How to become a Hybrid Athlete.
So you’ve decided that you’re going to try this whole Hybrid thing. How do you go about choosing those first Hybrid goals?
Well, try to see the goals as a way of creating the things that you might currently be lacking. For many people starting out with Hybrid training, they often come from a strength training background. In which case, we want to choose a goal that will pull the biggest levers early on for them, so they can get in place the changes (both habitually and physiologically) that will serve them the best in the long term.
Namely, this means looking for goals that are going to help them maintain their strength as much as possible, and on the endurance side, put that first big push in place to build out their aerobic energy system.
Yes, I know the idea of doing intervals on a track with your top off looked like it was fun. And we’ll get you to that stage, I promise! But the hard fact of the matter is that if you haven’t ever done much running, you get out of breath on a set of heavy squats, or when you get to the top of the stairs, there are better ways to be spending your time.
Initially, I think it’s best to choose a 6 month timeframe, whereby the end, you’re able to complete something like a half marathon distance, or 2-2.5 hour run continuously. And, be able to demonstrate that (hopefully) your strength has been relatively unaffected. A win win first scenario basically.
This way, you can spend more time across the week getting those crucial aerobic training sessions which will underpin all your training going forwards. Remember that threshold training is still aerobic, so don’t be fooled into thinking that all your running should fall into the “easy” category. But ultimately, this is an approach I recommend to many people starting out.
Why lots of aerobic training vs hard intervals? This is a brief crash course, but here goes: You’re all familiar with the classic marathon guy look, yes? Tall, skinny, can run miles on miles and not be out of breath? It’s down to their physiology. They tend to have a greater amount of capillary beds (the smallest endpoint bit of blood circulation) that are heading to the main muscles that need them - so abundant blood flow, and thereby oxygen supply. Coupled with a greater mitochondrial mass (tiny energy creating things) throughout their body, they have the ability to synthesise ATP via the oxygen and bodyfat supplies at an above sustainable rate.
But, the classic strength athlete does not often have this naturally. On the plus side - we can directly increase the amount of mitochondria and capillaries in your body by doing the very thing that requires them to be in more demand - easy, aerobic training.
Basically, you can change your underlying infrastructure, so that you become more like the endurance athlete. And this is why we need that focus early on, so you can begin to make some headway on what isn’t always an overnight quick fix.
Ironically, although the purpose of harder, shorter intervals is to some extent (pacing aside) to generate higher levels of lactate production, it’s the opposite of what we want to happen when we’re actively competing (like racing), and it’s the abundant mass of mitochondria combined with your ability to consume oxygen and shuttle it into the muscle mass which should mean that we avoid high levels of lactic acid production.
Side note, lactic acid is not the enemy, it’s just the alternative fuel source that your body creates when the oxygen runs low in the working mass - it’s less efficient than the aerobic system, but once you’re using that energy source, there’s a finite amount off time left until your time to exhaustion arrives. Obviously, if you can stay as aerobic as possible, your time to exhaustion might be drastically extended (think all day ultramarathon pace). If you can get faster whilst staying as aerobic as possible…you see where this is going. Dominant endurance athletes are aerobic monsters. They can run fast with lower levels of lactate vs their opponents.
Let’s briefly circle back to that Threshold word I used earlier. As I mentioned, this is best thought of as “High Aerobic”, or, that point at which your body is hovering at producing some low levels of lactate (specifically at 2-4 mmol/L if you want to get freaky with this). This is a highly trainable area - and it allows you to train in longer interval repetitions because your body is beginning to cross that “Threshold” between aerobic and anaerobic, without getting too anaerobic. Being able to train this area will mean that your mitochondria can get some efficiency training to be able to better handle that lactate when it gets produced - basically, a better rate of conversion to energy (rather than being overwhelmed by it within the muscle mass, and it being dumped into the blood stream as excess waste).
Threshold is something as a Hybrid Athlete, you can train a lot of. It’s far less stress inducing on the body as harder, shorter intervals, and it gets you really good at understanding more about what paces you can handle over distances so that you don’t just run all your runs way too hard.
And obviously, if you were looking for a 6 month series of the most effective way to do all of this, then look no further than the Hybrid Foundation Programme. I’ve specifically designed it to be the biggest intervention to your training to give you the biggest long term results.
You can find it all here: