Episode 331: Off-Season Part Two – Inside the Purple Patch Approach for Off-Season (Copy)
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Welcome back to the Purple Patch Podcast!
This is part two of our three-part series on the Off-Season. We've reimagined the Off-Season to help you thrive and achieve success in the upcoming season. This week, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon discusses the Purple Patch Off-Season, focusing on a comprehensive 18-week training plan that extends into the initial 6 weeks of the following year. This period, which we refer to as Q4, starts in October for most athletes and continues through November and December, with the off-season mindset extending into the first six weeks of the next year.
Matt emphasizes the importance of structured training and smart Off-Season practices to prevent burnout and reduce the risk of injury. His approach covers swim, bike, run, strength, and supporting habits, and while our discussion will be centered around triathletes, the principles and approaches apply to all endurance athletes and fitness enthusiasts.
If you missed last week's episode, we encourage you to listen to it first, as it lays the groundwork for a successful Off-Season. Our goal is to provide foundational information to guide your Off-Season planning.
Committing to a well-structured Off-Season offers several benefits, including long-term motivation and decreased risk of burnout and injury. By investing in a proper Off-Season, you can set yourself up for a successful and fulfilling season ahead.
If you have any thoughts, or questions, or want to learn about our services, feel free to reach out to us at info@purplepatchfitness.com for a complimentary consultation.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 09:01 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
09:08 - 14:13 - The Meat and Potatoes: Off-Season Overview and Benefits
14:14 - 48:05 - Principles and Approaches for the Off-Season
48:06 - 51:22 - Final Thoughts and Call to 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 sports into their lives.
Matt Dixon 00:31
And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast as ever, your host, Matt Dixon, and let me say Welcome Back, because this is part two of our three-part series on off-season, and boy, once again, we're doing it a little different this year. You might remember in last week's show, I talked about how we completely reimagined the postseason last year; we got some positive results, and this year, once again, we're building off of that reimagination, refining it a little bit because we always want to continue to evolve. That is a big part of the purple patch folklore, as you might call it, and we are repositioning off-season again to enable you to be successful. Now let's start today by saying one thing. I want you to thrive. I want you to have a wonderful experience, a great season, and a breakout. I want you to be better than you've ever been before, no matter whether you're a part of Purple Patch or not. That's a big reason that coaches love to coach: to see people thrive. And a massive part of your success, I promise I commit to you, is getting your off-season right. And so what we're going to do today is we're going to tackle the purple patch lens of this. Now, the reason that I wanted to do this show where we peel back the curtain and talk about purple patches is three main things. The first is, of course, that it might inspire you to become a part of the Purple Patch community and trust us on your journey. Yes, there is that side of it. So speaking plainly, that's part of it. The second thing is, I think that this is going to prove helpful for coaches. If you're listening as a coach, you might draw from some of the stuff that we're doing and apply it to your athlete programs, and that helps lift the bar for every athlete or folks listening. If you are a self-coached athlete, you might be able to draw on elements of what we're talking about today to apply to your training. And so basically, everyone wins on this. From a data standpoint, when we're talking about the off-season, this is a little bit of a longer lens than a classic off-season. Because what I'm going to sort of peel back today and discuss is 18 weeks of training. So no one just has random off-season training for 18 weeks. The truth is that this goes beyond off-season, but I see it as part of the same journey. And so for us at Purple Patch, the off-season is Q4, so it starts October for most athletes unless they're racing in October, November, or December, which, of course, we have many that do, but October through November and December. And then I'm also extending the off-season mindset into the initial six weeks of the next year. And of course, as we go along this journey, what we're doing in October is going to be lighter, easier, and even more flexible than what we're doing in January because it will progressively develop over those weeks. But it's pretty easy to jump in, and it leads people into, therefore, the first six weeks of next year, which is part of what we call our prep season. You might call it preseason in many ways. So I just want to create the landscape of what we're talking about here. We're talking about a pretty meaty block of very specific training that we want you to get done throughout it, okay? Now, as I discuss our approach today, I'm going to talk about this through the lens of our triathletes. So swim, bike, run, and strength, as well as supporting habits. So we're going to touch on all of those components, but I should know that the very same principles and approaches apply to any endurance athletes as well as fitness enthusiasts in many