379 - The Keys to Successful Coaching: Lessons From 20 Years in the Trenches
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
In this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon discusses the evolution and future of coaching on the Purple Patch Podcast. He emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach, integrating performance with life demands, and proactive coaching that anticipates challenges. Dixon highlights the need for mutual investment, collaboration, and simplification in coaching. He warns against the "magic method" and "will it work for me" traps, advocating for individualized training plans. Dixon also stresses the role of technology, particularly AI, as an assistant rather than a replacement for human coaching. The podcast is based on feedback from athletes, with high satisfaction scores and a focus on continuous improvement. If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
:29-4:08 Episode Intro
5:03-8:00 The Narrow Lens Problem
8:16-14:50 Coaching is Proactive, Not Reactive
14:51-18:32 Coaching is a Team
18:37-21:10 Art of Simplification
21:10-26:40 Red Flags of Coaching
26:45-end The Leadership Element
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Transcription
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, and welcome to the purple patch podcast as ever, your host Matt Dixon and today we thought we'd dig into a discussion around the current state of coaching. Today's episode was born out of two things, really. Firstly, our quarterly athlete survey that we like to do so that we can have a litmus of how we're doing as a team, and then the subsequent coaching round table. About every two weeks or so, we have a big round table amongst the team of coaches at purple patch, and we had a particularly thorough discussion last week. It was fueled by the direct feedback that we received from our athletes. And the reason that we do this once a quarter, have a real deep dive is that we have a key pursuit of excellence. It's kind of the equivalent of athletes watching game tape after a big game, try and get better, improve, see what we can do to build on for greater success. A key aspect that we talk a lot with our athletes is around having high expectations and support. And so we set the standards high for ourselves and our athletes, but we also support those athletes so that they can foster success. And so in many ways for us as a team, this was our standards. Check in, we measure ourselves consistently across the same meat tricks and check in to see where we can improve. Now, as a leader, I believe in transparency. We are a coaching team, not a set of individual coaches, and I have a mission to unite the coaching team across broad success.
Matt Dixon 02:02
I don't want one athlete or coach to be successful and another to be struggling. I want us all to go on the journey from good to great to world class, and so we have a transparent process. We see what each other are doing well, maybe some aspects that we can grow, and so that we can learn from each other, so that we can improve as a collective. And so we encourage every coach to engage in a high performance trait, something systematic, that we integrate reflection. In other words, this is a moment to pause, look back and say, What am I doing? Really, really well? Those are the aspects you want to build on. Where are the areas I can improve? Maybe I need to course correct on some of my practices and habits. And out of that, what are the lessons, and therefore the actions and adjustments that I will make moving forward, the lessons emerge from the feedback they receive from their coaching and their athletes, as well as, of course, reviewing other coaches feedback. It is a great team based solution. Well, as we completed our review, it made myself pause and reflect a little bit. After more than 20 years of coaching, how's that industry evolved? More importantly, where does it need to go next? And so for this episode, I want to establish a listening lens for you, if you're listening today as a coach, I hope this helps you hold up a mirror to yourself to refine how you show up for your athletes and, of course, yourself. And if you're an athlete with a coach, this should help you understand what great coaching really looks like, so that you can get more from your partnership. And finally, if you're self coached, well, this might just be a conversation that helps you assess whether now is a right time to explore structured personal guidance. And so let's buckle up. Let's discuss endurance coaching as a whole, my perspective, out of 20 years of experience all in today's meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 04:14
Yes, the meat and potatoes today coaching through a 2026 lens. We're almost there. Guys, 2026 Goodness me. What are the challenges? What are the opportunities? And some might say, what are the requirements to lead athletes to ongoing success? Well, information, data, technology is more accessible than ever before. I think we are now leading the smartest and best informed athletes that we have. What I've done is I've categorized the challenges and a few key points, and so why don't we just go through them one by one, and I'm going to title each one because I can't help but try and make it simple and memorable for you. Number one. I'm going to identify a problem. This is the narrow lens problem so much of modern coaching lives inside a spreadsheet or maybe an algorithm in a computer. It's data driven, but it's context blind. When coaching only focuses on sports metrics, athletes are forced into a false trade off between performance in sport and their performance in life. I really believe that true coaching sits at the inner section of humanity and performance sites. The vast majority of training athletes are not tracing performance in a relative vacuum, they face vastly different challenges than a professional athlete that has taken all of the components of lice as much as is under their control so that they can appropriately, I might add, really focus on physical performance in sport above all else. That's not us. We're looking for performance within context of broader life. And so for me, the great coaches always ask when they are prescribing any given session, not just what are the great intervals in the session, but what is the cost of