At NZ Manufacturing one of our favorite aspects of running a resistance training equipment company is connecting with our customers and seeing all the wonderful things they are doing in communities around the world.

This month we sat down to talk with Matt Dixon of Purple Patch Fitness to learn more about his amazing background and how he uses NZ Manufacturing’s equipment to give the athletes he works with a leg up on the competition!

Read on to learn more about Matt’s incredible background as well as his unique skill set that has allowed him and his company to thrive over the past several decades.

Can you tell us a bit about your background?

My background was originally in swimming and I came over from the UK in the early 90’s. I was one of the first wave of international swimmers that came to attend college in the US on a swimming scholarship. I have an educational background in psychology and exercise physiology and after I finished with school I started coaching in the Midwest and eventually went back to graduate school to get my master’s degree and started coaching at the University of South Carolina, which is where I first got into triathlons.

I’m a wonderful example of how to poorly train for professional triathlons. Because swimming is typically a sport that’s prone to overtraining, I took that same work ethic and essentially overtrained for 3 sports. Early in my triathlon career, I drove myself into the ground with the help of a few bad coaches. The reason I think it’s important for everyone to understand this is that even with my background in swimming, a degree in clinical psychology, and coaching experience, I still allowed this to happen to me. This chain of events informed my transition into triathlon coaching.

When I first began my journey into triathlon coaching in the early 2000’s, I saw massive symptoms of underperformance at the professional and amateur triathlon level. At this time, I did something which was really polarizing by not looking at training validation through the number of hours trained but rather created a system where we looked at a variety of different performance metrics which included nutrition, strength and recovery. Because of my intense focus on recovery, I became labeled as “the recovery coach”. This multi-pillared approach to training is still what we use today when we work with professional and amateur athletes at Purple Patch Fitness.

What is Purple Patch Fitness?

Purple Patch Fitness is a company that I started 12 years ago and has had consistent growth, which has all been completely organic. I was very lucky to work with a number of amazing athletes early on, which helped us to be extremely successful. My goal in coaching athletes through Purple Patch Fitness has always been twofold:

  1. Help fitness enthusiasts of all levels
  2. Ensure education is the backbone of everything we do

At Purple Patch Fitness it’s important to understand that we work with athletes of all levels. That includes professional triathletes as well as amateur athletes of all levels. We like to think of ourselves as a human performance company because a large percentage of our clients are not triathletes. They just adopt a performance mindset, which is key to succeeding at almost any task in their lives.

At Purple Patch Fitness we offer a variety of different training options, some including 1:1 coaching from myself or one of our other coaches as well as a broader program that allows us to work with a larger number of athletes, both local to our facility here in San Francisco, but also across the country and even around the world. All of our programs are done through prescriptive programming which includes video and written materials as well as live coaching. We offer multiple weekly live coaching sessions where we literally watch athletes as they’re training to help them make small adjustments which can often lead to significant results.

The primary goal of all the coaches here at Purple Patch is to help our clients be the best version of themselves.

This may involve intense triathlon training, or it may be just focusing on improving nutrition or exercise regimens for busy parents. We do our best to meet our clients where they are as opposed to forcing a program that will likely not work if there is not buy-in from the client. We feel that our role as coaches is especially important right now as helping individuals develop healthy habits and protocols to thrive and improve their mental and physical health is vital to the wellbeing of each and every one of us.

Which NZ Manufacturing products do you use in your training?

The most common NZ Manufacturing products we use are the StretchCordz® with paddles. We have hundreds of athletes all over the world who are using your products based on our recommendations. We love that athletes can use different resistance cords with varying gauges. We’re using these products in 3 main areas of our training:

  • Technical development – This helps us to teach the right biomechanics to our athletes so that we can really drill down into the correct form for various strokes.
  • Muscular endurance – The StretchCordz® gear also helps us to make sure athletes are retaining proper form and doing it at a fast pace that is as close to stroke rate in real swimming as possible.
  • High power tension work – This allows us to focus on tension work while still retaining proper form.

Why do you continue to use NZ Manufacturing resistance training products?

There are several things that I really like about NZ Manufacturing products, including:

  • They’re extremely easy to use
  • I like the high-quality mounting strap
  • They easily attach to almost anything
  • The gauge of rubber is really nice and seems to hold up well in the water
  • We’re able to easily mimic swimming form very well

Do you have any social media accounts where our followers can find you?

Sure, you can always find me on my website, https://purplepatchfitness.com or on Instagram at @purplepatchfitness and on twitter at @purplepatch.

Thanks to Matt Dixon for taking the time to speak with us today!

We really enjoyed our chat with Matt today and as always, we’re so proud of the wonderful work our customers do on a daily basis to improve the lives of athletes around the world. We commend Matt and his team for their work to advance the sport of triathlon and their keen focus on training the right way! Feel free to reach out to Matt if you have any questions about his company, and as always give us a call or email if you’d like to learn more about any of the NZ Manufacturing products featured in this blog.