ways. So before we get going, if you didn't listen to last week's show, that created a lot of the grounding, a lot of the value that you get out of a smart off-season. What that looks like, how we want to integrate a whole bunch of rejuvenation, flexibility, making sure you get a complete structure break, et cetera. So if you haven't listened to that show yet, I encourage you to pause this episode right now, go back, and give that listen first. Right, it's really important, foundational information that we go through there, and we'll go from there. So we will get going as a reminder of a couple of things that are in it for you if you do commit to this off-season. Last week, we talked a lot about it. Going completely unstructured, having a huge break, and the perils of going random for too long. And yet, many, many athletes go random for way too long. And so what's my call to action? What's in it for you if you listen to me and apply it to your journey, and you do commit to a nail-off season under the context that we do? Well, as I mentioned last week, it's several folds. Number one, it's longer-term motivation, so it's much, much easier to avoid burnout if you invest in a proper offseason. Sounds counterintuitive. We talked about it last week; very important. Number two, there's a huge reduction in risk and injury. We tend to see much lower incidence, and in an episode a couple of weeks ago, we highlighted that throughout the 2023 to 2024 season, the season that's just gone, we had the lowest injury risk or incident injury incidents that we've had in any season. So that's great. And also, then, thirdly, it seems to be much better to integrate sport into life on a more consistent basis, and that has led our athletes, and this is proven throughout this last season, to have better results than ever. We qualified more athletes for the world championships than we ever had before. Also, it seems to be not just a lower incidence of burnout and better sporting results but also a positive impact in broader life, both in terms of people's health profile and, of course, their life and work commitment. It's also been a lot of fun. When we talked about our season last year, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about athletes saying, I felt connected, I felt engaged, I felt really like I was having fun. I was part of something. And that's, I think, as a starting catalyst offseason is critically important. And so what we're going to go through today is we're going to break down some principles and approaches that make up our approach at Purple Patch. Remember, this is for coaches. This is for self-coached athletes, and it's for you if you're interested in joining Purple Patch. Okay, great. We are going to go through q4 our focus and half of q1, which is going to make up, for the sake of this discussion, at least off-season, even though, of course, it penetrates that prep face, and we are going to focus around the three main words that I highlighted last week, which were foundation, skills, and technique. And it's all about how I infuse that into the programming at purplepatchpro. Now as we get going here, just before the meat and potatoes, one other thing, you have a great opportunity to do a deep dive with me live on September 26th, so that is right around the corner when I am hosting a free performance webinar on this very subject. And I'm going to go very, very deep on that. I'm going to unpack and give you some of the key-specific workouts. Also, we're going to have a longer than normal Q&A session, which is an opportunity for you to come live and ask me any questions that you have on this topic that we're going through in the show link in the show notes for that; it's free. Anyone can join. You do not need to be a purple-patch athlete. Please, please, please feel free to share it with anyone that you think might benefit. September 26th, it's 9 a.m. Pacific, and if you can't attend live, of course, we will send you an episode afterward the recording so that you can watch it at your leisure, or leisure if I'm being more American, and as I've been saying for the last few weeks, we bring you today's show completely ad-free, as well as no big promotions for Purple Patch. And so suffice it to say, if you do want to reach out to continue discussion in any way, shape, or form, if you'd like to set up a free consultation, or have any questions at all, you know where to find us. Info@purplepatchfitness.com, we're always delighted to chat. Give you any counselor advice that we can around the Purple Patch program or any aspect of your performance. Just reach out to us, and you can find all of our programs and offerings at purplepatchfitness.com. Alright with that, let's do it, guys. We're talking about the purple patch off-season today. It is the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 09:08