this session, not just in energy output, but in life bandwidth, as much as we aim to design and program science based training, it's important to lay out a human aspect to the program. I always discuss dynamic programming that adapts to the ebbs and flows of life. Here's a stark truth in 2026 this is yet to adapt simply via what our readiness score is or our HIV tells us these aspects are really helpful, but they're not defining it's imperative that a coach shares this way of thinking with their athletes to educate and foster autonomy. It encourages athletes to retain awareness on how they actually feel, take stock of all of the various demands that they face across life so that they can execute a program that isn't dumped on top of life but integrates. This has been a starved truth for years, by the way. In fact, I could go all the way back to my first book, 2012 the world built triathlete, where I discussed that success is not measured by how many hours of actual training an athlete can accumulate over any given week. Instead, it's measured in how many effective training hours an athlete can accumulate over many, months, and this is a huge divergence, and I should add here, I'm not talking about less is more. That's one of my least favorite sayings. When it comes to endurance performance, it is about doing more of the more effective training. That's what you want to get done. And so if your plan doesn't breathe with your life. It's not coaching. It's just programming, even if the claim is it's science backed. The second key point, coaching should be proactive, not reactive.
Matt Dixon 08:18
This builds on point number one, you have a coach because you want someone that's all in, all in along the whole of your journey in reality that needs to be thinking ahead about what's happening in your life so that they can best support you. Coaching isn't about reacting, it's about anticipating. I can't imagine coaching an athlete without first having a really clear understanding of the weeks ahead. What are your demands, your true demands? What's your actual time availability, and how do I anticipate these demands actually impacting my athlete? What I then face as a coach is an optimization challenge. That challenge is design a program that takes all of these demands into account. I don't just write the best Iron Man program and leave it to the athlete to find their way through, to try and fit it into the nooks and crannies of life. Instead, I have to have a broad perspective of what's the actual life and framework that this athlete is actually navigating, and then I aim to integrate it the best coaches that I see out there, and there are many of them, by the way, are always one step ahead, preempting fatigue, thinking about upcoming travel, having in context, the different stresses in life often emerging out of work before they derail momentum. I would add to this that the great coaches also realize that when they write a training program, it's not static. It's not. Setting stone. In fact, we always talk about it as a living document. Here's a simple litmus test, if your week changes and your plan doesn't, you're not being coached. And so true coaching is pattern recognition, not damage control, taking the time up front to truly understand as an athlete, your own demands, your own travel, your own components, and identifying your capacity. And as a coach, ensuring that you have that before you write the plan. That's anticipation and that prevents challenges before they actually emerge. Number three, I labeled this as great coaching being a mutual investment. What's the foundation of coaching?
Matt Dixon 10:54
Many people think when they go and get a coach, that it's getting a training plan. Here's the foundation of great coaching. It's a single word, care, in the same way as if I was talking about high performing teams, and I wanted the foundation, the bedrock of a great team, it would be trust in coaching that's important. But I would say care. That's number one from our survey data, the number one driver of athlete satisfaction wasn't performance improvement, it was the feeling that their coach was genuinely invested in their goals. This is emotional work, and I don't believe that you can automate belief. I should be clear when we talk about coaching, caring is not cheerleading. If you want to achieve something remarkable, something that personally is important to you, I promise you this much, it's going to require great commitment, hard work, navigating, managing demands a massive amount of resilience and perseverance, if it means something, it's going to require navigating pressure. And so once an athlete sets their goals, the role of the coach is to deliver the appropriate challenge and pressure relative to the aspirations. It comes back to that high expectations. And so it's not my role as a coach, your role as a coach to sugar coat things. I certainly can't reduce the demands. The goal is there. My goal, my job, is to get the athlete to the solution. And so in other words, a coach's role, with a bedrock of care is to enable the athlete to meet the demands. When I coached the purple patch pros, I never got accused of being too easy. In fact, I think it was a pretty demanding coach, and that was imperative. After all, most of the athletes that I were coaching was trying to become world class athletes. And so I couldn't lower the standards. I couldn't reduce expectations. They were there. They were objective, and so I had to bring the pressure commensurate with the demands of what it takes to be world class and yet, when I reflect on our athletes, typically, they were incredibly healthy. They had a really low injury rate. They improved and they developed year on year. That was a one of our hallmarks, that we had long term athlete development. And on top of it, they stuck around. Our retention rate of coach athlete was around four times the industry naught. So how was this? I bought the pressure. I was demanding. The work was hard, but they excelled. It was because I balanced the pressure and all of those expectations with a massive amount of support. Now this only works if you get the first two components right, as we discussed, if you just demand, demand, demand, and have a narrow perspective, you're setting your athlete up for failure or burnout or, of course, injury.
