Episode 345: Beyond the Finish Line: Winning as a Triathlete in 2025 - Part 2
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Training in 2025
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In part two of a four-part series on winning at triathlon in 2025 IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon outlines Purple Patch's coaching offerings, including individual coaching and the tri squad program. He discusses the Purple Patch coaching model for triathletes, emphasizing a smart mindset and practical strategies for performance improvement. He outlines the training phases: off-season (October-December), pre-season (January-March), build phase (April-June), and race-specific (July-December). Dixon advises a preparatory mindset in pre-season, focusing on winning workouts and building foundational fitness. He recommends a three-week training block structure, balancing key sessions with supporting workouts, and integrating strength training. Dixon stresses the importance of life balance, flexibility, and the optimization mindset to avoid burnout and ensure long-term success.
Dixon asks listeners to Reflect on your actions for Q1, including tackling a weakness, leveraging a strength, and refining a baseline habit. Adopt a preparatory mindset for the first 6 weeks, focusing on winning workouts and building supporting habits. Structure your training in 3-week cycles, with the first two weeks being challenging and the third week being a transition week with lighter load. Identify your key sessions for the week and build your training around them, incorporating strength training and supporting workouts.
If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
Promo :00-1:46
Introduction: 2:17-7:55
Meat and Potatoes: 7:55-End
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Transcription
00:00
Hello Folks, today we are doing part two of our Triathlon Series, winning at triathlon 2025
00:07
it's all about setting up your plan and strategies for the year ahead. And if you find today's show of interest, please do me a little bit of a favor. Can you share it? Anyone that you think might benefit, even across your socials, it will be greatly appreciated. And one more note, as I mentioned towards the end of today's show, this stuff that we're discussing over the course of the month of January is really important for you to unlock your performance level. But if you feel like you might need some additional help, or maybe you'd like some individual support, we're happy to continue the conversation. We are available for some custom consultations with either myself or one of the Purple Patch coaching team. Feel free to reach out info@purplepatchfitness.com
00:49
for more information. Also, we're excited to welcome you to Purple Patch coaching if you would like to join the team and leverage us over the course of the long journey, we are unlike any other coaching journey when the most successful coaching program for a reason, whether it is one to one or part of a our very popular tri squad program, we are going to ensure that you implement the exact approach that we're outlining in this series of educational shows, and we will be so happy to set up a complimentary chat with you to discuss your needs and how we can best serve you. There's both of those info@purplepatchfitness.com
01:25
feel free to reach out to continue the conversation, either as a paid consultation, to help you implement some of the education, or to explore our coaching journey. Of course, those conversations are complimentary. Alrighty. Enjoy the show. Have a good one, and as I've already mentioned. But happy new year as we lead into now the midpoint of January. Cheers.
01:47
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.
02:16
And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast as ever your host, Matt Dixon, and welcome to the second part of our new series, winning at triathlon 2025 we kicked off the year on January 2, now, a couple of weeks ago, with a grounding preview episode. And this was important because we outlined a smart mindset when it comes to you going up in your performance level over the course of the coming year. We also spent some time in that episode breaking down the Purple Patch coaching model that we leverage across all Purple Patch athletes. And we leverage this so that we can have a universal application of our Purple Patch method, which is very important, so that we can build consistency across the coaching experience and also make a really simple and smart, integrated approach to you, ensuring that all aspects of life and work and sport work together, cohesively. Infused in the model is ongoing mechanisms of clarity, commitment, support, accountability, all of these components that we know make up a Positive Coaching journey and progression to greater performance. And of course, there's a whole systematic approach built into the model that builds and integrates some flex into the system. There are always things that we haven't thought about that's always going to be the way whenever you're building anything of value. And also, the journey to performance is never linear, so when things stray off track, you need a model and mechanism and system to get back on track, and so we build all of that into the model. And that was a really grounding episode. If you haven't listened to that first of the year episode, January 2 is when we released it. I would really recommend you go back last week. Then we went through what we were labeling our official part one of our four part series, and in there, we went through a really extensive case study of a real Purple Patch athlete named Sam, and some of the work that I did with her. I coach her individually over the course of the 2024 season. What we did there is highlight some of the coaching process and my mindset as a coach to establish Sam's priorities and focus so that we can get to an up level in performance. And then we expanded those lessons and applied them to you. And you might remember if you listened to that show, I actually gave you some homework. I asked you to reflect and decide on your actions for q1 and they were first a challenge to tackle a weakness, get up to that simmering discomfort, as we talk about So, getting out of your comfort zone. Number two, an area of strength that you're looking to leverage and develop even more. And then thirdly, I ask you to consider a baseline habit or maybe some supplemental practice, maybe something around mindset or confidence that you're looking to refine or.