So what are the principles and approaches that we are leveraging at Purple Patch to ensure that every single one of our athletes has a wonderful off-season where they can get their break and be rejuvenated? They can have a whole bunch of flexibility and fun. They can spend more time with their family and friends, as well as invest in other components of life, such as work, but also show up next year, ready to thrive. These provide the cornerstone of our programming. Everything we're going to go through this is a purple patch, coaching, community education that is going to drive our athletes to their very best year of racing, and, of course, most importantly, the successful integration of this sport into their time-starved lives so that they can thrive and show up across all other aspects. We are not chasing finish lines; we are chasing performance in life. For me, today's an important one because so many people come to us and ask how we manage to get such exponential performance shifts from our athletes, despite the outside perception of having reduced training hours. And so many of our athletes have been particularly time-starved by the demands of their work as well as their families. And the truth is that what I'm going to unpack today in today's show, I think, is a big part of that reason. This is how, at the crux of it, we managed to help athletes continue on their lives, show up in everything important to them, improve how they show up in everything important to them, and also have great personal achievements in sport. Today's show, I think this is the benchmark of it, and you've heard me say many times before, the off-season is the number one predictor for me, for athletes showing up throughout the season, reducing their risk of injury, and, most importantly, taking their level, wherever their level is, and going up a level. And so when someone joins Purple Patch and says, I want to take it to the next level. The first thing that I say is off-season. This is where it all starts—a successful offseason. Alrighty, this year we're stepping it up again. If you remember, last year we went back and completely reimagined our off-season, and we hoped it would have a big catalyst of improvement across all of those areas. And guess what it did. We were incredibly happy with it. We reimagined the approach, and it was great. But this year we're going to go again. Because whenever you go through a shift and a change, there is learning that is going to emerge with it, and there's some continuing growth that is going to occur. The building blocks are the same as last year. There are a few other refinements. And as I mentioned in the introduction, we are going to unpack what we're going to do in the 2024–2025 season this year, relative to our athletes. We're going to go through and we're going to talk about that, but we're going to do it through the lens of the triathletes we talk to and cater to—a vast group of types of people—runners, bike riders, gravel riders, ultramarathoners, and, of course, performance enthusiasts that are just looking for performance in life. But we're going to use our case study with what the majority of our clients and athletes are, which, of course, identify as multisport athletes. But bear in mind, as I said before, the same principles apply to all endurance- and life-performance-minded folks. So there's something for everyone in here.
Matt Dixon 12:47
Last week, I framed our three words of the off-season, if you remember the number one foundation, and that's a smart platform of training that provides a runway for the next nine months or so of effectiveness. We talked about strength in there. We talked about tissue resilience. We talked about rejuvenation so that you have the actual capacity to absorb the hard work that's coming up. So the foundation is important. We also talked about the ability and importance of focusing on technical development. So the technique is our second word. Off-season is the time to improve technically and then finally master the craft of your sport, the third name, or word, which is skills, and that's the mission: to get the best speed return possible from any fitness that you manage to develop throughout the next season. So we're going to break this down into how we're taking those three elements and blending them into a program, a purple patch program for our individually coached athletes, which, of course, is refined and tailored to them from their coach, and, our squad athletes, which are part of more of a moving train. There's customization and personalization in it, but it's a little more akin to being a member of, like a master swim program, for example. Everybody improves, but you're going on a journey pretty much together. So let's dive in. We're going to go one at a time, and the first one I'm going to lead off is that I rub my hands with great glee and excitement because we're going to label this swim school.
Matt Dixon 14:24
Now, remember, we're talking about triathletes. What are we doing with swimming this off-season? Well, swimming is a critical part of triathlon. Most people relegate it to an afterthought quite often because it's logistically the most difficult. It's also often the most frustrating. One discipline of the triathlete program that is the most common weakness is the swim. Goodness me and in the swimming, for you to improve, particularly if you need to improve in open water, which is what triathlon is typically, you need three things, and this is universal across all levels. Number one, you need the very best technique that you can develop. So there is a reduction of drag and technical elements that are important. So you need the best technique. You need a large amount of muscular endurance and cardiovascular fitness, and you achieve that through training and specific sessions, of course. And then thirdly, you need specific skills to help you navigate the dynamic conditions of open water, things like lifting your head to the site without it interrupting the flow of your stroke. So technique skills and that middle one—training, fitness—are pretty simple, yeah? When the heat is on and you're racing and you're working from the ground up to try and improve your technique and skills, it's almost impossible. If you've got a race deadline in four weeks, six weeks, or eight weeks, you're not going to think about skill development and technique; you're going to primarily be concerned with fitness and muscular endurance. It becomes the dominant focus of the program, and it should, in many ways. And