matt talks about the concept of "race weight" and how focusing excessively on it can increase stress, create an unhealthy relationship with food, and derail your goals.
We recommend listening to this episode before making any changes to your eating habits. It will help you broaden your perspective and understand what you can do to achieve your desired results. Whether you want to improve your race day performance, change your body composition, maintain good health, or be more productive at work, managing stress is crucial to adopting a healthy approach.
In this episode, we also provide resources for anyone looking for expert guidance on their nutritional journey. Click below for more information on how to better understand and manage your nutritional needs.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 03:55 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
04:18 - 07:41 - Matt’s News-ings
07:56 - 10:03 - Word of the Week
10:10 - 46:05 - The Meat and Potatoes - Episode 309: Understanding Nutrition and Stress
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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. We all face a ton of stress. But we step up, we meet demands, we excel, at least, we want to. But to do so, we need capacity, a robust platform of health, and resiliency. We can go a long way to developing our capacity and resiliency through a commitment to fitness, and strength training habits in nutrition recovery. But you know what can amplify our efforts, that's getting specific around your specific needs. Leverage InsideTracker and take a look inside, assess your biometrics, and then combine it with the recommendations from the team of experts at InsideTracker. When you have it all done, you have a personal action plan that's going to give you actions, behaviors, and adjustments to your efforts so that you can achieve measurable performance improvements. Whether it's athletic, health, work, or life performance. My athletes leverage it, my C suite executives never get the team of Purple Patch athletes and coaches or utilize it and you can too, insidetracker.com/purplepatch, very simple Purple Patch pro 20, 20% off everything at the store. It is the sure path for you to get the best ROI on your efforts a measurable impact on nearly all of the metrics associated with improved health and performance. Enjoy the show. It's a cracker today, we're going to be talking about stress, and some of the things you can do to improve it as it relates to nutrition, and taking care.
Matt Dixon 02:04
Just before we get going on today's show a quick note, when we talk about today's subject, which is stress and the role of nutrition and stress for you to deliver high performance quite a few times I have referenced Fuelin and the team there to help you navigate all of the rigors the complexity, the confusion that can be abound in the world of nutrition fueling and of course, hydration. If you want to get involved with fuel and integrate it into your program, you don't need to be a Purple Patch athlete. It's a wonderful service and a great team. And so if you want to do it, feel free to just reach out directly to them. Head to the website, fuelin.com/purplepatch, that's f-u-e-l-i-n, fuelin.com/purplepatch, make sure that you let the team there know that you came via this podcast and that you're an avid Purple Patch listener, they're going to treat you extra special, I promise. Enjoy the show.
Matt Dixon 03:11
And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast as ever, your host Matt Dixon, and today we're going to be talking about stress, or stress. It's a nasty Bucher isn't it, but it's also important for growth. And today, I'm going to outline three key areas where your approach to nutrition and eating habits, and the role of stress will determine your success. Or if you get it wrong, your struggles. Now, don't shift any behaviors in your eating without listening to this show. Because I think it's going to help you broaden your perspective and ensure that you're emphasizing the things that are under your control to yield the results that you want. Whether it's race day performance, body composition shifts, a platform of health, or how you show up at work with stable energy and optimal cognitive health. It's all about stress today as it relates to nutrition. But before we get going, let's do Matt's News-ings
Matt Dixon 04:18
Yes, folks, two quick things today, Matt's News-ings You're gonna hear me today quite a few times reference Fuelin. It's our partner, it's a fantastic application, highly affordable less than $1 a day to get yourself some integrated, and I use that word deliberately, integrated nutritional advice around many of the aspects that we talked about today. Now I'm not an owner or an investor or anything like that of Fuelin, but I have tremendous success with the team. Not only are they world-class nutritionists, but they've developed something that is very, very simple and directly integrates into the training that you're doing. You don't need to be a Purple Patch athlete to leverage it. All you need to do is head to the fueling page, now, I'm going to send you through the Purple Patch website because that's the simplest way, it's at our URL, just simply go to PurplePatchfitness.com/fuelin, that's fuel-i-n, in very, very simple. We're also going to leave the link in the show notes. But it's a wonderful opportunity and you get a great opportunity to