05:00
Proof. And so there were three main aspects that fit under your vision and your goals that you've established for the year that are actionable. So that's what we went through last week. What we want to do this week, very quickly, is get practical. We're going to just dive in. We're going to discuss framing your training journey over the course of the year. Number one. Number two, how to frame into your training, ensuring that you've got an arc of long term success over the season. Because I don't want you to build a great quarter of training. I want you to build an entire 2025 of training and be motivated and excited at the end of this year for 2026 so we're going to talk about long term success and how to ramp back into your training. And then third, we're going to get really granular. We're going to talk about setting up a training module and a training block as well to how to structure a week, particularly in a time starved format that most of you listeners are living it Okay, so this is a little bit of a how to manual today, and it's going to serve as your building blocks of success. I think that I have to
06:12
pause here and just do a little bit of a disclaimer, because what we're actually doing over the course of this episode is radically narrow in perspective. Because all I'm going to focus on in today's education is the training. And you know that that's not really something I like to do at Purple Patch. I always keep a broader perspective. It's a big part of our coaching, where we go well beyond swim by run strength, and it should include education and coaching around all of the key practices and habits around health and performance, and we constantly tie it to the journey of life and longevity and quality and health and showing up in all aspects of your life are important to you. But today, let me take that hat off a little bit, because with intention, what I'm going to do is closing the walls, narrow the conversation, and focus on just the training. That's it very specifically. So I'm gonna hone it
07:12
and to serve you today, what I'm gonna do is make a few assumptions as well. Because what I'm gonna try and do is tackle the middle of the bell curve, try and target as many triathletes globally as I can, and I realize when I talk in today's show, there's going to be some of you listening that are outliers. You might be training for an Iron Man in March, or you might be coming back from a return to injury. You might be absolutely brand new to the sport, but this is about taking your performance to the next level. So I'm trying to cast as big of a net as I can and make it applicable to as many of you as I possibly am able. Alrighty. So three parts as we go through the show, very actionable. Number one, let's in. Part One, talk about where we're at training wise. So this is really important to get
08:02
grounded at Purple Patch our season globally. When we think about it again in broad scope terms, we tend to break our season up into different phases of training, and we like to do it synchronized with how most people structure their life. So we do it by quarter, January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September. I know all the months, October, November, December. So actually starts more towards q4 which is October through to the end of December. If you listen to the show on a regular basis, you know that's off season. Really important. We now move into what January, February, March. So q1 is pre season, April through June. We get into the build phase, a lot of early season racing occurring there, including some important races. And then finally, it's race specific and priming, where we're really driving into some dress rehearsals and getting ready for people's best performances of the year. Now, there is a ton of flex in this, a host of individualization, of course, but that keeps us as a general guide where we're at now, in truth, off season, it's highly variable relative to where the season end is for any athlete. And I'll give you an example here. Recently we had 50 athletes finish their seasons in December, because they are at the Ironman 70.3 World Championships. And so that's obviously an individualization of 50 athletes. That's a good group of athletes. There. We had other folks, Indian world 70.3 we had other people doing the New York Marathon, and CIM, which is the count International Marathon up here locally in the Bay Area, said a lot of athletes that are all over the place. So when we say off season, you shouldn't feel left behind if you're racing extended in through past the end of September. Okay, it's just where our guiding line is. But as a general rule, when we talk about off season, the mission so as we finish one season.
