5 Hills I'd Die On as a HYROX Coach

5 HILLS I'D DIE ON AS A HYROX COACH

HYROX training can get complicated pretty quickly. More running, more stations, more compromised work, more volume and more intensity. Spend enough time on social media and you'll probably find someone telling you that whatever you're currently doing isn't enough.

But more isn't always better.

After years of coaching hybrid athletes, there are certain principles I keep coming back to. They're not particularly revolutionary, and they're certainly not going to make for the most exciting Instagram content, but they're the things I believe make the biggest difference to an athlete's long-term development.

The reality is that most athletes don't need a more complicated training program. They need to get better at consistently executing the fundamentals.

So here are five hills I'd die on as a HYROX coach.

1. BORING WINS RACES

One of the things you'll notice about good athletes is that their training often looks pretty boring. They're not trying to set a personal best every time they walk into the gym, turning every conditioning session into a competition or judging the success of their training by how long they need to lie on the floor afterwards. They're simply doing the work they need to do, consistently, week after week.

And I think that's something a lot of people struggle with. There's a tendency to believe that the harder a session feels, the more productive it must have been. If you finish a workout feeling like you've got something left in the tank, surely you could have done more? Well, yes. But that doesn't mean you should have.

Training is about creating a stimulus that your body can adapt to. Sometimes that requires a very hard session. Other times, it requires you to execute relatively straightforward work at an intensity that allows you to recover and come back ready for the next one. The athletes who improve the most aren't necessarily the ones doing the hardest individual sessions. They're the ones who can consistently string together weeks and months of quality training without constantly needing to recover from their own enthusiasm.

The takeaway: Judge your training by the progress you make over time, not how exhausted you feel after one session.

2. THE BIGGER THE BASE, THE HIGHER THE PEAK

Everyone wants to get faster. They want to improve their race pace, get better at compromised running and hold higher outputs across the stations. Naturally, the temptation is to spend more time training at those higher intensities. But your ability to perform and repeatedly tolerate high-intensity work is heavily influenced by the aerobic foundation you've built underneath it.

The better developed your aerobic system is, the more effectively you can support sustained efforts, recover between harder bouts of exercise and tolerate the overall demands of training. And in HYROX, that's pretty important. You're not performing one maximal effort and then going home. You're repeatedly moving between running and stations, accumulating fatigue while trying to maintain a consistent output.

That's why easy running and lower-intensity conditioning play such an important role in our programming. They allow us to accumulate aerobic training volume without creating the same level of fatigue as constantly working at threshold or race pace. That doesn't mean we shouldn't train hard. Of course we should. But the harder sessions become much more productive when they're supported by an appropriate amount of lower-intensity work. If every session you do is hard, there's a good chance you're compromising your ability to perform the sessions that actually need to be hard.

The takeaway: Protect your easy sessions. They're what allow you to get more from the hard ones.

3. YOUR ENGINE WILL OUTPACE YOUR STRUCTURE

This is probably one of the most important things to understand when increasing your running volume. Your cardiovascular fitness can improve relatively quickly. You start running more regularly, your breathing becomes easier, your pace improves and suddenly you feel capable of doing considerably more work. But just because your engine can handle something doesn't necessarily mean the rest of your body is ready for it.

Your muscles, tendons, bones and other connective tissues all need time to adapt to the repeated mechanical demands of running, and those adaptations don't necessarily happen at the same rate as improvements in your aerobic fitness. It's one of the reasons we see athletes run into problems when they dramatically increase their training volume. They feel fit enough to run another 20km per week, so they do. Their cardiovascular system might be perfectly capable of handling the additional work, but their calves, Achilles, knees and feet might have a slightly different opinion.

This becomes particularly relevant in HYROX because running isn't the only thing we're asking your lower body to tolerate. You're also squatting, lunging, pushing sleds, performing burpees and accumulating fatigue through other conditioning sessions. All of that contributes to the overall training demand.

That's why we want to build running volume progressively, considering not just how much you're running but everything else you're doing alongside it. There's no universal percentage by which everyone should increase their mileage. What matters is your training history, current capacity, recovery and how you're responding to the work.

