Episode 296: Looking Ahead - Q1 / The Build Phase
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As we approach the holiday season, it's a great opportunity to reflect on the past and plan for the future. We can review the year that has passed and think about what worked well and what didn't. At the same time, we can set goals for the future and create a roadmap for transformation and self-improvement.
In this episode of the Purple Patch Podcast, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon takes a look back. He reviews the progress made during the “offseason” training phase while providing a practical plan for navigating the coming months, which we at Purple Patch call “Q1 - the build phase.”
Matt highlights what success looks like on a performance journey, regardless of your skill level or goals, and provides important strategies to employ during the build phase. These strategies aim to help you have a successful first three months of the year and help establish a foundation for achieving your goals and becoming a higher-functioning human being throughout the year.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 05:25 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
05:40 - 08:38 - Word of the Week
08:39 - 44:49 - The Meat and Potatoes - Episode 296: Looking Ahead - Q1 / The Build Phase
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Full Transcript
Matt Dixon 00:00
I'm Matt Dixon and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.
Matt Dixon 00:24
You go to the doctor, you decide to get blood work, and the results come in. And the doctor tells you, everything's fantastic. But, most doctors are just looking for the absence of disease — are you functional? But you don't want to be functional. You want to thrive, you want to achieve your on a journey of performance. That's why by taking a look inside and assessing your biometrics and then combining it with the advice and expertise from the team at InsideTracker, you can get an action plan where you can drive your focus on the key elements that are going to, for you, drive you to better performance in life in sport, or any endeavor that you're chasing. That's why we leverage it at Purple Patch. It's a very simple process and the outcome of it is that you're looking to go from good to great. We leverage it across our athletes at Purple Patch with meaningful results that are trackable throughout the journey. It also enables us to get precise and focused on the elements that are going to be individually best for you to give you the results that you want. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. It's validating the key habits and lifestyle changes that you need to make to whether you want to perform in sports or across the endeavors in life. It's very simple and accessible for you as well. All you need to do is head to insidetracker.com/purplepatch, that's insidetracker.com/purplepatch and use this sneaky code, to tell them I sent you, Purple Patch Pro 20. That's Purple Patch Pro two zero, you get 20% off everything at the store. Alrighty, we're looking ahead today to next year. Enjoy the show.
Matt Dixon 02:11
And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast as ever, your host, Matt Dixon. And today we're holding hands and looking ahead as we march into the holidays, of course, it's a wonderful time for reflection, looking back over the last year to see how things went. But in doing so also looking forward on how you can take on a performance journey that can lead to transformation. Now, of course, at Purple Patch, we do this in a structured manner, we have a method that not only helps you facilitate the training that you need to get ready for the goals that you're looking to accomplish but also develop the habits and also a toolkit around a high-performance mindset to help you become a higher functioning human being. Over the last few weeks, we've focused on two main things. The first is what we label the offseason, Q4 training, and focus for, of course, our endurance athletes, but also anyone who is seeking better performance across any arena in life. We then over the last few weeks went into what we call the performance base layer series. Yes, those elements that make up your performance readiness through the four pillars of the methodology that make up the Purple Patch approach. And that is namely endurance sports, strength, and conditioning, the aspects under the pillar of nutrition, and of course recovery and sleep. That puts us prime now as we get through the holidays, and we come back and we are hit with the blizzards of New Year New You. And all of those New Year commitments that you're going to make are going to be resolutely forgotten by February. It allows you to lay the bedrock for you to become the person that you want to become. And so what I thought we would do today is carve through some of the noise and put together an action plan around how best to approach the coming months of Q1. Now at Purple Patch, we call this our build phase. But we're gonna go through three main things today. Firstly, we're going to reflect on the offseason phase, we need to have a little bit of taking stock of what we have achieved hopefully, over the last few months. We're then going to pause and think about success. What are we trying to do here? Now we have a lot of different listeners for everything from world-class athletes to people who are just starting their intention to go on a performance journey. But ultimately, we are unified by a desire to improve. But what does that mean? What is success? What do we see in our role as the coaching team to help you excel and succeed? And then finally, armed with that information, number three, we're going to pick apart some of the strategies that you might want to employ in Q1 to help you not only have a successful first three months of the year but lay the bedrock to absolutely prime for you to achieve your goals over the whole year. Yes, this is a performance journey, just not a short-term intervention. It's on today's show. But before we get going, we're not going to do Matt's News-ings. We're going to do word of the week, Barry, you get to play the ukulele enjoy.
Matt Dixon 05:40
Yes, it is Word of the Week, and it's been a few weeks since we've done Word of the Week. But you know what it is this week, we bring it back because we want to say a big thank you. Yes, thank you for a marvelous year. There are so many distractions to pull you away from your journey. The pseudoscience and misinformation out there, the promises of quick fixes, all of the elements that can drag you away from the fundamentals. You know that what we'd like to say at Purple Patch is to nail the basics. Well, right now, we finished this year as an organization as a team with a larger, more connected, and even more engaged community of like-minded individuals than ever before. For myself, Kelli, and the whole Purple Patch team, and for most of our athletes, Purple Patch is about more than a training company. We'd love to see you reach your athletic goals, of course. And in many ways, that's kind of the simple part. But our purpose is much broader than that. And to my mind is more meaningful. By chasing your goals, we also want you to improve your health. We want to enable you to bring your very best self to all aspects of your broader life. And finally, we love that as you go along this journey, you take this commitment, and you experience so many experiences that are out there, that you start to apply the lessons and strategies to enable you to stay with a forward center of mass to thrive under the broad demands of stresses that you're going to face in your journey. That's what we call establishing a high-performance mindset. We talked about that, in last week's show. We had terrific results in 2023. And we're incredibly excited about the year ahead. In 2024, we're going to be rolling out a brand new training delivery platform with a new hub for communication, community, education, and enabling us as a coaching team to get even more engaged. It's going to be for all Purple Patch athletes, we're also going to be rolling out a new education hub community offering. And that's going to be exciting. But all of the news for that coming over the coming month or so. We are excited to repeat and improve on our current progression and of course, get even better results over the coming year. And so the word of the week this week is Thank you. Thank you for being a part of the journey with us. We couldn't do it without your engagement, support, and belief. With that Barry, limited public acknowledgments for you and your hard work this week, I'm afraid. Yes, your thanks for the tireless work emerge in the form of a big fat, greasy palm of English Sterling, mate. Well done. You've earned it. But enough about you, Barry, this is for the people. And it is time for the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 08:39
Yes, folks, it is the meat and potatoes and today we're going to look ahead. But to do that, effectively, we must pause we must look back. Three key elements today show number one, we're going to have a brief review of the offseason as we like to call it. Then I want to outline how I view success in the performance journey for the year ahead. And finally, we're going to outline the work ahead, what we like to call Purple Patch - the build phase. I'm going to talk about what you should exit each of these phases with starting with the offseason defining success and then the build phase because this is all links in the chain that make up the journey for you to become your very best version of yourself. Whether it's just you applying yourself to become a better leader, a better parent, a better employee, or the very best endurance athlete possible, it all comes from the same place. So let's kick off today. And let's pause and reflect on the offseason. Now remember, each of our phases has three keywords or phrases associated with it. So with the offseason, it was very simple foundation skills, and technique, and those three rewards drive the meaning of all of the content and all of the training philosophy. You're looking to develop a foundation of tissue resilience. What I like to think about with tissues, is resilience your muscles, your tendons, and your ligaments, are all built up so that they're healthy and primed to absorb and adapt to the upcoming training. That's what I think about the foundation of elements. It's not base building in the old-school cycling vernacular, it's a foundation of readiness. Now with that, it's a foundation of you being a healthy human being and building a certain level of cardiovascular condition as well. But that's not the primary driver throughout the offseason.