10:00
And we have that high flex period of training that can last up to a whole quarter, 12 weeks or so. The mission is very simple. Number one is preparatory. What I mean by that is that you're really allowing the body to have less physical strain, and you're preparing it from a musculoskeletal standpoint, tends, muscles and ligaments, as well as from a cardiovascular standpoint, you're developing baseline stimulus to equip it to handle and adapt to very hard work and make that hard work effective in following blocks. So that's preparatory in nature. That's off season. There's also a heavy emphasis on technical and skills development. We like to have athletes focus on building foundational habits, maybe around sleep, hydration, eating habits, etc, and we look to leave a great amount of capacity. So we're going to actually drive a little bit less of a training load to give people scope to grow right. Another interesting feature that often catches some of our ethics by surprise is we drive the ceiling of performance a little bit. We do some very, very high intensity work, short periods of time, where we're taking people close to max heart rate, raising the ceiling of their performance potential, which then when we build out the resilience for the endurance, it tends to help them operate at a higher level, keeping it very simple and accessible for you. Okay, well, here we are now, as a general rule, knowing that you might be out of bounds on this a little bit. We're in pre season, so q1 January through the end of March. And in many ways, pre season is an extension of off season. The difference is that as we tend to roll through the weeks into the months, there is a increasing focus on developing foundational fitness, alrighty. So as you go through these months, January been a gateway into stronger training. February gets harder. March is the hardest month. There's a progression in months globally here. There's also an amplification in focus, in your commitment level through the pre season. So as you go through the months, January, being the most accessible, turn up the heat a little bit. In February, the toughest month, comes. In March, there is an increase in training load progressive over the month, and increasing focus and your associate commitment level really needs to ramp up in conjunction. And what's happening in the reverse, in the inverse of this is that your high degree of flexibility and lower physical load that we associated with off season that starts to diffuse, and so we're ramping up the vigor in pre season, and we're building on as we go through the months. And by the end of q1 most Purple Patch athletes are very fit, very strong, developed technically, have a robust foundation of really smart practices and habits associated to support it with their needs, etc, but are still really fresh mentally and physically, and they're missing some of the ingredients to high performance readiness in triathlon. They don't have huge muscle resilience yet. They don't have really anything but a sniff of race specific training, and they don't have simply put prime readiness for key race performance. Now this isn't a bad place to go and do some early season racing. Quite often. We have some really fantastic performances in those early season races, but we're holding the reins a little bit because bigger resilience, foundational endurance race specificity, prime readiness that we want to occur in the meat of the season, that emerges in the following phases. And so what that means for you is that you should emerge out of q1 with plenty of room still to grow as an athlete, despite the fact that you've just gone through three months, 12 weeks or so of solid progression across various areas over the course of those weeks. So that's where we're at when it comes to pre season. That's an important grounding when you think about this. So how should you now, as you come out of the holidays and you start q1 How should you ramp in for success? Let's consider this in part two here, and there's some general guidelines that I can give you that I think will be really actionable. I'll say this. This is the power here of great coaching and great support. It's really hard when you're in the weeds with your ambition, your goals, your excitement, you ready get to, get charging, to actually take a really smart and pragmatic approach. That's why I'm a big believer in coaching. That's why I'm a coach. In many ways, it's very, very easy for athletes to do too much, too quickly. So that's your rate of acceleration. It's not just the total.
15:00
Mode, but it's how quickly you accelerate too much, too quickly, particularly with the focus on both strength training, taking typically a prioritized aspect, and some high intensity in the bike and some swim. And so it's very difficult to integrate three disciplines, some bike run, a couple of them with pretty short, high intensity components and strength training and ramping up week after week after month after month, in a really smart and pragmatic way, way too many athletes pile on too much, too soon, and struggle. They get injured, they get fatigued. They get burnout of motivation, etc. And so what I encourage you to do as you ramp back in is first set the right mindset. If we started in around the start of the year, so January, 1, second, third, fourth, fifth, somewhere in there.
15:53
Until February 15, this is just rule of thumb. Okay, nothing more. But until about February 15, keep a preparation mindset, what I call a preparatory mindset. Okay? In other words, I encourage you, over the course of the first six weeks or so, not to focus on the building fitness part of it, all right, fitness is going to be building. It's going to be foundational, but it almost wants to sneak up behind you and whack you on the back of the head, right? It's going to be occurring, but the primary focus is still getting the body ready to accept higher load. That begins towards the end of February and extends certainly into March right now. Instead, focus on winning workouts, so successful completion without failing, executing them with intent. That means going very easy on the easy sessions, if asked to do so, challenging yourself on the ones, but ensuring that you're successful, doing every session with a really good form okay, and leaving a little room to grow. Most of the sessions leave yourself with a little bit left in the tank.
