One of the easiest traps to fall into with HYROX is spending far too much time worrying about the stations. Everyone wants a better sled push. Everyone wants a faster SkiErg. Everyone wants to smash their wall balls without breaking. All useful stuff. But there’s a fairly large elephant in the room… You’ve still got to run 8 bloody kilometres. 😂 Eight separate 1km runs, with a station waiting for you after every single one. And the real challenge isn’t running the first kilometre when you’re fresh and feeling like an Elite 15 athlete. It’s whether you can still run properly after the sleds. After the burpees. After the farmers carry. After the lunges. And eventually, after seven kilometres of running and seven stations have already tried to ruin your day. That’s why we bang on about running so much inside HYROX Blueprint. Your easy running builds the aerobic engine and gives you the foundation to handle more work. Your threshold and tempo sessions teach you to hold a strong pace for longer without completely blowing your doors off. Your intervals help develop speed and your ability to work at higher intensities. And your compromised running gives you experience finding your running rhythm again when your legs would much rather you stopped. You don’t need to become an elite runner to be good at HYROX. But if your running falls apart halfway through the race, being brilliant at shaving 15 seconds off your SkiErg probably isn’t going to rescue you. Stations matter. Strength matters. Technique matters. But never forget what connects the whole race together. Running. Lots of it. Build the engine, learn to control your pace and make sure you’re still racing when everyone else starts surviving.

Hi, team! 👊 Me again with the same reminder… You probably don’t need another new training method. You don’t need the latest supplement your favourite athlete is suddenly promoting. You don’t need to completely rewrite your programme because you saw a spicy HYROX workout on Instagram. And you definitely don’t need to change everything because you had one rubbish week. Most people already know the basics of getting fitter. The problem is that the basics are boring. Running consistently for months is boring. Getting your strength sessions done every week is boring. Going to bed instead of watching another three episodes on Netflix is boring. Eating properly, recovering properly and sticking to the plan when progress feels slow is boring. But do you know what’s even more boring? Training your arse off for six months and getting nowhere because you changed direction every three weeks. The athletes who make the biggest improvements aren’t necessarily doing anything particularly clever. They’ve just become very good at doing the obvious things over and over again. They train consistently. They eat enough to support their training. They prioritise sleep and recovery. They don’t panic after one bad session. They don’t completely change the plan every time Instagram shows them something new. And most importantly… They give the bloody thing enough time to work. So stop searching for the missing piece. You probably aren’t missing one. Get your sessions done. Recover properly. Eat well. Sleep. Repeat. Then do it again next week. Exceptional results are usually built from very ordinary things done consistently for a very long time. Keep it simple. Keep turning up

There seems to be this idea in HYROX that because the race is fast, everything we do in training also needs to be fast. It doesn’t. Sometimes the best thing you can do in the gym is slow everything down. If I give you 8 squats, I’m not particularly interested in how quickly you can get through them. I’m interested in whether all 8 reps actually did what we wanted them to do. That’s where tempo training comes in. You might see something like 3-1-X-1 written next to an exercise in your programme. That simply means you spend three seconds lowering the weight, pause for one second, drive back up as powerfully as you can, then take a second to reset. And yes, doing that properly will probably mean using less weight. That’s absolutely fine. Because we’re not trying to win Tuesday night’s squat session. We’re trying to get better at HYROX. Think about what happens towards the back end of a race. Your legs are tired, your heart rate is up and suddenly that sandbag feels considerably heavier than it did when you picked one up fresh in training. Having stronger quads and glutes that can control you through every lunge becomes pretty useful. When you’re halfway through a heavy sled push and every step feels like you’re trying to move a small family car, having spent months developing actual leg strength rather than just rushing through your squats becomes useful too. And when fatigue starts pulling your body into horrible positions, having strength throughout the entire range of movement gives you something to fall back on. Tempo work also gives us a way of making exercises harder without constantly adding more weight to the bar. A controlled set of split squats with moderate dumbbells can be absolutely disgusting when performed properly. You don’t necessarily need another 20kg; sometimes you just need to stop bouncing out of the bottom like you’ve stood on a drawing pin. That doesn’t mean every exercise should be painfully slow either. There are times we want speed and explosiveness.

One of the quickest ways to convince yourself that your training isn’t working is to spend too much time looking at what everyone else is doing. You can have a brilliant week of training, hit every session, run a pace you couldn’t hold three months ago and finally start feeling like you’re making some proper progress… then you open Instagram, see someone running considerably faster than you, and suddenly everything you’ve achieved feels a little less impressive. Nothing about your progress has actually changed. You’ve just changed what you’re comparing it against. The same thing happens in the gym and at HYROX races, because there will always be someone pushing a heavier sled, running a quicker, smashing out wall balls faster or crossing the finish line before you. That doesn’t mean your training isn’t working. It just means somebody else is currently further along in their journey. You have no idea how long they’ve been training, what their sporting background is, how much time they have available, what they’ve sacrificed to get there or what their starting point looked like. So instead of constantly asking yourself why you’re not as good as somebody else, start asking a much more useful question: Am I better than I was six months ago? Can you run faster at the same effort? Are you stronger? Do you recover quicker between stations? Are you more consistent with your training? Can you handle sessions now that would have absolutely buried you last year? If the answer to those questions is yes, then congratulations… The plan is working. Someone else being faster doesn’t make you slow. Someone else getting stronger doesn’t make you weak. And someone else smashing a PB doesn’t somehow cancel out yours. Use other people for inspiration, give them a clap when they do well, then get your eyes straight back onto your own training. Because ultimately, you’re not trying to build their HYROX athlete. You’re trying to build a better version of yours. Keep showing up.

Hi team! 👊 Here's a question In your last race did you........ PB? Brilliant. Get the time you wanted? Love it. Get absolutely humbled but dragged yourself over the finish line anyway? That counts too. 😂 You probably don’t need to train harder. You need to get better at doing the boring stuff for longer. Everyone is searching for the thing that suddenly makes them better at HYROX. The perfect running session. The secret sled technique. The new carbon shoes. Some ridiculous workout they saw an Elite 15 athlete doing on Instagram. But most people already know 90% of what they need to do. The problem? They don’t do it consistently enough. Get your runs done. Lift your weights. Eat properly. Sleep enough. Recover. Repeat. One decent week won’t transform you. But 20 decent weeks might. That’s the bit people underestimate. You don’t notice progress while it’s happening. Then one day your old running pace feels comfortable. The sled doesn’t feel quite as disgusting. And you cross the HYROX finish line with a time you couldn’t have touched six months ago. There was no magic session. You just stacked enough boring weeks together that eventually you got bloody good. That’s training.🔥