the reason for this is normal, because even as a coach if I'm asking you to improve your technique, and if I had you in the middle of your races and say the technique is everything. Go and drill up and down the pool and focus on technique. That technical improvement will fall to pieces if you don't have the required muscular endurance and cardiovascular conditioning. So fitness is the driver. But the season is over. We don't need to be chasing massive fitness right now in swimming; we're not under the demands of racing. And so now in the off-season, under the purple patch, it's time for a swim school. We remove the deadlines of races; we have the opportunity to improve your swimming technique from the ground up. And that's good news because swimming is the most technical sport that you can imagine. It is by far the most technically demanding, particularly if you're an adult on-set swimmer. And so as we go through the coming months, starting in October, for people that have finished their racing all the way through until the middle of February, we've got a heavy emphasis on improving swimming technique. But that doesn't mean that we're just throwing a few drills into the swim sessions. There you go. Folks go and do these drills. I'm sure it will magically correlate to better swimming. That's not the case. We see this all the time in athletes just swimming up and down, doing single-arm drills, proverbial catch-up drills, and all these other components. But it doesn't have any correlation or tie into you swimming faster. Any single athlete benefits from a complete understanding of what the focus and targets are; that's the only route for them to upskill in technique. And then finally, even with any technical elements, the athlete needs to apply that technique to real swimming. And so if you've got technical development, you need real swimming sessions. And then one other component is to be successful, enjoying ongoing feedback and support along the journey, and that informs our approach. And so once again, our off-season swim school is going to be led by a swim specialist, John Stevens. John's fantastic. He and I have gone through the sessions that we did last year, and we've refined them, and we've developed a series of technique-specific swim sessions that are completely refreshed for the 2024–25 season, including brand-new drills and sessions from the learnings of last year. And each one of the swim sessions, rather than throwing a whole bunch of drills at you, has a single element of technique. The swim session comes with a video instruction on how to do the drill, a tutorial on the purpose of the focus, and how to execute that session. What should it feel like? Following the technical element, then, John encourages you to apply that technical element to the focus of the workout so that you can further practice and apply it in real swimming. In other words, it's educate, execute, and apply in every single workout. As you go through the cycle of our three-week format, each swim session has a different technical element. And as you go through those three-week cycles, and you repeat and you repeat, and you evolve and you evolve, you start to cement these as habits, and they become a part of how you can swim. And when you. Repeat and involve them over time. This enables you to focus, get feedback, and develop little building blocks that are ultimately, hopefully, by the middle of February, you have technically advanced your swimming. Now, of course, while you're doing those technical elements, we need to do a certain amount of swimming to build muscular endurance so that you can hold it through a swim workout. But it is only really in the middle of February that then we open up the throttle and say, Great, you've evolved technically. Now it's time to ramp up the load, and I want you to cement that technique new and improved into your swimming and incrementally build up the training intensity and volume to get you primed for early season races. So that's fantastic. That's great. We then support those swim workouts with education and feedback. A big part of swim school is the education around the fundamental technique. As I mentioned, video-based education is very, very important. And then, of course, some folks are the slight outliers, either challenged with swimming or maybe a little bit more advanced with swimming. To say, great, but I want to have some personal feedback. I want to get John to talk to me, look at my video, draw on my video, and give me specific individual swim workouts. And that's a big part of the program. Now, a lot of purple patch athletes decide to upgrade and take on the swim program that we have, which is supplementary, where a lot of athletes go through with John and they do video analysis, but more than video analysis, and then goodbye, see you later, video analysis with the same educate, execute, and apply the concept. So from that swim analysis, John will then have a great consultation with you and build custom workouts. Have you gone and executed, redo the swim analysis, redo the education to say, did it stick? So our swim program, from the individual, customized component, is multiple weeks in duration for the value of the standalone product. So that's how we're approaching Swim School. Very important: a structured and progressive pathway to improve your technique, ensure you understand it, and ensure that that technique sticks. And that's the really important point. So in your weakness, at the time when training commitment is a little bit lower, you have the opportunity to improve as a swimmer. That's my favorite, I've got to say, and one of the principles that we're doing with our off-season this year.