develop many of the habits that we're talking about today. I have great respect. I've had Scott, one of their lead co-founders on the show many times because I just really trust them. Most Purple Patch athletes leverage their services as a key part of their approach to fueling and nutrition. And I recommend that you do too. Another thing that I want to highlight in Matt's News-ings This week is the perspective that we're talking about as it relates to stress. And it defines what it means to be a Purple Patch athlete, because we always talk about Purple Patch, yes, we want you to get the best racing results possible. But we also want to ensure that you're empowered to take control over all of the competing demands of your life, where we can give you the tools and strategies that you can not only get faster but also have a greater capacity to show up in other areas of life. And that's empowering. Life looks much better like that, by the way, because you have the capacity mentally and physically, to show up to other arenas and be your best. And that's fantastic. We also highlight one of the key components in today's show around what it means to be a Purple Patch athlete, so heavy in education and realizing that your success, no matter who you are, is not defined by just your training plan, your approach to nutrition, the fact that you sleep well. It's a holistic, combined integrated approach with a set of simple habits and practices that boom, ignite your performance consistently and predictably. So if you want to come along for the ride, three simple steps, reach out first, for a conversation, of course, we're going to find out whether we are a good fit for you, you for us. It's very simple. And that's very important, you need to make that decision first. And then step two, boom, almost immediately, within 24 hours, you can be up on the plan and getting the program ready. And then finally, of course, we're pretty confident in what we deliver. It is something different, specifically tailored for the time-starved athlete. But if you don't love it, within the first 30 days, well, it's fine. We'll give you your money back. And we'll wish you the best of luck with greatest respect. Feel free to reach out to us for a complimentary call to get the process going. info@purplepatchfitness.com. And with that, let's do Word of the Week.
singer 07:42
We like the way he thinks seriously about a wage job. It's time to take a peek. It's the Dixon every word of the week.
Matt Dixon 07:56
Yes, folks, the word of the week this week is excellence. Excellence. Doesn't that sound invigorating? What it is, I've got many silly sayings that I like to roll out daily, to be honest. And one of them is a coaching mantra. Now, if you're a part of Purple Patch, you're gonna know this. It's printed on some of our backs. I don't ask for much, just everything. It's very simple. It's my coaching standard. I ask for everything. Now, I don't want you to dominate your life with this sport or anything like that. But I want you to bring it I want you to invest. And I want you to take a broad approach to what performance means. It's not just showing up hard, toughness, barging through doors, it's about consistently applying a smart approach appropriate for you, and supporting it with really good habits. And these are very simple. For the most part, aim to sleep well. For the most part, aim to have quality eating and support your training with enough calories, hydrate consistently well, and lean into your team and community to get the most out of it. For the most part, not every day passes or fails. But 300 of 365 days, make it habitual. Because when you do that, you know what comes out? Your brand of excellence. It's pretty simple. It doesn't involve a whole bunch of paralysis of analysis. It's not the judgment of yourself. It's fun. You get the most out of it. And so I don't ask for much. Just everything and that is the route for you to get your own -- word of the week word this week --personal brand of excellence, all right, let's do the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 10:10
Yes, folks, the meat and potatoes. And today I want to shine the light on stress - the word. But I want to focus on stress with its role in you achieving your desired success in nutrition and eating habits. Now my quest is to help you broaden your perspective today, to help you develop a smarter approach to your performance, whether you're an athlete, or you're just simply seeking improvements in how you show up in broader life. Now, as we dive in today, it's pretty easy to consider each aspect of performance as something mutually exclusive, different domains that we focus on. If I prioritize my sleep, and then that's going to be in addition, I'm going to be successful. And if I just get my eating, right, that's going to yield results. If I train hard, that's going to make sure that I'm fit for the journey. And unfortunately, if you segregate those into completely mutually exclusive domains, it's going to act at the peril of the results that you chase. You need to have an integrated approach if you want to be successful. And I'm going to shine the light and highlight three such aspects today to try and yield better outcomes for you. But before we dive into each of these three very simple, almost little case studies in a way, we need to first talk about the word that is the focus and that's stress. Let's talk about it as a concept.
