Hyrox training plan: it's an endurance sport, so train it like one.

Why I programme Hyrox closer to a triathlon block than a strength block — and what that changes about your week.

I was a national level swimmer as a teenager. Twenty hours a week in the pool, and every session built around intervals — sets, rest ratios, heart rate, hold this pace for this long, go again. I burned out, got injured and I then stopped.

Later I came to triathlon, and something changed in how I trained. Heart rate started to matter more than the clock on the wall. Not because pace stopped counting, but because I needed to know which system I was training and whether I was actually in it. That's where zone models come in, and once you've coached yourself that way for a while it's very hard to go back to guessing.

Then Hyrox. Eight stations, eight kilometres of running, and a sport that arrived with no coaching tradition of its own. During the rise in popularity of Hyrox over the last few years there have been varying approaches to Hyrox coaching and training methodology. A lot has been borrowed from CrossFit and trends from hybrid strength-and-fitness training, because that's where the early athletes came from and that's what the gyms already knew how to deliver. However that's changing with more runners and aerobic endurance athletes coming into the sport.

I build Hyrox training plans differently. I include aspects of both but arguably closer to how you'd build a triathlete than how you'd build a CrossFitter. I've now programmed for over sixty athletes on this basis. This is the argument for why.

First, what we mean by hybrid

Hybrid training and hybrid fitness racing get used interchangeably. The actual definition of hybrid training is far more polarised than that, but online both terms usually just mean mixing strength and aerobic work.

Plenty of sports have always done that and called it cross training. Purists call it hybrid training. Everyone else assumes hybrid and Hyrox are the same thing.

The people programming Hyrox as strength and conditioning with conditioning attached aren't fools, and plenty of their athletes are quick. But I'm interested in the specific demands of the multi-disciplinary sport that is Hyrox.

They're also right about several things. The stations do need strength — a 152kg sled on a bad floor does not care about your VO2 max. Muscular endurance under load is a real quality that endurance athletes often lack. Training that keeps people interested gets done, and a varied hybrid week keeps people interested. In a multi-disciplinary sport, breadth genuinely matters.

So this isn't strength versus running, and anyone framing it that way is selling something. It's a question of proportion, sequencing and what governs the plan.

What the race actually asks of you

Start with the numbers. Eight kilometres on the website, closer to 8.7km on the day once you account for the course variance and the roxzone. Running makes up more than half your total race time.

But look closer than that. Even if your stations and your running look similar on paper, consider how much of that station time is spent resting — hands on knees, shaking out, waiting to be able to move again. For most athletes the real split is closer to 60:40 in favour of the running.

Then there's the bit between. Eight transitions, and the running in them is rarely straight — most set-ups make you turn, so it's decelerate, change direction, rebuild pace, on legs that are already gone. Almost nobody trains that.

Does your training reflect a 60:40 split? For most people the honest answer is no, and it's not because they're lazy. It's because station work is more interesting, more measurable and easier to feel good about than an hour of steady running.

What a Hyrox training plan should actually look like

Before the detail, here's the shape of it.

Sixteen weeks, if you've got them. Eight weeks of general preparation into eight weeks of race specific work. Eight weeks rarely shifts much unless you're already close to the goal — I need a decent runway to develop an athlete rather than just tire them out.

Four sessions a week minimum. Five or six will produce more if your life genuinely allows it, but four is the floor I'd programme for a Hyrox athlete. Two of those are strength — one upper, one lower — and the rest is running and aerobic work.

Strength gets built early and dampened late. Development is the job in general prep. Once you're in the race specific block it moves to maintenance, or I turn it down, because the race specific stress is climbing and something has to give.

The running does the opposite. It starts as easy aerobic volume and movement quality, adds tempo and threshold work through the middle, and only in the last six to eight weeks does compromised running — running straight off a station — come in.

And the week gets front-loaded, especially for anyone with kids or a job that bites. Put the sessions that matter on Monday and Tuesday. Miss a Wednesday and you've still got four days to catch it.

That's the skeleton. The rest of this piece is why it's shaped that way.

Intensity distribution, and why your watch zones are wrong

Here's what endurance coaching brings that hybrid training usually doesn't: a framework for how hard, and how often.

