Right, a little reality check before everyone goes charging into another week of training like they're preparing for the Olympics. Not every workout needs to absolutely destroy you. I know. Shocking. Some people seem to think that unless they've finished a session lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling and reconsidering their hobbies, they haven't trained hard enough. Absolute nonsense. Here's something worth understanding. Your training programme isn't supposed to be a collection of daily punishments. Every session has a job. Some days you're building speed. Some days you're improving your threshold. Some days you're getting stronger. And some days you're simply building your aerobic engine without putting your body through unnecessary stress. That last one seems to confuse people. You finish a 60-minute easy run feeling like you could comfortably do another 30 minutes. GOOD. That's literally the point. You weren't supposed to set a personal best, race someone on Strava or turn your Zone 2 run into an unofficial 10K time trial. You were supposed to run easy. And here's the clever bit... By keeping your easy sessions easy, you're actually giving yourself a better chance of performing properly when the hard sessions come around. Because turning every workout into a competition with yourself is a fantastic way to accumulate fatigue and eventually wonder why your performance has stopped improving. Training harder and training smarter aren't always the same thing. The goal isn't to see how exhausted you can make yourself seven days a week. The goal is to improve. And that requires a bit more intelligence than simply going flat out every time you put your trainers on. So, heading into this week, remember: Hard days HARD. Easy days EASY. And stop feeling guilty for finishing a session with something left in the tank. That's not being lazy. That's following the bloody programme. 😂

Morning team! 👊 I've got a question for you. Are you actually training to get better at HYROX, or are you just trying to see how much exercise you can squeeze into seven days? Because there's a difference. A pretty big one, actually. I see people doing six, seven, sometimes eight sessions a week, absolutely convinced they're making progress because they're permanently exhausted. Monday they're smashing a HYROX circuit. Tuesday they're doing intervals. Wednesday they're lifting weights. Thursday they're doing another circuit they found on Instagram, and by Friday they're walking downstairs sideways because their legs have given up on them. And somehow, despite all that effort, their race times aren't improving. Congratulations. You've become incredibly good at being tired. 😂 Here's the thing. HYROX training doesn't need to be particularly complicated, but it does need to make sense. You need to run. You need to get stronger. You need to practise the demands of the race. And most importantly, you need to organise those things in a way that allows you to actually improve rather than simply survive another week. So, if I were building a training week for an experienced HYROX athlete who has the time and recovery capacity, here's how I'd approach it. 🏃‍♂️ FIRST, WE RUN. FOUR TIMES. I know. Shocking. A sport that involves running eight kilometres might actually require you to become a decent runner. Who would have thought? But rather than making every run a lung-busting competition against your Garmin, we're going to give each one a job. Two easy aerobic runs. These are the boring ones where you should be able to hold a conversation without sounding like you're being chased. They build your aerobic foundation, help you develop endurance and allow you to accumulate running volume without constantly hammering your body. One threshold session. This is where we start working on your ability to sustain a quicker pace for longer. Not quite flat-out, but certainly not comfortable either.