Matt Dixon 10:52
The second element is the ability for you to upgrade your technique and your skills. Very, very important. So that becomes an element that we've done over the last few months of Purple Patch athletes, where we've had a focus with the key workouts being focused less on the physiological development -- how hard are we going to do, what are the intervals that we're going to progress -- and instead, having a complete obsession of the mastery of technique, development, and application of that technique, into skills, a great example of that would be some of the work that we've done on our cycling sessions around Terrain Management, and how you can get the best speed return for whatever power you have. And of course, over the season, your power is going to increase. But if you know how to use it, you're going to go faster for longer. So that's the primary driver throughout the offseason in three words. Coupled with that offseason has been a mentality of high patience. In other words, we've been explicitly talking to our athletes about not chasing fitness, not seeking validation of the worth of this training by -- am I getting fitter? Am I getting faster? am I improving my thresholds and all of the other physiological measurements that we sometimes have as a barometer of the success of training? This is truly a phase of preparation is preparatory for you so that you can optimize your performance in training and the adaptations that yield from it in the months ahead. So in many ways, it is like building a foundation of the house, but not in the old school way of thinking about this high high volume when the days are getting shorter and shorter and shorter, colder and colder and colder, as they are, of course, in the northern hemisphere. And this becomes important.
Matt Dixon 12:53
But that's not the only element that we've been focused in on the offseason. At Purple Patch, we don't think about the performance journey just being built in your endurance training. We've also been thinking about the baseline habits that we want to integrate. So we've had a lot of people as training, stress has been lower throughout this phase, really focusing on okay, this is a time that I establish my quote, performance baseline a lot of the language that we've used over the last few months of this podcast of really sound healthy eating habits. Over the last few months, and, for the coming weeks, I'm not obsessed about a massive training load, I'm not obsessed about getting fitter and fitter, stronger and stronger, faster and faster. So I can create a base layer of really healthy eating habits on which I'm going to build my fueling, which will help support and facilitate my training in the upcoming months. So dialing in daily eating habits, making sure that we are healthy, and doing everything that we can to try and future-proof against colds and other viruses by really healthy hydration. And starting to develop the foundational habits, prioritizing sleep, and even some of the organizational effective and management tools of training that we know are going to become ever more useful and important as the training load goes up but life demands continue. So this is just a phase of preparation from a physical standpoint, but also habit development and starting to develop tools that we are firstly creating a baseline of health but also on top of that, actually setting ourselves up to be equipped and master our understanding on what we are going to leverage to manage our training over the coming months.
Matt Dixon 14:56
So emerging from this highly flexible and lower stress phase of training. The goal is for every participant to emerge into the New Year motivated, fresh, feeling rejuvenated from the rigors of the journey of last year, and excited for the journey ahead. But in addition to that, real success is that beyond the motivation and incitement, you are physically prepared to handle your upcoming training. In other words, we want to optimize the response to the training that you're going to put in. And you've become more of a master of how you're doing things. In other words, upgrade your skills and techniques across whatever is important to you. This is a phase of the year that is not where we are chasing race readiness, prime fitness over the whole year, and huge physiological gains, such as improved sustained power or pace. But ironically, it is a phase that in many ways, is the fundamentally most critical phase of the whole year. Yeah, I'll say that again. Offseason is not when you're chasing gains from a speed standpoint, but equally critical in the arc of the journey for anyone who is chasing speed and long term. So in other words, you're not chasing it right now, but if you don't do this, you ain't gonna get it in the future. And that becomes the really important component. And so for the sake of this show today, what I want us to do is just simply unite and imagine that this is where we find everyone -- Successfully committed to the offseason, not gone rogue and random, has developed a little bit of skill development, and is primed to start training hard. And guess what? This works. I want you to take the opportunity when we talk about the offseason and a lot of folks that have a real challenge buying into the concept, retaining structure, making sure that you're still training, not just taking a break to spend time with family and friends, but engaging on a lower stress structured technical development phase of the program to ensure that you yield success.