Matt Dixon 22:48
Number two, my other favorite, I have to say, is bike craft. So this is my opportunity to lead the off-season programming personally. I'm not alone in a vacuum, but I'm leading the bikes. No one takes my bikes off of me. We have a reputation for purple patches developing. How do I nicely say this? Freaking strong cyclists? Yep, our cyclists are strong. They always have been. Our pros: we had some of the best cyclists in the sport. Our amateurs, we have some very, very strong cyclists, and there's a reason for that. Central to it is bike craft, because there's a simple truth that so many triathletes, and unfortunately, triathlon coaches, spend the vast majority of their energy and focus thinking about fitness, pure metrics. You've heard it all before: threshold, FTP, critical power, just output, output, output, chasing fitness, facing, chasing muscular endurance, facing, operating levels. How strong can I hold for how long? And of course, that's great. That's an important part of it. You don't want to dilute that. We do want to get very, very strong. But there is a whole other world up there, which is no matter how strong you get, however much you boost your operating levels, whatever fitness you get to on the bike, how do you yield the best speed for that fitness? In other words, how do you apply that fitness to any piece of terrain and go faster? And that is anchored in racecraft. Now it's a really interesting time of the year because the truth is that the vast majority of triathletes are spending the winter months training inside, on a trainer, and that's because of weather. That's because of longer days or shorter days, I should say, so, therefore, longer nights, so light, or just simply being time efficient. It's cold; it's dark. Let's go on the trainer, and it's good, but this is the time when training demands are lower, and we want you to become a better cyclist, but many cyclists are not going outside at this point, so it's normal for athletes just to get onto one of the platforms and start driving, start doing intervals. But the key—the key here for us—is bike craft. Now we have three main reasons for this. We want our riders, our athletes, to understand their current strengths and their weaknesses as a bike rider because by understanding that they can utilize tools to suit their natural strengths as riders, and of course, they have opportunities to develop their weaknesses. So a part of bike craft is a little bit of self-evaluation to understand who you are as a bike rider and how you can deploy your natural strengths. The second component and reason is that we want every single bike rider to become better at leveraging their skills to develop managing terrain better, and that's that speed return that we talked about. And then finally, we want athletes, throughout under the banner of bike craft, to develop a toolkit, a toolkit of habits that are going to improve your economy. In other words, no matter how strong you are, no matter how fit you are, you can ride your bike where your miles per gallon improve. You are more economical, and you can do that on a bike. And that's particularly important if you're doing something like, oh, I don't know an Ironman or a half Ironman, that you need to ride as fast as you can but also run off the bike. The economy is a huge component, of staying power. It's a huge component. It is the rock that you lift over, and there is a little bit of gold underneath it. So this is how we do it at Purple Patch throughout the off-season. Am I building, at the start of it, six key sessions? So we tend to work in three-week cycles: week one, week two, and week three, which is what we call a transition week. And over the week, we anchor the focus around two sessions a week. Now we like to give weekend rides the opportunity for riders or for athletes to go outside and play. So that might be on one of the fat tire bikes. It might be on a gravel bike, mountain bike, road bike, time trial bike, whatever it might be, but we'd like to keep it more free and low-key, more relaxing. It also is an opportunity for folks to go and do cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, hiking, or something else. The key point is, in the week, which, of course, those sessions are movable. There are two key technical sessions, and we do two weeks one, two weeks two, two weeks three, and six weeks that we then evolve and progress throughout the time. And what we do for this is leverage our video-based platform. It's called velocity. It is, how do I say is fantastic? I hate the word game changer. I hate that because it makes me smell like some form of life hack or performance expert; this is a game changer. It is amazing to optimize education and skill development. I've never ridden on anything like it, and each one of the sessions that I build on this platform has a very different technical or skill focus. So for the sake of time, I'll just go through a couple of them and highlight them. Here is the first one. We are going to do a session that is focused on improving your overall functional capacity while enabling you to understand your strengths and weaknesses. So for this, this is a very high-intensity, little interval session. This is a short VO2 Max workout. And this is one of the sessions that you could anticipate that we would deliver you a purple patch. And what we're doing is a series of very, very short sprints at maximum effort with very short rest. And we go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And you are going to hit close to your maximal heart rate, and we get to measure it. And we do this in a different style. We do one set where we ask you to do it against a grade that is built into the platform connected to your smart trainer, and we have you do it with low RPM. So we're making it very, very muscular. We then repeat after a nice, big break, and we have a discussion and a chat about it over video. We then do those same intervals at high rpm, and what we're asking you to measure is, okay, what is your output there relative to your maximal steady state, or your critical power, your functional threshold, whatever metric you want to use, and how much above that do you hold on the low versus high cadence? Is it 110% of the threshold? 