The Purple Patch Strength and Conditioning program is a targeted and year-round progression of strength, coordination, mobility, and movement patterns. It should not dominate much time, as a couple of 20 to 30-minute sessions will yield great results. Embrace the program, commit to it, and shift your lens from viewing strength simply as a necessary evil to reduce injury risk to an essential performance enhancer.

With all of the training on the schedule, you might think it is impossible to squeeze in yet another session, but finding a way to integrate at least one weekly session, often doubled with an endurance workout, is of high value to you.  

If we are applying strength training to our professional athletes, we typically place the sessions on the same day as their tougher training, but time-starved athletes will more often be challenged to nail a complete key session and then have time to hit strength.  We must be more flexible in application, with the only important thing is to ensure you have enough time (24 hours) to recover before hitting a key session. As an example using our San Francisco group, this could be Monday morning before a Tuesday morning Key Swim.  It is possible to do a strength session immediately before or after another workout, but be aware of what impact it may have. If the prescribed session includes high-intensity intervals, you really don’t want to go into it depleted from strength. If you have a long endurance ride or run and perhaps are training for an IRONMAN then doing that workout with a little fatigue could help give you an idea for the feel of the latter part of the race.