Matt Dixon 11:44
Now we're going to be doing a whole show on the word stress very, very soon. But today, to help us march forward into this journey of performance, I want to just talk about it briefly to help us set the lens as it relates to stress and our topic of the day nutrition. So the Vedics have what I love is a great perspective on stress. What they say is, there is no such thing as stress. All there is is a stressful response to situations that you face. And this perspective puts you in control, at least up to a point. To meet the demands of any difficult situation or challenge that we face, we need capacity, or what the Vedics like to call adaptation energy. The more adaptation energy you have, I love that phrase, the more adaptation energy you have, the greater your ability to meet the demands and respond to challenges or stresses that we face. And this is what an athlete needs to improve their fitness, through adaptations through the training stress, the specific stress that we apply on the body. It's also what a person needs to establish stable daily energy for the day, or what a diabetic needs if they want to shift body composition in a positive direction. In other words, we all need adaptation energy, and capacity, we're not going to be able to shrink stress, we need to meet the demands.
Matt Dixon 13:28
Stress in itself is originally just an engineering term. But we are hit from many different sources in our lives with this thing that we'd like to label stress. Most people view it as something harmful, something to retreat from, something that we're going to inevitably wilt in the face of, but stress is coming at us every single day from many arenas. We have emotional and physical stress from many aspects in the workplace, whether it's environmental or whether it's demands that were placed, deadlines, etc, managing or being managed. So the workplace delivers a lot of stress to us. We have physical and emotional stress from travel, particularly if you travel with work. We have an accumulation of self-stress from our perspectives and mindsets as well as other challenges such as finances, relationships, and more. And we have physiological stress from potentially poor eating, maybe in terms of quality, overeating, or underconsumption relative to the demands that we place on our bodies. We can get physiological stress from poor sleep quality, such as a lack of sleep, or duration of sleep. And we can even get physiological stress from issues in hydration. Environmental stress can be corrosive. And of course, there's the physical stress that emerges from training, something that we choose to do. Yes, your Training is a specific stress that you place on the body that with enough adaptation energy, you can force growth improvements and adaptations.
Matt Dixon 15:10
And so if you have the capacity or adaptation energy, you have the ability, you are in control, to respond to all of those stressors and grow. That's positive. But as smart as our bodies are, and our bodies and minds are amazing, complex mechanisms, they're not that clever and smart regarding stress, that's the bad news of today. Our bodies don't do a great job of differentiating the different types of stress that we face across all of the real arenas in life. And that's a key concept that we have to understand here, as it relates to our little narrow focus on stress, which is nutrition today. And that's a simple concept, our stress accumulates. So all of those things that I talked about, self-stress, travel, work demands, training, stresses, lack of sleep, quality, nutrition, good, bad, or otherwise, all go into our big bucket of life. All of those sources that we imagine or can, identify, contribute, and they fill your bucket up until it overflows. And once it overflows, no matter what the different sources of stress are, you are ill-equipped and unable to adapt positively. And that's when things go wrong because your body adapts negatively. Now, in an athletic sense, that can be fatigue, deep fatigue, injury, illness, or everything else that we would identify as a lack of positive adaptations, replaced instead, with negative adaptations. So we want to keep this in mind whenever we discuss anything in performance. Stress is stress.
Matt Dixon 17:03
And so if we now do a deep dive into the pillar of nutrition, and we start discussing race fueling, or daily nutrition habits, or body composition changes, or maybe stabilizing daily energy management, or factors in which nutrition, what we're putting in our body, when and how much of it plays a pivotal role, we cannot ignore global stress, the accumulation of global stress. And so today, I thought I would highlight this point, just with three quick examples. So that you can ponder, reflect, and maybe shift your approach as it relates to each of the domains so that you can find better performance. I want you to emerge today thinking more broadly, and strategically about your approach to not just nutrition, but performance globally, so that you can get the results.