130, 150%. It's going to provide you with insights into your capacity to generate force. Are you someone who is more muscular, or do you lean more on your cardiovascular system? What's the pathway for you to generate? Make more power, high and low, and you start to unpack and reveal who you are as a bike rider, where your strengths and weaknesses are, these insights become empowering because they help you identify your best focus to leverage your strengths and, of course, improve your weaknesses. So we're doing two things at once. Here, we're doing something that's physiologically beneficial for you right now, high intensity, but we're also layering in education, and I'm life with you if you can attend live or on-demand via video, so Netflix style, you can do it at a time of your choosing, and talking you through the workout and explaining this is how you should think about it. And if you are better at low or better at high rpm. This is what this means for you. These are the actions that you could take. So for many around the world, you can improve as a cyclist and start to gain understanding, rather than just mindlessly doing intervals and going, goodness me, that was hard, and that's empowering. A second session, though, is vastly different, with much lower intensity. We're going to talk about terrain management here, and I'm going to give you an example of what this is like. I want you to put your mind as though you're riding along a road that's going up and downhill, up and downhill, up and downhill. We refer to those as rolling terrain. So you're going up; you're cresting over the top. Gravity becomes your friend. You're going downhill. There you go. Relative to your fitness, what is your best speed return, where you're going to apply effort, or you're going to relax, depending on whether you're going uphill, downhill, through the bottom of a roller, or cresting over the top? We'll send you on extended intervals, 10 minutes in duration, with a moderate effort. The game that we will play is similar to doing a swim drill; the game that we will play is going to ask you to make a consistent effort, and I'm going to have you ride at a leg speed, a cadence that is locked in, 85 revolutions per minute. And so you're going to flatten. Of course, you're going to keep your cadence the same, and you're going to keep your output the same. About zone three, moderate effort. But here's the kicker: while that's going on, the platform is at play, and within each interval, I have specific and highly variable courses built out. And it might go a 1% grade, a 3% or a 6% cresting down to a negative one or 2% through the bottom 4%, 7%, so this variable real-world terrain. And the beauty of this is that the platform acts like you would feel outside. It doesn't just shift like a bang. It smoothly goes through the bottom of a grade. Imagine you're going downhill and you're leading into a 4% grade; gradually, you're going to feel tension under the feet as gravity becomes your own biggest enemy because it's going to start to work against you. Conversely, as you crest, you're going to feel the tension start to dissipate, and then, just as you would see outside, rolling resistance dissipates as well, and you build speed, and suddenly gravity is your friend, and it is that environment that we can teach you, at a static cadence and a static output, how to use your gears throughout variable terrain. Now, the sister workout to this is doing the same workout with the same goal; make sure you have a thorough line of consistent output. But this time, you don't change gears at all, and that means you only have a certain single tool to leverage, and that's your leg speed. So we go through the same intervals, 10 minutes, variable terrain, keeping output the same, that zone three effort. But this time you want to just use cadence. And when you start to repeat these working on gear shifts only and cadence, you build this magical awareness of what flow feels like and how to get, of course, the best speed return. And then the final element, the kicker, is when you put them together. Now, how do you navigate the terrain and leverage your gears and cadence to give you the best speed return? And you know what happens when you get better and better and better at this ah, epiphany? You go faster, and sometimes over 10 or 15 minutes, you might average slightly lower power. That's energy savings, but you go faster. And ultimately, that's our goal. And so this part of training is very hard for you to even entertain thinking about when you're hammering hard intervals. But if you do it now, you are emboldened. You know how to ride a bike. And then when you take it outside, that's where it sticks. And then when we ramp the training and intervals up, it's just a part of how you ride a bike. You become a craftsman. You know how to do it. And so this is off-season, and it is hugely, hugely important. The final component we do under bike craft is standing full. How many people truly know how to stand up and use it as a tool to reduce the perceived effort to lower cost and shift up body posture? How many people know how to gain speed standing? How many people can stand up with their heart rate going down? Very few people. And so these sessions are wholly immersive. They're educational, but they're also really fun. Every one of these sessions that we talked about was coached by me via video. You attend them live, or you go on demand, and it's really valuable, and you can connect with other Purple Patch athletes all over the world. This morning session that I did was right at the heart of races and very, very difficult, but here's where we had athletes joining us from Kansas, New York, London, Cornwall, my brother, Mexico, Columbia, and far beyond, let alone San Francisco and everywhere else. It was a global experience, a two-way video, where we could see each other, chat with each other, and be a part of a connected fun community. Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? Bike craft—that's element number two.