17:01
So this doesn't mean that all the training that you're going to be doing is easy here. But I mentioned this before. The mindset is winning, winning every workout, in other words, from January 1, which is now a couple of weeks ago, but january 1 till February 15 never go to a failure. This is a really good rule of thumb associated with that for the first few weeks, your mission should be and this doesn't sound very
17:32
performance smelling, but underworld yourself for three weeks. I like athletes to leave plenty of capacity in the initial weeks of training. If you're like most athletes, when you come out of the holidays, you've probably had the last few weeks, even a month, where there's been pretty low load. So don't shock the system. There's no way. There's no benefit of doing that. It's just risky. Don't suddenly add 50% of training load. Begin, easy, start the third area, really embrace the easy. Everyone wants to get from A to B as quickly as you can. But the first thing is embrace the easy. So how do you do that? Well, the first thing is understanding with clarity where the key sessions are, any key sessions over the course of your pre season. Q1, are pretty simple to identify, typically, because the first is strength. Everyone should have a priority on strength right now. So those are important. You want to make sure that you're getting in at least a couple of key focus strength sessions every week. We might not label it key always, but strength is important at this phase of the year. It is a bull's eye. Boom, alrighty. So that's always important. So you're going to modulate as you plan your week, which we'll get into in a few moments, but you're going to think about strength as priorities, okay? And then the sessions that tend to be more key right now are the ones that are more demanding, so higher intensity, alrighty. And you place those typically two to maybe three sessions a week. So those are your building blocks, but everything else is supportive. It's either going to be technical, low stress and soul filling, or focus more on endurance, the mythical zone two, as you hear about that, alrighty, in those sessions go easier than you ever imagined, embrace more walk breaks than usual if you're running, think about it as a pressure release fail from life scale, the intensity and durations of these sessions when needed, so that you can win the sessions and win the weeks of training. This is really, really important. So we're going preparatory and mindset. We're going to underwhelm ourself for three weeks. We're going to identify the key sessions. You're going to really embrace the easy being courageous, to throttle it down as necessary so you can win next week, not just always try and win this week, and then finally, conquer your baseline habits. This is the.
20:00
Time, because you're growing up in commitment and training load over January into February, now into March, and it's big. So this is the time now that if training is going to ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, it ain't going to get any easier. So now the time is to get in with intention and dial in those baseline habits. Because, you know, if commitment goes up and training load goes up, fatigue is going to go up. So you've got to have the antidote of that. You've got to build your habits really, really key. Alrighty, that's absolutely fundamental. What those are for me, always making sure you're getting organized the Sunday special. If you haven't heard or you don't understand that, either reach out to us, and we can send you a packet of information on the Sunday special, info@purplepatchfitness.com
20:49
or go back to a prior episode when we've actually talked about that in extent. So the Sunday special getting really, really organized. That's critical. Number two, daily hydration is important. It's a cornerstone. It's really easy to implement about three liters a day, important for your health, your immune system, your cognitive function, your performance readiness, etc, and then dialing in your eating and sleeping habits. These are some of the components that require investigation and prioritization to bolster that performance based layer so that you can be effective across both sport and life. So that's what we're thinking about in pre season right now. Very, very practical. Okay, start slow from where you're at, underwhelm yourself, focus the key sessions, easy, build supporting habits, no more than that.