Matt Dixon 17:59
So with that, folks stress, let us begin part one. Key Story number one, think about food for fuel, supporting your exercise and training. With enough of the right calories at the right time to ensure success. Orthorexia, or the obsession with very clean eating, quality eating as you might say, is very common amongst endurance athletes, and it tends to deliver to these athletes a sense of control, a perception of health, and high performance. It's a catalyst to get more out of their bodies. But unfortunately, it's detrimental to their health and performance. Beyond orthorexia, a clinical disease, many endurance athletes and health-focused athletes fail to consume enough calories to support the demands of life and training. Now, typically, this is unconscious, it's accidental. It's a habit that they've created, but it serves up negative consequences. I can't overstate how many athletes struggle to get this part of the performance life, right. Some more supporting training demands the right amount of calories, optimizing the return on investment of the training with the right food choices, and ensuring that it's habit-driven, so that they can remove the cognitive load and the guesswork that comes with it. So many athletes are oblivious to the limitations that are placed on themselves through accidental under-fueling or incorrect food choices relative to what their training demands are. Now, a few of the aspects are absolutely fundamental and almost universal. The first is I'm a big fan of three meals a day as an athlete. For most people, that means avoiding fasting, especially if you're an athlete, and even more so if you're going to train in the morning. Now, there are situations where you might wake up in the morning and go and do some form of a session without calories, not fuel during that session, etc. But deliberate intermittent fasting on a time basis, and having training be a part of that, typically, under the banner of the umbrella of most is not advisable. And so three great square meals a day are important snacking advisable for some people. The second important component, ensure that you're making protein the centerpiece of every meal. Now all three macronutrients are important. And we're not going to make the show about specific recommendations in nutrition, per se. But most athletes, endurance athletes, under-consume protein relative to other demands. So protein, yes, some carbohydrates, yes, some fat, and of course, tons of vegetables, which are carbohydrates in themselves. But I like to think about things such as making protein, the centerpiece of each meal. Number three, understand your caloric needs and what that looks like for your meal planning. So this becomes important. And it's on two levels that we consider this number one, your caloric needs to sustain a great platform of health in life, and then layered on top of that your caloric needs to support your training. That's why we like to have a mindset of food for fuel, it fuels your life, it fuels your training. And so having a deep understanding of what you need to meet the demands is going to mitigate any stress accumulation, and you're going to get better results from it. And so that's what we like to think about that. Consume enough calories to support daily life. And then the additional calories that are required to support your training. This is critically important. Number four, making a habit of post-workout fueling is really important for time-starved athletes. It provides control over your eating habits, supports your training adaptations, aids in stress reduction, and also facilitates management of the rest of your eating across the day. And I think this part of the puzzle is so important. When you get it right when you nail it, you can manage completely unnecessary cascading stress that reduces your adaptations, tends to lead to an accumulation of fatigue, increases your risk of injury, and destabilizes your daily energy and cognitive function for all other aspects of life. But this puzzle, when we think about thinking about nutrition more broadly, it's not easy. I realize this, I threw out a few recommendations right now, but to cement these habits is difficult. And it's difficult because life is a living, breathing thing. Dancing with this life is our training plan, of which you have very tough sessions, and bigger days, you have easier sessions that are designed for recovery. And it's all enmeshed and integrated into this recipe of life, where you've got all of the stresses and you're looking through this, to leverage your nutrition and fueling as a eustress, something that can be supportive, where you can feed and fuel enough of the right things at the right time to enable you to sustain greater adaptation energy and get the results that you want.
Matt Dixon 23:54
And so I'm going to shout out here, a little word. Because this point is the reason that I like the folks of Fuellin. They are the only team of nutritionists that integrate all eating habits directly into your specific training demands on any given day. So in other words, their app their program, and all of their education integrate and work with any given training - A really hard and demanding day, a lighter day and recovery, your nutrition plan in eating is going to be different, it's going to work with it. And that creates habits and autonomy, it's going to help you get smarter. They have a tremendously flexible system so that you can follow the recommendations whether you find yourself cooking at home, maybe grabbing a quick lunch at a boutique grocery store, or even going out for a business meal. And that's what I like about it. It's workable, but most importantly, it's world-class nutrition. These folks are smart because their mindset is not. I'm just going to tell you what to do and follow it and it's going to be rigid because that makes Is nutritional and eating a not fun and be restrictive. Instead, it's about habit development. And making sure that your exercise and training are linked with your life, is linked with your eating. And that's how you get to managing nutrition and the big bucket of stress well. I think this is a critical component to your developing capacity for you have, as the Vedics would call it, more adaptation, and energy, leaving you more scope in life, and you don't have to be a serious athlete to leverage this. A world-class athlete, they do this 100%. Many of the best athletes in the world work directly with Fuelin, to help them with their demands. And they're chasing world-class performance. For serious amateur athletes, of course, it's almost non-negotiable. I think that you should have some form of professional guidance in your eating habits if you're serious about sport. But what about folks who are like me, just looking to show up better, have stable energy, and bring the best things like this show? What, it's a key part of that as well. Because I exercise every day, I realize it's important. But I don't want to carry fatigue and stress hormones into the rest of my day, I want to have stable energy. And this system that they've leveraged is incredibly powerful, peer-reviewed, researched, and works well. So outside of having a personal chef cooking for you, and syncing day-to-day, hour-to-hour with your training load, I cannot think of a better way for you to learn and develop and stick to habits. And this is the power, to be honest, of Fuelin for me. And I'm not an employee of theirs, I don't own a stake in the business. But I do see the benefit that they bring to athletes. And to be honest, I see it as Yeah, a great set of nutritional recommendations for race fueling, for day-to-day training management, for improving your body composition, if that's something that you're chasing, et cetera. But really, I see it as a stress management tool as well. And I think it's beneficial to anyone. A little word on that. Fuelin team, you can pay me later.