Matt Dixon 14:16
And so if you're listening right now as a coach, let me tell you this, your athlete won't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Great coaching isn't cheerleading. It's been the anchor when things wobble and the mirror when ego takes over. Care is a bedrock of coaching. Okay? For point number four, let's broaden our perspective a little bit. It's about coaching. How we started the day, a coaching Round Table coaching is a team sport, even in one to one coaching, I would argue that no great coach stands alone. The best results tend to emerge. Coach from integrated systems specialists who collaborate to serve the whole athlete. If you're a coach and you're doing everything yourself right now, you're not demonstrating mastery, you're actually limiting it. If it were me, I would want my coach to seek guidance to help you navigate parts of your journey beyond their expertise. It's not weakness to collaborate. What it's called in my book is professionalism. If I was the leader of purple patch and wholly responsible for the success of the pro athletes, I can't imagine what the results would be. I was the leader. I was responsible, but I couldn't even imagine having all the answers. Simply put, I wasn't smart enough, and it would be impossible for me to make all of the decisions, quite often, tough decisions, in a vacuum, without support. When I reflect on all of the experts that were surrounding me to help these athletes excel. They were numerous.
Matt Dixon 16:03
I never went without one or two senior assistant coaches that could really help me fuel sometimes, experts in their fields, people that were great with Terrain Management, with mechanics around swimming and running, we leaned into experts names that I remember, Dr John ball out of Phoenix, Arizona, Dr Stacey Sims, Jerry Rodriguez of Tower 26 a slew of bike fitters fuel in and Scott tintle and various other nutritionists along the way, a wide range of fantastic body Workers, strength and conditioning coaches, the list goes on, and what emerged of the pros was a performance ecosystem. In other words, our collaboration became a superpower and in the world of high Information Access Now, as we lean into 2026 an athlete is typically miles ahead of where we were 10 years ago. And so the best coaching includes a broader perspective, an ecosystem of support, real support. And so if you're listening as a coach, I'm not suggesting that you're hiring experts, but you're out there ensuring that you have mentorship, that you have peer to peer support, that you have people in your local community that you can lean on to draw from their expertise right now, as we coach at purple patch, as people come into the center if there's a little niggle or a fear they're upstairs working with the Sports Medicine Institute, or a guest on this podcast a couple of weeks ago. Renee Songer with physical therapy, I don't try and execute bike fitting. That's not my expertise. We have Chris Soden, an ecosystem of support. Many of our purple patch athletes lean into fuel in, and that team, Megan Scott and the team at fuel in to have really qualified best in class support around nutrition, fuelling, body composition, health, longevity and more. This is performance evolution, and every coach has this at their fingertips, but it takes tabling the ego, tabling the aspect of thinking you need to have all the answers, being a little bit vulnerable and saying, How can I fuel the best journey for my athletes? That's where 2026 coaching goes. Point number five, the art of simplification. This is important. I place this one right after the team for a reason, as I mentioned in the last point, we have more access to information than ever before. In fact, I would argue there is no information gap for endurance athletes, but what I do see consistently is a knowledge gap in a world that is drowning in data and content and information. The coach, their job is to create clarity. Most athletes don't need more information. In fact, information is cheap. They can go anywhere.
Matt Dixon 19:19
They can even go on to AI and find it what they need is translation. I always see my role as a coach and our team of coaches to serve as a filter. What's good versus bad, what's relevant versus irrelevant. What are the aspects that this athlete should double down on this because, because it's going to provide a high yield that's actually going to drive the performance needle versus aspects that might be good but aren't going to be beneficial to them, at least. Now push back on focus, because by adding that, it. Will only draw into greater complexity and ultimately, confusion. Let me give you a secret around champion athletes, and this is the same across all sports. Champion athletes love simplicity. They're never looking to add more. They're looking to reduce the noise. And this extends to training and so as a coach, ask yourself, do your athletes just know what to do, or do they know how to do it well and why it matters in their journey? The role of coaching is translation filtering, so that the athletes can have simple clarity. If we get that right and we repeat it, guess what? Athletes improve every single time. Alrighty. So we're five focus areas in I'm going to broaden my perspective, and I'm going to give a couple of red flags here.