Matt Dixon 17:24
And I want to talk about a specific Purple Patch athlete, Kyle Carrick. Because he just posted on our internal committee page, this. One of his elements, Kyle is a triathlete, and one of the elements he decided to focus on was swimming throughout this offseason. Now this wasn't a huge time commitment. But he engaged not in trying to swim harder and harder and gain fitness and instead spent the last three months focusing on technical development. He's a member of our tri-squad. So he's not coached individually, but he engaged and leveraged the expertise of the coaching team, particularly coach John Stevens, who is our swim expert. And here is his story, unsolicited that he decided to send out to the rest of the Purple Patch community. Coming from Carl, says, we all have our sim journeys, but mine took a giant leap forward. I'm an adult onset swimmer. I put in several consistent years of training and saw my swim times improve, but then plateaued. I'm sure it sounds familiar to many of you guys, by the way. Now, my swim times are not breaking any nautical speed records, but I wasn't last out of the water. But this last week in the middle of his offseason, when we're not chasing speed, we're not chasing bigger fitness, I was shocked that I had found myself with a seven-second PR in the 100 then I nearly repeated the same time in a simple endurance workout. This was nearly a 10% increase in speed on a personal best that had not improved over the last six years. Now, I would normally write this off as me just miscounting laps, but it's a little hard to do throughout 100 yards. My focus during Swim School, which is what we labeled the swim component of our offseason programming is getting to the pool three times a week. Normally it was twice a week. While I thought I was starting to make some connections to my stroke, I didn't really notice over the initial months a marked improvement in speed until this week, and then boom, it happened. This was very much a 'gradually then suddenly' experience. And so I hope all of you Purple Patch athletes out there who haven't yet seen the improvements that you might have hoped for out of Swim School, stay with it, it might be just around the corner. Who would have thunk it, ladies and gentlemen, that skill development and technique would foster and produce results? Now with that technique, what Kyle has to do, and the rest of the Purple Patch athletes, is to retain a focus on holding that technique as we start to build the fitness up, the build phase. That's it. So that's the offseason. And that's a little reflection.
Matt Dixon 20:23
And before we jump into the next chapter and phase of training, the build phase of training, I want to just pause and align ourselves on how we view success. What are we looking to achieve here? What's the big project that we're looking for? Well, there are multiple elements to this. The first is your athletic success. We want you to nail your goals, whether you've decided to compete in a 5k, whether you're looking to finish your first half Ironman, or whether you're looking to win a world championship, athletic success is of course important. But we think in broader terms than that, that's almost the easy part of this. We want to, by taking this journey, help you show up daily, in your daily endeavors, whether it's family, whether it's work, facilitate your daily performance, and then of course, it's built on great stable energy, optimal cognitive health, and a platform of health.
Matt Dixon 21:24
We also want to ensure that you are investing in yourself, your future proofing, and your future proofing against the risk of major disease, all of the major diseases, we're helping set yourself up for the highest functional living that you can have. So that in five years, 10 years, 20 years, you're not forced to hold the handrail going upstairs, you don't pull a muscle by lifting the luggage into the overhead. And we wanted to ensure that no matter how much time each of us has left on this earth, we have the best quality of life possible. But the final element of what we talked about in last week's show was to help, through this journey, you develop a toolkit, a toolkit that makes up what I'd like to label the high-performance mindset. Because the journey of your commitment, your athletic commitment, your your process of personal well-being, your sporting journey, that is the place where you can draw so many lessons that apply to every part of life. It can equip you to be Battle Ready, to keep you no matter what happens throughout the journey, whether you're thinking about work, whether you're thinking about life, whether you're thinking about sport, the lessons that make this up, enable you to be adaptable, resilient, draw from expertise, (inaudible) keep you in a forward-center of mass. And that's a key part of a high-performing human being. And so these are the elements that we think about. And I would say makeup what it means to be a part of Purple Patch. It ain't just the plan. Okay, it's not just the plan.
Matt Dixon 23:13
So under that big umbrella, how do we get you there? What are the things that we think about? Well, there are three main elements that we can pick apart. The first is training. And as we launch into next year, the training, to be successful in your time-starved life, has to be integrated. We have to ensure that for every person we're supporting, we enable a program that can integrate into their life, so that it becomes a part of their daily existence, rather than just an additional thing dumped on top of life that feels like suddenly, you've got a second job, you've just got one more thing to think about. Because whenever it becomes that, you'll never, ever, ever be successful through the lens that we're thinking of -- best health, best sporting results, best ability to show up in daily life. By context, the training that we deliver has to be dynamic. It has to be flexible. Because ultimately, we can't predict what's going to happen. Of all the other things that you have going on in your life. The demands from work, maybe some travel with it, friends, family, social commitments, the need to rejuvenate and step away. Life is a living, breathing thing. It's not a spreadsheet, we're not building a bridge. And so your training program has to have some flex to it. It can't be programmatic 10 hours, 12 hours, 14 hours, progress, because suddenly you're just forcing that training into life, and something has to give. So we need to think about a training program that integrates into life but can also dance, expand, and restrict with life as all of the stressors in life, heck, give them merry dance along the way. And so our training approach is built around these principles.