21:39
But how do you actually construct your training? This is where we get really granular in part three. Now let's talk about building a block of training and a training week, all right. This is it. This is time, the word when we think about this integration. This is it. If you want to be successful, this year, you got to learn how to integrate your training into this big thing called life, all of the competing demands that you have with family, friends, work, travel, whatever it might be, integrate it into life so that you have a fabric, a woven fabric of performance. Do not bold, double underlined. Do not dump training on top of your life. If you dump training that you believe is necessary to get you to where it is, but it's unsustainable, and you dump it on top of life, and that forces you to consistently compromise other parts of life, including your sleep, and you try and cram a program in that is unsustainable just because you think that's what's needed, you will fail, you will be frustrated, you'll lose motivation, you might get injured, and you certainly won't get the performance yield, especially over the arc of the whole year. So don't dump it. Build your training in a sensible way,
23:00
step by step. Great. Firstly, macro level. Don't try to do everything every week. This is really important. Triathlon is one sport. It is made up of three disciplines, swim, bike, run, but it is not swimming, cycling and running. The sport is swim, bike, run. That's what it is. One sport. We also need to add strength into that recipe to get ready. So with swim, bike and run, and as a part of that Bullseye is strength. That's a lot of disciplines, a lot of training. And we're trying to develop, improve your swimming, improve your running, get better at biking, and integrate strength as a catalyst and a vortex to get bigger returns, let alone all of the health components into that. As soon as coaches or athletes try to cram all of the pieces of a regular training program across a single discipline. So for swimming, we need some speed, we need some over distance, we need some threshold. We need some strength base cycling. We need some low cadence, big gear. We need some high intensity. We need some extended endurance running. We need some hill repeats. We need a track session. We need some over distance. We need some frequency, etc. As soon as you try and wrap all of those components into a single week of training. Everything breaks and so just come up out of the weeds a little bit and liberate yourself. You don't need to hit everything in every discipline every week. Instead, think about it as a block of three weeks. That's a proven, smart approach that works. And I don't mean three weeks of work and one week of recovery. That's not what I mean. Here's how we do a Purple Patch. Feel free to draw from this. When you build your own program, we tend to think about the first week as.
25:00
A week of training where we're building pretty good challenge focused around two to three key sessions in the week, ones that place greater demand. Now this time of the year, it tends to be slightly higher intensity, less of a focus on muscular resilience and big endurance and certainly very little race specificity. So in q1 it's still the same thing, and more demanding week with two or three key sessions, right? Week two, it's very similar, another week of challenge with two to three different key sessions. So it won't just be a rinse and repeat of that week, it's going to have evolved sessions with evolved focus. And as you look at those two weeks, you can start to identify swim, bike and run intensity, strength based, etc. Week three has a slightly different personality. We call it a transition week rather than week three, that transition tends to include two to three days of lighter training load. So that's intentional recovery, allowing the body to adapt and absorb the training that you've done in the prior two weeks, and then a flash of high intensity in the week, and typically something more demanding at the weekend. Now, as the year progresses, those transition weeks, the third week of each training cycle, if you want to call it, that, tends to mimic the rhythm of a race week. So it might include some intensity after a little bit of rejuvenation in the middle of the week as a little bit of priming. And then we might have at the weekend, some race specific dress rehearsal type session where an athlete practices their fueling, their hydration and intensity right around the demands of the race, and we do this because that really leads to greater understanding of what the athlete needs to feel good on race day, therefore greater performance predictability. But that's not how we're building transition weeks now in q1 that's not how we do it, but we do keep the rhythm and pattern week one, challenge week two, challenge. Week three, little bit of recovery and light of work, flash of challenge at the weekend. And that's the cycle. And the key is that across those three weeks, what I can identify as a coach and hopefully the athlete can identify, is all of the key focus points that you would look to drive and in q1 that is strength training, infused throughout the three weeks, some very high intensity bike, not every single week, but certainly week one and week two, some Terrain Management work, because that skill development lower stress, but Really looking at skill development, some swim technique work, some swim super speed work, a little bit of run power, but a lot of the running is actually relatively low stress and more components. But what we're looking at here is, over the course of a three week cycle, I've got all of the ingredients of what I want to do to drive the athlete into the journey of progression, and it spread over three weeks. Then what I do with an athlete, typically, is repeat and evolve the key sessions so they go through that same three week cycle again, not exactly because there's tinkering, there's evolution around the sessions. The theme might be the same, but the specific workout might be evolved a little bit, but we repeat and evolve these sessions so that we can ensure that the athlete can execute it well. Can gain some familiarity. They can learn there's a clear line of progression. And so it actually helps in training quality.
