The Purple Patch Squad is a global powerhouse with hundreds of AG athletes worldwide crushing their goals in swim, bike, and run. It’s a hub for high-powered execs and time-starved athletes looking to toe the start line in top mental and physical health, ready to let it rip.
Like Olympic medals, squads like this don’t come out of nowhere. They’re built on years of hard work, decades of knowledge, trial, error, constant care, and a dose of magic.
Matt Dixon, will tell you that magic comes from the athletes themselves. Their dedication. Their drive. Their camaraderie. That’s very true. But it also comes from him.
If you could design an ideal coach from scratch, you’d get Matt. He’s a former pro triathlete and 2x Olympic Trials finalist in swimming. (400 & 200 IM, 200 & 100 breaststroke, thank you for asking.) He has a Master’s degree in Clinical & Exercise Physiology from the University of South Carolina. And, as he’ll tell you himself, he made some huge mistakes as an athlete. Mistakes hat helped him develop his wildly successful training philosophy that prioritizes strength, resilience, and overall health over huge volume.
“You have to think about training as a long-term performance progression,” he says, building in rest and recovery for optimal results. This was radical stuff in the more-is-more aughts.
“As an athlete, I really ignored some of the elements that fuel long-term performance, like adequate recovery and nutrition, and I just threw work at the problem,” he says. He ended up with chronic fatigue and underperformed as a result.
When he became a coach, he was determined to help other athletes avoid the same mistakes. He launched Purple Patch Fitness, ready to help fellow athletes get it right from the start.
In the early days, he coached pros only. You have likely heard of every one of them: 11x IRONMAN and 23x IRONMAN 70.3 champ, Meredith Kessler; 6x Wildflower and 2x IRONMAN champ, Jesse Thomas; and 2x IRONMAN champ and 2009 Kona runner-up (at 37 years old), Chris Lieto.
Age group athletes—including a slew of C-suiters in California’s Bay Area, where Matt’s based—saw the pros’ success and wanted the Dixon magic. It became a lightbulb moment.
“These people are under huge pressure, and they need to show up every day. They’re struggling with very much the same problems as my pro athletes,” he says. And thus began the movement that is now the Purple Patch Squad: A global community of athletes of all levels with busy lives, trying to do something extraordinary—coached remotely by Matt and a team of coaches he personally trained.
“When I started, my identity and passion was coaching world champions,” Matt says. “Now my identity and passion is helping people.”
Below, Matt outlines Purple Patch’s driving philosophies—and how to start using them in your own training and life.
NAIL THE BASICS
These are Matt’s non-negotiables. Nail these for happiness and longevity in sport:
- Fuel after every workout.
- Go really easy on the easy days.
- Do year-round strength.
- Hydrate properly every day.
- Prioritize sleep.
FIND YOUR SQUAD
Matt credits his early pros’ success to taking a team approach. Strength training and having the courage to recover were novel concepts for elite triathletes 20 years ago. The team environment created one of support and accountability when trying something new.
The same is true today. Having a squad alongside you on your journey can make it much easier—and fun—to crush your goals.
Bonus: Teams are a perfect place to find or become a mentor to fellow athletes, keeping the stoke high for everyone.
GO TO CAMP
Training camps are where trust and understanding among athletes are built.
“There’s nothing more powerful than when you take people out of their home training environment and get them uncomfortable together,” Matt says. “Camaraderie through suffering.”
DON’T SWEAT A BAD WORKOUT
“Workouts are not where the magic is,” Matt says. It’s all about the systems you build, the decisions you make to support your goals. And if one of your goals is to be a great athlete, a winning system starts with nailing the basics, as outlined above.
BE YOUR OWN CEO
Matt’s a sought-after speaker for the corporate set, because, he says, the traits of successful athletes also help build successful careers: maintaining energy, capacity to handle the work, performance readiness, trust, support, accountability, communication, resilience, adaptability, and performance under pressure.
Can your pursuit of sport make you a great leader? Heck yeah it can. (Maybe try putting tri on your resume?)
On the flip side, questions he asks C-suiters are also important for athletes to ask themselves to optimize training: “How do you organize your week? How do you filter distractions? How do you navigate failure? How do you focus on the boulders, not on the sand?"
SWIM SMART
OWS:
“It doesn’t matter how good you are in the pool,” Matt says. “A lot of people carry tension into open water because of the fear, the lack of familiarity.”
There are 2 important things Purple Patch athletes do to thrive in open water:
Get uncomfortable. Practice swimming (in a safe, monitored environment) where you can’t see much in the water. Get used to the sensation of not seeing the bottom.
Do circuits. Ins and outs. This might look like a 4-6 minute swim in which you round a buoy, come back out, run across the beach, then take a break and do it again. This helps you learn to sight—and get your land legs back quickly.
In the pool:
Focus on form.
“We like to build endurance through short intervals rather than through long and slow,” Matt says. The goal is to hold great stroke mechanics at a strong effort, with small rest intervals. His athletes do a lot of 25s to a 200 steady, multiple times, with 5-6 seconds rest.
Change your effort.
Matt will have his athletes pick a distance, say 100 yards. They’ll swim it 2x easy, 2x harder, then 2x at their hardest effort. As you go harder, you should get faster.
“What we see a lot of the time is athletes will go harder and harder, but their speed stays the same,” Matt says. A set like this teaches athletes to gain propulsion and go faster with higher effort.
Inspired? Check out how you can join the Purple Patch squad here.
We’re so proud to support Purple Patch athletes, and all of the teams and athletes making big goals and getting after them this year.