Matt Dixon 27:09
All right, part two. The second component, I think it's really important is your nutrition, and your approach to nutrition with supporting habits. So let's shift our perspective a little bit, because I just really discussed the importance of dialing in your habits in nutrition, to mitigate stress. Now, what I'm going to do is shift the lens and say, great, you're chasing some form of results with your nutrition, but that is only going to be successful. If you now think about your supporting habits. Now this could be related to your race performance and race fueling, it could be about you improving your body composition, it might be stabilizing energy in the day, it could be about you yielding the best adaptations possible. Whatever it is, the key is that just because you eat well, appropriately relative to all of the demands that we talked about, it's not a promise of results. And you can undo those results by failing to focus on the key supporting habits that can help manage your stress. Let me say it again, you can eat well, you can eat plenty, and you might nail your post-workout fueling, but maybe you're not getting the results that you expect. Well, there's a really good chance that your hard work and your emphasis on your eating have been undone. And it's been undone because of stress accumulation. High stress globally, chronically high stress for any of us, makes it incredibly tough to retain good habits around fueling and eating. It does. I can't tell you the number of individuals who get unstuck because they view their eating habits and caloric intake as linear on these shifts in their day, their energy, their adaptations, their body composition, et cetera. What's that old saying on that? Oh don't worry about it, it's all about calories in and calories out. While I'm afraid that mindset doesn't hold water. If your body is constantly under high-stress accumulation, several factors are now working against you. And they can impede the results that you're going to seek via your emphasis on nutrition. Chronic high stress shifts your hormonal profile, and that can lead to elevated levels of insulin, and blood sugars, and one of the impacts of that is an intense craving for sugary fat-laden foods. Now, we only have so much willpower. Most of us ultimately will buckle. So if we can't stabilize that, the high blood sugar levels, etc., we're going to be going down a cold a sack of struggle street, and so we need to manage our total stress accumulation. In addition, elevated stress levels also disrupt many of the regulatory processes that leverage to retain proper eating habits. So adherence is tough.
Matt Dixon 30:08
But let's just say you do retain really good eating habits, the right amount of food, and the right types of food, at the right times, this now becomes a eustress. This is what we want under this pillar. It can be a powerful antidote to the accumulation of the massive stressors that we all face in life remember at the start of the show, we talked through them self stress, work, stress, travel, stress, financial stress, training, stress, etc. Eating the right things, the right types of foods in the right amounts at the right time, a huge eustress, the antidote to stress accumulation. You've taken a big step forward to the results that you want. So what can go wrong? Well, a lot, just because you've nailed your eating habits, it's not a direct promise of positive results. If you then go on and just ignore sleep, you're stuck with stress-inducing poor sleep quality. Or maybe you have limited duration, getting by on four or five hours a night, or you consistently compromise the amount of deep sleep you get with late nights, then it's likely that your body is probably going to be facing too much stress to overcome your great approach to eating. Now, if we add to this, then something like a training program that has too much work in terms of duration, number of hours, or intensity, relative to your current level and the stress of your life demands. Or even if we then add on the failure of adding enough recovery, or maybe going too hard in some of your exercise and training sessions, the truth is, you're going to struggle, you're going to struggle to get the results that you want. I see a lot of people, well, I'm eating well, but my body composition isn't changing. I'm not getting stronger and fitter. I don't feel like I've got stable energy that you always talk about and I'm eating well. Well, quite often, you need to not look at what you're doing under the habits of nutrition and fueling but instead shift the emphasis on what else are doing that is leading to the accumulation of perhaps too much stress. This is why at Purple Patch, we never treat any aspects of performance as a standalone, mutually exclusive. And it's why for you to be successful, and consistent you have the burden and the requirement to not only build up a smart approach to your eating but also develop a training program that fits into life. Establish positive habits and sleep, adherence to going easy enough when asked to, and then nail the right foods, the right amount of foods, at the right time, et cetera.