Matt Dixon 21:02
Okay, there are two big challenges, and this is age old, but there are two challenges that I see with coaching, that if you're a coach and you're applying this, we might want to adapt ings, and if you're an athlete and you're listening to a coach, and this is their promise, you might want to think about evolving your approach. Number one, what I might label the magic method applying the same system to every athlete, just scaled down in volume. You know what? This is? A recipe for mediocrity. Unfortunately, it's really common, and it often emerges from inspiration of programs leveraged with professional athletes. Unfortunately, this is really common, and the inspiration for these types of programs often emerge from either athletes that are absolutely time unbound. In other words, they have endless hours to train, or from professional athletes in bike production. An amusing saying used to be, and I think it's an equivalent to this. Don't worry about women's bikes. Let's just shrink it and pink it. That's not what we're looking for here. It's a big red flag to assume a training program designed for a professional athlete seeking world class performance with no limitations, when their primary focus in life is pushing their body to the very limit is the program that is suitable for every very busy, time-starved athlete looking to integrate sport into a world of massive competing demands, it's a different challenge. And let me tell you, one program is not magic. It doesn't fit all the other red flag is what I would label, will it work for me? Type trap? This emerges when ex athletes tend to coach other athletes the way that they train themselves. And this often occurs because, quite simply put, the athlete who was probably very successful doesn't actually understand why they achieve success. I can't tell you the amount of ex professional champions who have struggled with coaching, especially when they start to coach a broad range of athlete type. The heart of this challenge is that they often became great athletes without actually understanding why.
Matt Dixon 23:32
And that's okay, there were athletes, and it is vastly different skill set to pursue an individual goal and excel at it, versus the selfless endeavor of coaching people, particularly when you start to coach people with different levels of talent and different challenges than you faced as an athlete. Now I should point out there are exceptions. There is a host of coaches out there that were a world class athletes and have become tremendous coaches. Julie dibbens, super athlete, great coach. Tim Reed, ex purple patch, pro World Champion triathlete, super coach. There are many more out there, but the truth is this is the exception rather than the norm, and this is often amplified because there's a host of ex age group athletes out there that equally have enjoyed individual success at the age group level. Love their sport, fall in love with it, and think I don't want to do this corporate job anymore. I'm going to take up coaching. And the unfortunate approach, sometimes, quite often, I have to say, is to then apply the program that worked for them to all of their athletes. It's no wonder that the results are nothing short of haphazard. Myself as a coach, I was always known as lower volume. In other words, a lot of people mistake. My approach for less is more. That's not what it was. I was always seeking optimization for my athletes to stay with a platform of health and build performance on top of it, and I also understood that some athletes responded better to a slightly lower volume approach relative to their peers. Others needed more work. Tim Reid, I just mentioned him, a great coach. He won the world championships, and yet, as a professional athlete, he was only training, typically around 18 to 22 hours a week. At that same time, I was coaching Laura Siddle, a fearless competitor, multiple time champion, highly accomplished. Typically, we would be hitting 28 to 32 hours a week. That's not low volume at the age group ranks Sami ings, very well known athlete that I coach. He won the amateur Division at the Hawaii Iron Man. His average 10 to 12 hours a week. Versus rich Viola, equally talented, equally driven, had a demanding role as a CEO, but luckily, had just a little bit more training hours, and so we leveraged them. He responded to that work. He also benefited from the partnership of purple patch pro Meredith Kessler, in other words, it was what was right for the athlete.