Matt Dixon 25:12
The second element of that is all of the key performance habits that we know foster the best leverage are adaptations from that training and also equip you to have stable energy to have optimal cognitive function to ensure that your future-proofing against future diseases. So habit development is also a key part of being a Purple Patch athlete. Beyond your workouts, it's critical, nonnegotiable, that you develop key habits to support the training you are doing to foster better daily performance and invest in your future self. For every single Purple Patch athlete, we first aim to try and build a very robust platform of health or a strong physical ready state, which I like to label your performance base layer. And it's around those key elements. First, I want you to be healthy, because you can't achieve anything if you ain't healthy. I want you to have consistency of energy throughout every single day. And I want you to develop a bedrock of readiness so that on top of it, you can layer training and racing demands. And so even folks that are chasing world-class athletic performance, need the same performance base layer, as me and you. And so that's a key part of it is that every single participant in our program isn't just receiving a program, but is going on a journey to develop a performance base layer.
Matt Dixon 26:45
And then finally, through experiential learning, the lessons that come out of the journey, that journey that you have committed to, you can develop a high-performance mindset. These are the traits and strategies that every high performer in any arena that I've ever interacted with holds in spades. It is an educational process, a learned process through coaching. And it applies to every aspect of life, it is amplified when you are also a part of something. A high-performance mindset comes to a magnified state with bigger results when you're not going on the journey alone. When you're a part of a team, a group, or an organization with your buddies, and you're holding each other to account, support, and develop an understanding, that's when the results become even more potent.
Matt Dixon 27:42
And so ultimately, all of this is to say that your success can only be delivered and achieved by approaching your journey through much more than just a set of workouts. If you're looking ahead to next year and thinking, give me the training plan, and let's make it up -- ooh, I've registered for Ironman Texas in April, what's my plan? -- that's not going to equip you to be successful along your performance journey, A, in what your time result is in that race, but more importantly, and more profoundly in your health and how you show up in other areas of life, you can't achieve that via just looking at a plan. It doesn't matter if it's equipped by EA with some black-box methodology. It doesn't matter if it's written by the best coach in the world. What matters is that for you to be successful, no matter what your sporting goals are, I encourage you to think more broadly. You want to have Yes, a plan that's flexible and dynamic. You also need to develop management tools to work that plan, then you need to create habits. And you need to foster education to ensure that you're focusing on the right habits. So I always talk about InsideTracker, by the way, that can help drive a little bit of focus in that area. And then realizing that a lot of the value that you're getting from this is the experiences of the journey itself, the lessons, and those can be molded more through a coaching perspective, someone that has a 10,000-foot view that seen it all before. That's why in the highest performers, both in a sporting context and as they rise through organizations, are much more likely to seek external help as a sounding board, as a source of perspective and expertise. And then finally, your results, you will be driven to better and greater if you amplify your individual goals and approach through what we know works -- Team. Become part of something, lean in, even if you're experienced and sage, be a mentor, give to others, and help others, it's going to help you. And so before we talk about what's coming in 2024, with the build phase, whatever your goals and quests over the coming years, I encourage you to set your lens and success based on the elements that I highlight. That's the same if you're coming to the show, through the lens of an athlete, a leader, a member of the military, a parent, or an employee, pick your poison. Everyone builds success from these elements that we discuss.