Matt Dixon 33:05
But when you get all of this, right, it's why I like to call it -- pardon the pun, the performance recipe -- when you get this right. It's a vortex of a high-performance shift. Just go back and listen to our recent podcasts. In the discussion and interview that I had with a Purple Patch athlete, athlete Mike Kane, he didn't do anything crazy. All he did was shift his focus, he thought I'm gonna get healthy, I'm not going to chase fitness. I'm going to try and reduce some of my stress. And by doing that, I'm going to prioritize sleep, hydration, and smart training, rather than just the accumulation of training sessions. And I'm going to eat a lot more of really good stuff. You know what happened almost instantly, he accelerated his health, his energy, his mood, his performance levels in sports, and his body composition, he dropped 30 pounds over just a few months. And you can yield great positive results too but it does paint the picture of how hard this is to get right. Because we're not talking about just sticking to a plan. We're not talking about just thinking about sleep. We're talking about this big puzzle. And it is challenging to go alone.
Matt Dixon 34:21
So ask yourself, you might have a great training plan, you might have a great collection of workouts, fantastic. You might even know how to develop a plan. But can you also weave in the habits and all of the approaches to nutrition? Do you have integrated into your training a personal system and approach? That's why education is so important to me. It's the backbone of coaching and it's why I love to integrate that Fuelin thing that I talked about before because they get it. They work the nutrition with the program a little bit. And so you need to at this moment if you are going to chase results, whatever is energy, whether it's adaptations, whether it's body composition, and have a focus on nutrition, you better do so realizing that stress management is a key part of it.
Matt Dixon 35:12
Alright, the third one, is a little shorter, a little simple. Part three is race weight. Here's a statement for most athletes. Now, there are exceptions here. But for most athletes chasing a preset number on the scale, while in conjunction, parallel, ramping up their training to get ready for a race tends to lead to negative consequences. It is a stress implosion. In all of my years of coaching, some of the highly successful Purple Patch pros, multiple World Champion amateurs, as I mentioned before, more than 1500 amateurs that qualified for world championship events, over all of those years, two decades, how many athletes have I had to chase a specific number on the scale to get ready for racing? You thought I was gonna say none didn't you? One. There is one and I'm going to tell you who. It was a runner called Ryan Hall. Now I haven't coached and don't coach too many pure runners, at least at the elite level. But it was Ryan Hall, a professional runner, a US marathon runner, fantastic. And the number that he chased on the scale was 138 pounds. Now I encourage you to go in and look at Instagram or social media and look at Ryan because he doesn't weigh 138 pounds anymore. But it is worth going and checking out Ryan as a runner and what he looks like now, go and do it. You'll have a lot of fun, great guy, amazing guy. Gotta love Ryan. But when I was helping Ryan, the reason that I -- that Ryan came to me for help was that he had a great accumulation of fatigue. He was really tired, he was over-stressed. And when Ryan came to me, he was getting ready for marathons, we were getting ready for the London Olympics. So this was 2012 and 2011. He came and he believed that his best race weight, as it were, was somewhere between 134 and 136 pounds. So let's just call it 135 pounds. And, in truth, if he was at 133, 134, he would have been even more comfortable. That's what he believed was important. And I was helping him to try and dig him out of a reservoir of fatigue. What I wanted as the guide, I wouldn't even call it the coach really, but the guide is I wanted Ryan to be healthy, robust, strong, and resilient. Despite racing the best marathon runners in the world, many of them were light. And so I specifically told Ryan, that 133, 134, 135 pounds, is too light. I believed that he would be weak, slightly unhealthy, he would lack resiliency. And so I asked him to go on a quest for 138 pounds. And to do that I wanted him to train smart, recover enough, prioritize sleep, fuel, and eat a ton of food. Now this was in preparation for the Boston Marathon. Ryan ran a marathon that day for the ages, two hours and four minutes. It's still the fastest ever by a US male. You know what? He was healthy. And he weighed 138 pounds on race morning. My goal was to be even heavier, to be honest. But I knew that I could only win so many victories. And so this is why I got specific. This is why I chased the number to get him to buy into weighing a little bit more. That's why I got specific, but in my two decades of elite sport I seldom, if ever, prioritized getting to any sort of race weight. Instead, I aim to build consistency, predictable training results, high energy, health, resiliency, and strength. And by doing that, managing the stress game, the body composition of the athlete tends to improve and they show up -- what did we talk about before? Fit and fresh.