Three zones — easy, moderate and hard — separated by two thresholds.

LT1, the aerobic threshold, sits between easy and moderate. It's the upper limit of your aerobic system, the point where your body shifts towards using more glycogen for fuel and blood lactate begins to climb above its resting level. Below it you can go for a very long time. Just above it, you're accumulating a cost you'll pay later.

LT2, the anaerobic threshold, is where moderate becomes hard. Intensity becomes unsustainable, lactate rises rapidly, and performance breaks down. It's not a wall so much as a slope that gets steeper very quickly.

Most people never find either. They use the zones their watch shipped with, which are calculated from a maximum heart rate estimated from your age, which is an estimate built on an estimate.

Here's how I test them instead.

For LT1, I start with the MAF equation — 180 minus your age. That's your maximum aerobic function, and it gets you in the neighbourhood. But the equation is a hypothesis, not an answer, so we validate it. I'll ask an athlete to exercise continuously for an hour — running if their running is there, cycling if it isn't — and then we look at average pace and heart rate together. What I want to see is someone holding the same pace, the same effort and the same heart rate, steadily, right at that calculated threshold. Sometimes it takes a few attempts to find it. That's fine. It's worth finding.

For LT2, a 30 minute benchmark. Warm up properly, then run hard for thirty minutes, and we take the average heart rate and pace from the last twenty.

Those two numbers then go into TrainingPeaks as individual heart rate and pace zones, attached to specific intervals inside each session. If you've got a Garmin or similar, the workout syncs to your watch and tells you whether you're in the zone the session was written for.

That sounds like admin. It isn't. It's the difference between a session that trains the system it was designed to train, and a session that felt hard and did something else. It removes the guesswork, it stops people overcooking work that was meant to be easy, and it lifts the quality of every session in the block. Better sessions, repeated for sixteen weeks, is most of what improvement actually is.

Strength has a job, and the job isn't strength

I still programme two strength sessions a week — one upper, one lower. Push, pull and core up top. Hip dominant and knee dominant work below, mostly unilateral, because you race on one leg at a time.

Two rep ranges doing two different jobs: five to ten for strength, ten to twenty for muscular endurance, in that order, in the same session. Each one finishes with short sharp erg intervals, paired to the day — ski after upper, row after lower — and something explosive thrown in.

What changes is the emphasis across the block. Strength development is the focus during the general preparation phase. Once we get into the race specific phase I put it into maintenance, or even dampen it down. Not because strength stops mattering, but because the race specific stress is climbing and something has to give.

I learned that one the hard way. Heavy back squats, a back injury, six months compensating out of the pain, an opposite hip that went stiff and stopped extending, and eventually a shin that gave up. Six months treating shin splints when the problem was in my hip. The pain and the problem are often in different places.

I'd still recommend strength work to every Hyrox athlete. Just periodised, and supporting your running rather than competing with it for the same recovery.

The thing nobody counts: total load

This is the part I care most about, and the part most training plans ignore entirely.

A Hyrox training plan counts sessions. Your body counts everything. We look at training load and we don't appreciate all the other stressors we're balancing at any given time. Sleep, work, small children, illness, money, the general friction of an adult life. It all draws on the same account. A plan that only counts sessions is only counting a fraction of what your body is being asked to absorb.

Preventing illness, injury and burnout isn't just a health consideration. It's a performance one. The athlete who trains at eighty percent consistently for sixteen weeks beats the athlete who trains at a hundred and ten for six and then spends three weeks unable to run. Fitness rises best through accumulation of consistency over time.

Which is why proper periodisation matters — so you're not hammering multiple systems at once. High running volume, heavy strength and high intensity stacked into the same week isn't a hard training block, it's a bet.

In practice this is what changes:

• A missed week gets repeated, not compressed. Same week again, but train to feel rather than to set-in-stone targets. Life already spent that capacity.

• Cut a session short if you're not on top of it. As long as it's a one-off. The last thing we want is pushing through when the body isn't at a hundred percent and buying an injury with it.

• Busy parents get the week front-loaded. Key sessions on Monday and Tuesday, flagged as the priority. Be disciplined early and a missed Wednesday costs you nothing — there are four days left to catch it.