28:44
Now, how this looks in training specifics and total hours and sessions that might flex relative to life demands. And of course, there's individual variants of this, but that's the recipe. So then you rinse and repeat again, and this flow is so powerful, so simple, and it's proven. It's the very framework that I leverage with the squad of the highly successful Purple Patch pros and for the last 10 plus years over the course of our highly successful amateurs that typically are time starved. And the reason that I think it works is it's very simple and accessible, but it's also really flexible. It's very easy to fit into life, because in this system built around key and supporting sessions, it's very easy on a week to week basis, to ramp up the training load or scale it down, and you might ramp it up or scale it down relative to life, commitments, fatigue or anything else. And what happens when you ramp up or you ramp or you ramp down, is you don't lose specificity. You don't mean lose the main thrust. You don't feel guilty about maybe doing a couple of hours less one week because.
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Really busy at work or you're traveling, and you feel the reward of retaining specificity on the program while maybe taking advantage of the time that the family away and you've got some additional training weekend hours. So this keeps you on track with an easy to understand progression. It also ensures, by the way, as a pattern, that it's not physiologically or mentally boring, yet it doesn't get stole because once you've seen a workout, let's just make it up some very high intensity session that I'm prescribing to you on a Tuesday, and you see it for the third time.
30:37
So it's week one, week four, Week Seven. By then, you're like, I might be getting to the not a gain point. And if your mind is thinking that, your body's probably thinking that too. And so we then shift the stimulus for the next block, and that's how you keep shocking the system, progressing and building on top of each other. And so that's how I would encourage you to think about the building blocks of structuring your training, but that's at the macro level. How do we now get a little bit more in the weeds and go to the micro? What about building your week? So in q1
31:19
as I mentioned before, there is a very strong emphasis on strength training for almost every single athlete. And while we encourage all athletes to embrace strength training year round, it's of the highest priority and ranking during the off season and the pre season, it's also the time that strength training is the most demanding. In other words, we get you to lift heavy things more often already. And so what that means is that when I think about building a week, and let's me just use this as a case study here, you've got seven days in a week that doesn't change. Start on Monday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, seven days. Alrighty, great. So what I would do first is I would identify with any athlete, what are my key sessions that I'm going to do? I'm in week one, or I'm in week two, or I'm in the transition week the third week, what am I looking to get done? Where are my key sessions now what I do with an individual athlete is I look at their life schedule, their training schedule, and build it and their work schedule, and build it around that. And that's something that our squad athletes can do alone. It's pretty simple. So all right, where's the key workouts? Where do they best fit into my life? And typically, you want to put a little bit of space between the most demanding sessions. So let's just say that you have a very demanding bike and you have a power base run, and those are the two key sessions. What I like to do is try and place one slightly earlier in the week and then one later in the week, and they having about 48 to 72 hours between those. So it's either a Tuesday, Saturday or a Tuesday, Friday or a Wednesday, Saturday, Wednesday, Sunday. So that sort of range. There's a lot of flex in there, but those are the ones that are going to drive the performance needle. So that's how we do it, Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, and then Friday or Saturday, maybe creeping into Sunday, but typically Friday and Saturday, and that's a really good option for you. But if there's a third day, that's a big key session. So if you do have a week where you see three big sessions, typically that would be a swim, and so I would typically do that swim, a joined with another key session. So it might be Tuesday, hard bike, Wednesday, key swim, then a Saturday power run, using our example here, so you have the three components built out. We then build strength around that. And with a professional athlete that has limitless time, I would align strength training on the days of heavy load period. So if we had a hill repetition type workout on the bike, I would do strength in the morning or the afternoon, depending on what I was looking to get out of it. So I'd actually keep it on the day. So the day with regular time, starved, very busy amateurs. That's just not the reality of life. But the good news that training load in total hours is also less than a professional athlete, so it tends to be less important. So I tend to just build strength, really where it fits best for the athlete, but I try and keep it away from a time that it might compromise performance in the most demanding sessions, okay, but typically, I might do strength on Mondays and Fridays, or Mondays and Thursdays or Wednesdays and Sundays, something where you keep the strength sessions apart as Well, and there's the fabric of your week, alrighty. Everything around it, beyond that is really important, but it's Amazon pack filler. You get a big box, and you've got those little nodules to keep, to protect the high quality stuff. That's it. It's your supporting sessions. They're really valuable, and they're helpful, and they play.