Matt Dixon 39:36
Now my two decades of elite sport I've seen many athletes trying to achieve two things at the same time, show up to an event fit and fresh. But at the same time, pursue a drop in weight with the belief that is going to make them go faster. And this is where I believe the mindset starts to create trouble. It's where things start to get unhinged, because 99 times out of 100, the impact of an athlete training hard, therefore requiring a whole bunch of fuel to support that training, but instead limiting the intake, because they're creating a deficit for weight loss. When you're doing those things concurrently, or short term, the impacts are typically pretty positive. Ladies and gentlemen, it's big party time. Yeah, we go fast. For a few days, maybe a few weeks, performance can be great. But then so often things go wrong, injury maladaptation, fatigue, sickness leading into a race. Just look at any Hawaiian Ironman World Championship, and look at the incidence of sickness, even at the pro level. It is typically due to overstress from either too much of an ambitious training load, a bunch of added anxiety and pre-race nerves, and commonly under eating while the athlete is pursuing weight drop to get to race weight. So shift your mindset, work with stress, and turn you into a machine. Think in terms of strong, robust, healthy, resilient, and powerful. Show up fit and healthy, because your performance will be good like that. And if you do need a shift in body composition, or if you feel like you should drop some weight to get down towards a more performance-focused element, then for me, I think it's almost impossible to do that down in the weeds alone.
Matt Dixon 41:46
I think it's nonnegotiable that you leverage some true expertise to help you succeed and help you nail an integrated approach. If you tore your ACL, you probably wouldn't have surgery on yourself. And so don't shift to chase shifts in body composition, or your chemistry, following advice from your mate who's got big opinions or social media. Instead, the only smart way to do it in truth is to partner with someone. Now, all of you dietitians and nutritionists out there, you're welcome. But it's true. You can have a high-quality coach that can help you -- a sports coach -- and or a high-quality nutritionist is going to help you. Now, you know by now, I hate to be a billboard. But if it wasn't for Andy Blow at Precision Hydration and Scott Tindal from Fuelin, I would not have been successful when I took on my big personal challenge last year, the Haute Route, that big seven-day riding event that we shared throughout the show, I knew it was going to be tough. I realized it was going to be incredibly challenging for me to retain perspective. So I leaned into the system of Fuelin, some of the recommendations from Andy, and it helped me show up really strong, resilient, robust performance ready, but most importantly, healthy. I weighed a lot more than many of the folks up there at the pointy end of the race. But boy did I enjoy having resiliency at the top of of 30-mile climb, where I was just letting those little mountain goats drop off my wheel. That was fun. Not that I've got an ego or anything. But it's not about me, it's about you. And if you want to maximize your race, performance, and or shift body composition, then partner. Now, we love Fuelin, and we've talked about that before, I'm not going to make this an advertorial about Fuelin, but even for a short time, it can help you. And it needs to be someone who thinks about things in an integrated approach to your training. So for Fuelin, look, if we can Barry, leave the link in the show notes if you want to reach out feel free to go directly to the team. Either way, I hope that what you get out of today is that whatever you're chasing so far as results from your nutrition, you need to think about things in terms of stress management. It is a part of your life, and you want to be equipped to meet the demands. What the Vedics say, building up your adaptation energy, and getting in your nutrition goes a long way towards this, but it isn't the whole story. I hope that helps. With a perspective, I'll see you next week. Take care.
Matt Dixon 44:33
Guys, thanks so much for joining. 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 on YouTube, and you will find it there and you can subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you, if you will subscribe also share it with your friends it's really helpful if you leave a nice positive review in the comments. Now 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. 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 on 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 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
stress, fueling, nutrition, athlete, training, adaptation, performance, habits, accumulation, patch, eating, eating habits, demands, shift, talk, race, purple, results, day, body composition