The takeaway: Increase your training load at a rate your body can tolerate, not simply at a rate your fitness allows.

4. FATIGUE IS EASY TO CREATE. ADAPTATION IS HARD.

If you asked me to write a workout that would leave you absolutely exhausted, I could probably do it in about 30 seconds. Assault Bike, burpees, sled pushes, a few runs thrown in for good measure, minimal rest and repeat until you can't move. Job done. But that doesn't necessarily make it a good session.

And I think this is where we need to distinguish between making someone tired and actually making someone better. Fatigue is an outcome of training. It isn't necessarily evidence that the training has been effective.

Every session should have a purpose. If we're trying to develop aerobic capacity, we need to prescribe work that allows us to accumulate an appropriate amount of time at the intended intensity. If we're trying to improve maximal strength, we need enough recovery to produce the force required. If we're trying to improve HYROX-specific performance, we need to introduce the right combination of movements, intensities and fatigue to develop the qualities we're targeting.

Those are three very different training problems. And yet it's incredibly easy to turn all three into the same thing by simply adding more work, reducing rest periods and making everything harder. The problem is that when every session becomes a competition to see how much fatigue you can accumulate, you lose control over what you're actually trying to develop.

This is something we spoke about in the MARCHON HYROX Blueprint. Just because a workout looks like HYROX doesn't automatically make it the best way to improve HYROX performance.

The takeaway: Know what you're trying to improve before deciding how hard the session needs to be.

5. RECOVERY IS PART OF THE PROGRAM

You can have the best training program in the world, but if you can't recover from it, it doesn't really matter. Training provides the stimulus. Recovery gives your body the opportunity to adapt to that stimulus.

And while people are often willing to spend considerable amounts of time and money looking for ways to optimise recovery, the fundamentals are usually where the biggest opportunities exist. Are you sleeping consistently? Are you eating enough to support your training? Are you consuming sufficient carbohydrates to fuel your harder sessions? Are you managing your overall stress and actually respecting the easier days in your program?

Because if the answer to those questions is no, I'm not particularly interested in which recovery boots you're using. That's not to say additional recovery strategies can't have a place, but they shouldn't distract from the things that have the biggest impact.

One of the mistakes athletes make is treating recovery as something separate from training. They'll follow every interval, percentage and prescribed distance in their program, but then completely ignore the recovery requirements that allow them to perform those sessions consistently. And over time, that catches up with you. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do for your next hard session is make sure your easy day actually stays easy.

The takeaway: Get your sleep, nutrition and recovery habits right before worrying about marginal gains.

FROM THE MARCHON HYROX PROGRAM

To bring some of these principles into practice, here's a session that demonstrates exactly what we're talking about. Nothing particularly complicated. No stations, no transitions and no unnecessary fatigue. Just a straightforward running session with a clear purpose.

45 MIN BASE BUILDER

PART A: 30 MIN RUN | EASY BASE

Start with 30 minutes of easy, conversational running. The intensity should be controlled enough that you could comfortably maintain a conversation and feel like you could continue beyond the prescribed duration. The objective here is to accumulate aerobic work without creating unnecessary fatigue.

PART B: 15 MIN RUN | TEMPO

Straight into 15 minutes at a controlled, sustainable tempo effort. We're increasing the intensity, but this isn't an all-out effort. You should feel like you're working with purpose, while still maintaining control over your breathing, running mechanics and pace.

COACH'S NOTE

The biggest mistake you can make with this session is running the first 30 minutes too hard. If you turn the easy portion into a moderate or hard effort, you're changing the purpose of the session and potentially compromising the quality of the final 15 minutes.

The restraint is part of the workout. We want to accumulate aerobic volume first, then progressively increase the demand without losing control. It's not the most exciting session you'll ever complete, but that's kind of the point.

ONE THING TO REMEMBER

None of these principles are particularly complicated, and that's really the point. You don't need every session to feel like a race, every week to be harder than the last, or every workout to leave you on the floor.

You need a training program that develops the right qualities, progresses them appropriately and gives you the opportunity to recover and improve.

Good training isn't about how much you can do. It's about how much you can consistently adapt to.