Matt Dixon 26:20
Real coaching isn't replication, it's adaptation. And so the best coaches don't just hand their athletes their playbooks. They write a brand new one every time for each athlete. It's about establishing what your non negotiables are, what your system is, and then applying it to each athlete's life. Principle number seven, the leadership element. Let's think about the role of a coach. It's very simple to get the most out of athletes. In other words, coaching is leadership in disguise, because it's exactly the same role as a leader in any endeavor. In fact, in our wind cycle program, in which we work with leadership teams and organizations, we do a lot of work where we help leaders and managers shift and evolve their mindset and their practices from more of a management approach to, in fact, adopt the practices and strategies of a coach, a key part of this, and what I would like to see more of in the coaching industry, is to give athletes what they need, not what they want. That requires a little bit of backbone and a healthy dose of compassion. The best coaching relationships that I see thrive on what you might label honest friction, really tough, truthful conversations about rest priorities and even course correcting on wholly unrealistic goals. When I reflect on my best coaching relationships, it never, ever emerge from me just agreeing. In fact, growth doesn't come from agreement. It comes from trust built from truth. In 2026 this is ever more important, because as coaches, we are leading athletes who are smarter, that are better informed and have greater access to information. And so we must step up,
Matt Dixon 28:23
be strong in our opinions, highly collaborative, and speak the truth. All right. Principle number eight, you knew it was coming, technology, AI, and what will label the human edge, the explosion of data and wearables is a gift, but it's also a trap. And as we dance into this arena, let me say something. If your approach to AI and data is through the lens of a Luddite, where it's fearful, protective, and you're pushing it away, you're going to get left behind. It's here. The ground is moving under our feet. In fact, with the businesses and organizations, this is their number one thing that they're aiming to navigate, how do we build a positive relationship with this explosion of AI? I would encourage every single coach in 2026 to become AI literate and embrace leveraging AI as a part of your coaching process. It is not, I promise, you going to make you irrelevant, and it's not going to replace you as long as you lean in. Technology measures performance, coaching develops it and so AI tools and platforms can absolutely enhance structure, accountability, but what they can't replicate is empathy, intuition, belief. I always view AI as the world's best assistant. It enables you to become wholly more efficient and leverage for patterns that you just can't simply identify alone. Over the years, the value of information is going to get less and less and less. Because no one is going to struggle to gain information. The role of a coach is to help interpret that information and data so that you don't drown in it. In other words, the coach will provide context, perspective, empathy, and all of these are critical, and this is where the value of coaching goes up, just remember that a computer is not actually understanding the words and numbers. It's simply learning how to put those words and numbers together based on all the information out there that it can go out and claw and this is incredibly powerful. It's exciting, but the coach is the person that will facilitate translation and nuance. This will magnify performance levels, if it is done right. The future isn't man versus machine, it's machine enhanced humanity. That's the truth. The future of coaching won't be about chasing more data, it'll be about developing better humans. Coaching will remain a craft, not a code. And so let's finish today with some rapid fire insights put all together everything we talk about as we hold hands and go into 2026 here's the truth, the best coaches don't build followers. They build self sufficient athletes. Our role as coaches is to try and create autonomous athletes that lean on to us for support and helps. If your coaching philosophy can't evolve, it's already obsolete. Performance isn't built on complexity. It's built on consistency and connection. And let me wrap it up with this, coaching is probably 20% science. 80% of it is communication. That's the truth of it. So with this in mind, I'm going to ask a few questions. Number one, do you feel like your coach is helping you progress or just keeping you busy? Does your training fit your life, or does your life bend around your training? And perhaps, finally, this one on a scale of one to five. How likely are you to recommend your coach to a friend?
Matt Dixon 32:19
What would it take for that number to be a five? That's what I want you to consider. As I said in the beginning of the episode, this episode stemmed from a coaches meeting fueled by direct feedback that we received from our athletes, and so I know you're going to be interested. So what are the highlights of the coaching survey that we went through, satisfaction across all purple patch athletes around our team of coaches, is four and a half out of five likelihood to refer a purple patch coach to a friend, to a fellow athlete, 94% that's a pretty high referral rate. I'm pretty happy with that, confidence in the program, clarity in the program, 93% and finally, an important one for me. When athletes were asked about education and support that they received in the broader aspects of performance ings like nutrition, recovery, strength, organizational effectiveness, mindset, they scored 4.3 out of five, pretty good. Still work to grow. We want to get that up to a 4.8 4.95 but as an average across the large group of athletes, that's pretty good scores, but we can improve. We want to blow our athletes away. So if this conversation resonates, if you're curious about world class coaching and what it actually feels like, reach out. Info@purplepatchfitness.com. We're happy to discuss our coaching, and we also want to make sure that you find the right fit for you, whether it's with US or elsewhere. We offer a complimentary needs assessment to understand your goals, your situation, and get you on the best path. Because ultimately, coaching should feel like it helps you get better, but feel better and perform better across life. That's what we want, and we want to make sure that you find the right fit for you reach out. Alrighty. Have a great day, guys. Thanks so much for joining and thank you for listening.
Matt Dixon 34:26
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, it. 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 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
coaching roundtable, athlete survey, high expectations, transparency, performance metrics, dynamic programming, proactive coaching, mutual investment, emotional work, team sport, simplification, AI literacy, leadership element, human edge, autonomous athletes