Matt Dixon 36:44
Principle number three: we've talked about swimming; we've talked about running. Come on, give me the run. Is that immersive? Is that technical? The run project, as we call it, is a little more simple than swim school. It's no less important, but it's a bit more simple. Mission number one for running in the off-season is to build a platform of tissue resilience. Running is where a lot of the injuries occur in athletes. It's weight-bearing, and so we want to set you up to be injury-resistant. And the way that we do that in the off season is we lower and remove almost all training intensity, so it's much lower intensity. We're not building massive long runs for the most part, but I'm having you run frequently, and this is a really fun unified project. We do this as the run challenge quite a bit. Can you run almost every day throughout December, for example? But a lot of these runs are super simple, really easy, and soul-filling. They're pressure-release valves, and you're just doing them on a really frequent basis. And it's a little bit like the concept of learning how to play guitar by just playing 10 or 15 minutes every day. It doesn't take too much thinking. It doesn't take up too much time, but it's going to build the integrity of your tissue, your muscles, your ligaments, and your tendons, so that when we do say now it's time, in mid-February, to start to ramp up training, your body can handle that. This is a big catalyst for why we had such low reported incidents of injury throughout last season. The second element of the run project is technique. So we know that we've got most of the runs are easy, pretty short, pretty simple. We do inject a few drills and a little bit of activation. And the one thing in the activation we do is some hill-based sprints. Now not maximal effort sprints. They're more like bounce so that you're getting full engagement neurally, in other words, from the brain firing up as many muscle fibers as possible in the usable mix, 20 up to 30 seconds of high-power upper-grade sprints, and lots of recovery between maximal recruitment. The reason we do that is that's a catalyst to improve your economy and also a catalyst to bring those fibers into the usable mix so that when at a later date we ramp up training, you're ready to charge and improve and get speed gains. Very, very simple. So that's the run project—easy, under the radar, simple, and good to do at lunchtime.
Matt Dixon 39:25
Principle number four: strong like a bull, let's get strong. I talked about this: every single Purple Patch athlete, and I mean every single one, whether they're in the center at Purple Patch in San Francisco or globally, will commit in the off-season to two key strength sessions a week. It is the bullseye. Now they get to do this in the center, in person, if they are lucky enough to live in San Francisco and their schedule allows, or they can do it via video anywhere in the world. Very, very usable and accessible. Very. Video-based strength that you can go and do at the gym or you can do in the convenience of your home, whether it's in the living room or it's in your home gym, is very good. All are led by our strength experts. These are foundational sessions that upgrade our priority and focus in the off-season. For me, this is the bullseye. This is the most important part because what we're looking to do here is do something that's going to promote your health and your longevity. So it's a really good investment for you as a human, and that's important to me and my soul, as well as all of our souls at Purple Patch. We're also developing yourself as a global athlete, in that sense, that athlete rather than a triathlete, so that you become a higher-functioning human being. So we have a lot of emphasis on joint mobility, balance, and coordination, improving strength, but also a little bit of higher load strength. But that's coming in subsequent phases. So we're building a baseline of your power potential. Taking on the strength challenge now is the time, because it develops a baseline of improvements where you are also not just improving in your coordination, balance, and movement patterns, but also really developing tissue health, and it is a catalyst, get this, a good one for me right now, improvements in my body composition. I become a better butter burner and a better thermic machine, and I start to improve my body composition by integrating strength. It is the catalyst. Every single one of us needs it. Every single Purple Patch athlete adheres to it, and we will adhere to it too. All right, good, good stuff that is golden.
Matt Dixon 41:43
So that's our training approach. Those are the four big boulders of our training. How we approach swimming, biking, running, and strength. A fifth component, or principle, is education and community, a huge thing for Purple Patch, and even more so now. Last year, when I talked about the off-season, I said, We've got something coming for our community. We're very excited. We finally launched it midway through this season; I think it was in February or March that we launched a brand new hub. It's called the Purple Patch hub, and it is our home base where we deliver news, upcoming events, all of our education, and, most importantly, connect all of our athletes globally. The reason that we did this is that we understand that effective training only really sticks when athletes are empowered and they understand what the goals and mission are, and that athlete then gets buy-in and executes as intended. So we wanted to invest to ensure that we could have the best vehicle to deliver education and empower athletes to go and do what we wanted them to do. But we had a bigger understanding as well, and I've talked about it on this show as well. Any individual journey is amplified when somebody feels a part of someone or something when they have mechanisms of support and accountability, and when they feel like they are contributing to a team approach. In anything in life, whenever you are a part of a team, it not only drives each individual to gather better, but the sum of the parts becomes greater. It becomes a performance factory. And so we felt it was very, very important to create an overall system of support, accountability, and connectivity amongst our global community. We now have the hub. So all of our education we talked