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Their role, but they are supportive. They're lower intensity. They may be technical in nature. They're really good for soul filling, so pressure relief, mentally, they build up foundational fitness in that zone one, zone two type effort. So it's an important component, but that's your lever and the flex that you have. So how many hours a week should you do on a week to week basis under this system? The answer is, I have no idea. It depends. It depends on your rate of development and what you have going on in life. And the truth is that the hours that you actually complete on any given week are highly flexible by week, depending on your life commitments. It also depends on your fatigue. This is how we go through that process. So I've talked about building your key sessions. I've talked about plugging in strength, and then we have the Amazon pack filler, all of the other supporting sessions, and they can scale up or down, demanding on or depending on everything else that you've got in life. This is where we come back to the optimization mindset. Alrighty, every week I love an athlete to go through a very simple process. This is a part of the Sunday special number one reflect, how did last week go? What did I do? Well, where can I develop and maybe, where did I fall short? Where do I need to apply my action and focus in the coming week? I do it as a coach for an athlete, I like the athlete to do it as well. It gives them agency. Is it gives them empowerment? Great. Then they look at the landscape of the week ahead. What are your life commitments? So you might have stuff with family, maybe you're coaching Johnny's soccer game, maybe you've got a doctor's appointment. What are my life commitments, and I lay them out, great. What about work commitments? What are key objectives of work where I'm going to apply my focus? Do I have any travel, etc? But then you go through on the calendar and you program the non negotiables, as I like to call them, the supporting costs that are critical. Time to eat, prioritizing sleep. We don't de prioritize those or compromise on them, very rarely, if at all. Okay, so boom. Now what you've got left over, and let's just imagine for you, it's 10 hours, 12 hours. It doesn't matter what it is. Now you've got an optimization challenge. How do I build up the right training program in these hours? And you program it in, just as we talked about your key sessions, separated apart, typically two to three days between each key session, unless you've got three. And then you sandwich that swim with it, which will typically be the pace. And then you add in the supporting workouts after your strength next, of course, then you supporting workouts, and that's where the Flex is. That's the living, breathing part of training, because I'm going to fill that time until the cardboard box is full using our Amazon pack filler analogy. It's low stress, it's technical, it's easy, it's valuable, but it scales up if you have more time without training adding any more specifically or high demand, or it scales back, guilt free. If life gets in the way, this is the ultimate in Flex. You don't need some machine to spit out really dull, repetitive, boring sessions dosed around some black hole algorithm of unprove the methodology to do this. It's really simple. You can do it every time, and guess what? It delivers results. We've been doing it for years. These are your building blocks of success. And it might sound like a lot,
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but I should add it that if you're feeling like, oh, this is pretty cool, this is interesting. Can I really do it myself? Well, it's not a call to action just to join Purple Patch coaching. It would be great if you could, but this might be a time where you do decide
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to actually purchase a Purple Patch coaching consultation, because we would be delighted to help you not just set up your vision, but also set up your training block. What does it look like? Where it fits into life? Would even frame up a sample week for you that works with your schedule, and we can do that over a single consultation or multiple consultations. Folks love to do that, that enjoy self coaching, that don't want to engage in a coach. I think it's a lot of value in coaching, by the way, but that's a really good tool, so it's absolutely accessible to you. You're welcome to go the whole hot we would love to welcome you onto the team. You get huge ongoing support, not just through the Purple Patch coaching team, but our community as well, of like minded athlete through our one to one options and highly popular tri squad. You're welcome, folks, but also that professional consultation is there for advantage either one of the journeys that you would like to explore info at Purple Patch fitness.com All right, folks, and that's it. That is how we set up the training next week. We're going to do is talk about the journey a little bit, some of the obstacles, and I'm also going to start to dip my toe into the power.
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Of team, very important, so don't miss it already. Remember I started the show, please. If you found this educational helpful, share it with friends and anyone that you think might benefit. You can even plug it onto your socials. All right, guys, take care. See you next time. 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
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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
triathlon series, performance strategies, custom consultations, Purple Patch coaching, training modules, long-term success, pre-season training, strength training, key sessions, training block, life integration, optimization mindset, training load, key workouts, supporting sessions