• Beginners get more rest between efforts, so heart rate actually recovers, and get programmed on RPE rather than fixed numbers until I know what their numbers mean.

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None of that is soft. It's the arithmetic of a body that only has one bank account.

Simulations, and why yours ran quick

Most people want to do a full race simulation before race day. I don't think it's totally necessary, though it depends on the ability and mindset of the athlete.

What I use instead:

• An opening half simulation — the first kilometre through to the end of the burpee broad jumps. This is for practising pacing and not letting your heart rate run away in the first half.

• A second half simulation, done after a block of continuous cardio lasting however long the first half would take you. So the back end gets trained on legs that have already done the work.

• Half running, full stations — every station with reduced running, to feel how the station order stacks fatigue up. Arguably that one's a three-quarter simulation.

  
  

And a warning about the number your simulation gives you. Hyrox is often a still air room with thousands of other athletes producing heat, sapping oxygen out of the air and dumping CO2 back into it.

Your gym is not that. Simulations run quick, and they give you a false perception of your likely race time. The best race practice is racing.

Don't copy the Elite 15

There's been a lot of talk about weekly running mileage in the last couple of seasons, and a lot of athletes chasing numbers they saw on someone else's Instagram.

High mileage is not the most important thing. Pushing your mileage up too much too soon greatly increases your risk of illness and injury, and it dampens the very adaptations you were chasing.

Copying elite athletes is never a good idea. It works for plenty of top age-groupers, and I understand why — but those athletes are likely fast responders, they usually have a previous sporting background, and they've built their capacity for training over years, not weeks. Some may be stretching the truth about their week to gain a bit of attention, too.

Look at the variety instead. The elite field includes a swimmer in Alex Roncevic, a cross country runner in Dylan Scott, and Hunter McIntyre out of CrossFit. There is no single body type, no single background, no one training style. That's the beauty of a multi-disciplinary sport, and it's the honest answer to "what should my week look like".

But there are patterns emerging, and this is the one I'd stake something on: plans with too much strength or too much intensity are not as effective as plans with an endurance focus.

What we actually know, and what we're guessing

I want to be straight about the evidence, because a lot of confident coaching content isn't.

The published research on Hyrox specifically is thin. A handful of papers, one small study with eleven participants, and as far as I can find, no training intervention study — nobody has taken two groups, trained them differently for sixteen weeks and raced them.

So everything above is endurance and strength science applied to a sport it wasn't written for, filtered through what I've seen coaching over sixty athletes through their races. That's not nothing, and it's not proof either. Anyone telling you they've got the optimal Hyrox protocol is ahead of the evidence.

What we do know is well established elsewhere: aerobic base takes time to build and is hard to fake, intensity distribution matters more than intensity, and total stress governs adaptation. I'd rather build on that than on a screenshot of someone's training week.

What a coach is actually for

A good platform with heart rate data and accurate tracking is essential. I use TrainingPeaks and I wouldn't work without it.

But that's half the picture. The other half is the written feedback, the mood, noticing the niggles, spotting the exact week adherence or performance first starts to slip. Checking in personally, and knowing the person well enough to tell the difference between a bad night's sleep and the start of something.

That's what a coach does. Makes informed decisions using the data, but not the data alone. It's also why AI can't, and arguably won't, fully replace coaches — AI can handle the data beautifully, but somebody still has to understand the individual and make the call.

And it only works both ways. No feedback, no changes. I'm adaptive with programming, but I can only adapt to what you tell me. We both have to turn up.

If you change one thing in your Hyrox training plan

Work out what block you're in and what that block is for. Then find your two thresholds, so the easy work is genuinely easy and the hard work is genuinely hard. Then protect your consistency like it's the asset it is.

That's a Hyrox training plan that works, more or less. The rest is detail — and the detail is what you're paying a coach for.

Ross Fisher is Head Coach at Hyrox Training Club Christchurch. Open solo PB 1:10:32 at Cardiff; 0:59:19 in the men's open doubles at Dublin with his partner Steve.

If you want the station-by-station detail — six tips for each of the eight — that's in my free Hyrox Performance Guide.

Managing a niggle rather than fixing it, or training hard without getting anywhere? Get in touch — no pressure, I just want to help.