about all aspects of performance, sleep organization, time management, and organizational effectiveness. The purpose behind these training sessions is that they're all delivered via the hub, and for this offseason, we're bringing it to fruition. We're going to have a coach's corner. So what that is, and if you're listening now as a coach, you might think about implementing this with your team. We have an area of this education hub, which is a place for our coaches to provide perspective, where we might say, Let's talk about sleep, let's talk about body composition in the off-season, and our athletes can ask at any time that they want any questions they want around that topic. So we get a really good discussion going to help athletes globally understand and enhance their approach to everything. So our vehicle for education, beyond the live sessions that we do, what we call office hours, and the meetings with Matt, where I go through big marquee sessions around this is how I want you to think about a, b, and c on an ongoing daily basis. You have a constant pipeline, not just to me, but to the entire Purple Patch team. So if you're going through perimenopause and it's challenging, you can talk to Nancy about that. If you're thinking about season planning, you can talk to Coach John, Coach Brad, or Coach Will about that. We have the opportunity for us to connect. And then, as a side project to that, we have a different area, which is for just the women of Purple Patch, led by coach Nancy and other female athletes or coaches participating in it. It is an area that is only for our female athletes, where we can have a roundtable discussion to navigate all of the unique challenges and different components of being a female performance-driven athlete. Nancy does a wonderful job of leading that. She's an expert in female physiology. It makes it fun and supportive, and a whole bunch of challenges are solved in both of those areas. So in other words, this is your source for everything at Purple Patch. And in many ways, when we have an incoming athlete, if I'm talking to an athlete as they're coming in, I say, Here is the hub. This is a purple patch, and by the way, Training Peaks. That's where you go and get your training. But the hub, the purple patch, that's where you get your news, your education, you connect with the coaches, you connect with the athletes. Boom. It's fantastic. It is its app, and it has become a great magnet to make a cohesive experience. And so that's the component. Those are the components that we build out off-season around, and we want you to be refreshed and rejuvenated. And remember one thing that I talked about: whatever your capacity is for training, let's just say you have 12 hours to give. I don't want you to give me 12 hours. What I just went through is a lot, but you can achieve a lot with just a few hours—6, 7, 8, 9, hours a week, whatever it might be—but only 75 to 80% of your total capacity. I want every athlete to be able to increase their training hours over the year ahead. So right now you've got more time. It is a vehicle to give you time back.
Matt Dixon 46:59
Alrighty, that's it. And so for the final component, and that is personalization, one other component of the off-season is a time for season planning, really thinking about what you need to do to improve. And the one thing that we have is our coaches on deck for our squad athletes to say, Hey, set up a consultation. Set up a time for planning. It's a wonderful opportunity for you to reflect on the year ahead and look forward. And so we like athletes to engage beyond the group and focus on some individual customization. We do that via the swim school with coach John Stevens. We do it with our remote-running analysis program. We also have some offerings that are coming up around remote strength and conditioning to help people understand and troubleshoot that, but also season planning in any area where I should apply and prioritize my focus and attention to give me the biggest yield. It makes it better to prioritize and gives you empowerment in ways to place your focus.
Matt Dixon 48:06
And that's it. That's our off-season. It goes—starts in October. A lot of our athletes are racing in October, November, and even December. We integrate them into a streamlined fashion so they don't miss anything, but we do what's right for them to get them dialed in. It's good. And remember, this is the final component of today, and I want this to be double-underlined: less training, more freedom, but critical for your development. Don't just keep going. This isn't about keeping the throttle on. Instead, get precise on focus on the elements that are going to help you long-term and avoid, at all costs, going rogue. I don't want you to go random, because we consistently observe the catastrophe that comes with those performance consequences that last nine months: high injury risk, burnout, underperformance, frustration, and trying to integrate into life. You don't need to do it. Just do a smart offseason, and you'll get there. Alrighty, folks, that is it. I hope it's helpful for you. Remember, remember, remember, next week is the Q&A session. We've got a host of questions. We've probably got room for about two or three more questions to get in. So if you have a question based on last week's episode or this week's, let's do it. Info@urplepatchfitness.com, ping me. I'd love to hear your question. We will read out the question. You can put your name, please, but you don't need—I don't need to read out your last name. I'd love your name location, and everything—all the questions need to be focused around the off-season. That's my only request. Alrighty, cheers. We'll see you next week. Take care.
Matt Dixon 49:51
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 on YouTube, and you will find it there, and you can subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you, if you will subscribe, to 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, 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, 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, and do whatever you do. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
athletes, swim, season, sessions, patch, purple, improve, talked, focus, technique, bike, coach, training, part, triathletes, week, strength, performance, people, muscular endurance