How to train for Hyrox. Part 1

If you’re thinking of training for any of the following events: hyrox, spartans or other OCRs, trail half marathons and even trail marathons and trail ultras…

This week I’m going to be putting into words my thoughts about what all these event types share, and how you should go about training for them.

Yes, they are different events that have different demands - whether on the energy system front or skill based front.

But, there are certain aspects that unite all of them. They each require a solid aerobic foundation, and anaerobic capacity. They each require aspects of full body strength. And they each require commitment, drive and determination to achieve.

I’m going to start today’s post with specific regard to what the research says about aerobic and anaerobic development. This is particularly significant because this is the main thing that unites all these events.

Let’s get the main mental hurdle out the way for most of you immediately, which is: just because you see the speed at which the event is performed, does not mean that all your training has to mirror that.

What you see on race day is not how those athletes train on a regular basis.

If you look at what the majority of successful athletes do, 80% of their running is done at an easy, aerobic level. 20% of their training is done at a harder level, but here’s the catch - there are two formats to this, pyramidal or polarised, and knowing when to use each type for that 20% of work is key. Looking at the data, the best set up is to train in a pyramidal way for 8 weeks, followed by 8 weeks of polarised. This basically means that the first 8 weeks has a focus on aerobic intervals, followed by 8 weeks of higher lactate/Vo2 Max work (Filipas et al 2021: Effects of 16 weeks of pyramidal and polarised training intensity distributions in well-trained endurance runners, Scandinavian Journal of Sports Medicine).

I’m not going to go into the finer details of what this looks like on a workout by workout basis, because there are too many variables to tackle in one post, but I can’t emphasise enough that “easy means easy”. If you don’t have the discipline to be able to control your easy workouts, then don’t expect to be able to progress your fitness particularly well - you will burn out very quickly.

So to sum up this first post: I think a 16 week programme that focusses on the event (split into two 8 week phases) works well. And on the aerobic front, the take away point is easy for the majority, and hard but well controlled on the interval front.

Next post, I’ll be talking strength, and how you should periodise it across a 16 week programme alongside what I’ve just spoken about above.