Matt Dixon 30:40
And so with that in mind, as we start to emerge out of the offseason, now we get to think about the next phase of training -- Q1. We're going to bucket everyone together. What's the title of this phase? The build phase. Think about that -- offseason, yes, that sounds like tanning salons in Miami. Now. We get building. It's the contractor phase. Now remember, offseason, three words -- foundation, technique skills. You lay down the preparatory work, now we build. And what are we building? Three words and phrases, fitness, strength and power, skills. I'll say it one more time -- fitness. Okay, we're building fitness. Strength and power, we'll a couple of those together and skills. Yeah, we don't let go of the skills quite yet. Now as ever, just as I talked about your success is anchored in more than just training or exercise. And so we are layering the bedrock for you to excel as a human through the comprehensive approach.
Matt Dixon 31:54
And so for triathletes and endurance athletes, what's the focus going to be from a training standpoint? Well, there are multiple things that we are going to place our emphasis on, and I encourage you to place your emphasis no matter what race you're getting ready for. So for the athletes what this looks like, number one, over the next three months, we are still going to have a heavy emphasis on technical development and skills. It's not a short-term project. And we are still going to be patient that we're going to be talking about here. So let's leverage the opportunity to continue on the journey of technical development and skills, particularly in the first six weeks or so, all the way through til Valentine's Day, over the coming year. That's number one.
Matt Dixon 32:44
Number two, we're gonna do once a week, some very, very high-intensity work, what we call your VO2 Max, okay? Your maximum ability to uptake and then utilize oxygen for energy. And what that is, that very, very challenging, short sprint type workout is it's a potential primer, it raises your ceiling, so that then when you start to build your endurance and resilience, you have flexibility physiologically to improve more. Now, I won't dive into the details here. But it's a perfect time of the year when your overall focus on longer-distance resilience and endurance is a little bit on the back burner to drive potential. So we're going to do some VO2 Max work very, very high-intensity work.
Matt Dixon 33:39
We're going to start to as well integrate some strength-driven endurance training. What that means for the triathletes out there, is some low RPM, high torque, work on the bicycle. So having your leg speed go slower, putting more muscular force and load against you, yes, we're going to put some challenging work up hills or on the bike trainer. And that becomes important. We call that the Purple Patch special sauce because for years we've been integrating this into our training with great success for our cyclists. If you were a runner, this would be about doing extended hill repetitions. We're gonna do some short high-power stuff on the run, but also some strength-driven driven run as well. And then as we go through the coming months, we're going to start to incrementally, very gradually turn up the training session durations, as we progress through the months. And that's how we very patiently build our fitness.
Matt Dixon 34:42
Now the backbone of it all, in fact, no not the backbone of it all. At the center, the nucleus of all of this endurance work for our endurance athletes is that we are wrapping all of these endurance sessions around the absolute central focus, strength and conditioning. And that's going to be very demanding, and the highest priority of all of our training over the next three months. That becomes important. But with that work, strength, and power, and you can see how it is -- strength training, strength-based running, low cadence riding, high, high power VO2 Max, there's your strength of power fitness, incrementally building it up, all with a very, very heavy emphasis on technique and skills. With that, what the emphasis isn't about throughout January, February, and March is priming for race readiness -- that's coming, race readiness. We're also not ironically, really seeking visible, tangible performance gains in the classic sense. So I'm not looking for you to boost your FTP or drive it up, it's all going to be happening. But I want your fitness to drive almost like sliding an envelope under a door, it's gonna creep up on you. And we're just still in the preparation phase of stuff. I want you to have high power, the highest power of your life over a short duration, I want you to get strong, I want you to enhance and become a master of your technique. So that when you exit Q1, here's the state of readiness.
Matt Dixon 36:22
Number one, you have a tremendous foundation of technique and skills. You are strong, so you have developed your baseline strength. You have an improved ceiling or power potential across the disciplines that are important to you. You're pretty fit, you're robust. So that means that you're ready to go and take on some early-season races. But on top of it all, you don't have a huge accumulation of mental or physical fatigue. Some stuff is gonna be tiring, and sessions will create some fatigue, but you don't have any of the more chronic accumulated fatigue, that means that you're motivated, you're healthy, and your tissue is healthy. And you've got this wonderful opportunity as you come out of the coming quarter, you have the opportunity for development, performance gains, big jumps in potential. Now, this is the intention of how we're going to drive every single Purple Patch athlete unless they're doing a very early season race. That's what we're looking to do. And in support of that, we then need to guide, because remember what success is and how we achieve it, we need to guide some other elements. So we're going to talk about that.
Matt Dixon 37:49
Then in Q2, you're going to be harvesting the riches of your effort over Q1 and your offseason. That's going to be called the priming phase when we're going to leverage the power and strength and we're going to get fast. For the metrics head, yes, we're going to drive towards greater sustainable power, we're going to have an emphasis on muscular endurance, and you are going to be performance-primed. So that's what's coming. And of course, we'll talk about that in about two months. But right now, build, build, build, build. That's the training element. But remember, in support of it, habits. what should we focus on? What should you focus on in Q1 for long-term development? Well, the first is organizational effectiveness. I want you to become a master of Training Management. We start to incrementally build training, I want you to master the management of that training because training isn't too too high right now. And so we do that through some very specific tools and practices that all Purple Patch athletes leverage and it's very, very simple but it's hugely influential on your success and decision making throughout the arc of the rest of the year.
Matt Dixon 39:08
Number two, continue to develop baseline eating habits very healthy, that can optimize daily energy, support the training load that we're asking you to do, and maximize the quality of your recovery and sleep. We also are going to develop and ingrain habits around hydration, both inside of your training sessions and more importantly, to facilitate recovery, daily energy, health, and performance across life. So fundamental things. And a lot of the Purple Patch athletes will start Q1, leveraging InsideTracker, so that we can have a baseline, define some personal focus, and then at the end of the quarter, going into early Q2, repeat the process to ensure (A) there isn't too much fatigue accumulation, but also see the measurable results of those baseline habits that we integrate, so though, we can say good, I am, quote, performance ready. Now I'm going to prime it. Now I'm going to drive it to high performance. And so as important as your training goals, we aim for you to exit Q1 with some parallel habits and strategies. We want you to become a master of training management within life - critically important and empowering.
Matt Dixon 40:24
And so you should ask yourself, have you got your recipe right, where you feel the progression in training, but also control and presence across other aspects of life? And if you typically don't, Q1 is the time to master this. We also want you to have a bedrock of great eating and hydration habits so that you are ready to support the uptick of training that is going to inevitably come and have optimal daily energy. And we want you to equip yourself with measurable insights via InsideTracker. So that we can show you and you can show yourself what 12 weeks of focus has delivered in a quantifiable approach. That tastes good, isn't it, I've seen improvements. And this is the journey. This is our broad approach and guiding method to drive your performance. Now how we boost this? Yes, there are superpowers -- the team. When you become a part of Purple Patch, you're never just coached by one person, you have access to the whole Purple Patch team and all of our associated experts, because we understand that individuals do best when they enjoy the support and accountability of a team environment and we actually can draw of collective expertise to help you do better. We know that high performers embrace coaching. They love immersing themselves as part of a team purpose. And we know that when you have a sense of belonging and a purpose that goes beyond yourself, it fuels your performance but also you get to contribute and foster the conditions that support a performance culture. And that's how we become a performance factory of many different people at different levels, with different ambitions and goals. And so we don't chase success via individual journeys, even know every individual is enjoying their journey. We tailor to individual needs, but we optimize through common practices, mindsets, and culture. You build a team, you build social learning, you build community, and we get better results. Support, mentorship, and accountability, it is amplified across the board. And that's why all of our coaches, whether they're coaching 10, 12, 15, 20, individual athletes, they all feel like they coach all Purple Patch athletes. That's why we're so invested heavily in the community and connectivity of our global athletes. You cannot optimize results on an isolated journey. Don't go it alone. Become a part of something, lean in, get more. It's that simple. Q1, A new year. High performance, your best. It begins. We're ready. Are you? Happy holidays guys, speak in the new year. Take care.
Matt Dixon 43:18
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. And it's really helpful if you leave a nice positive review in the comments. Now any questions 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, and do whatever you do. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
training, journey, purple, performance, patch, offseason, focus, athletes, year, elements, q1, work, build, habits, phase, success, develop, improve, results, chasing