Welcome back to the signature workout series!
Each week, we will be publishing a workout by an elite Hyrox athlete or coach.
These workouts will not be the ‘sexy’ or ‘brutal’ workouts you often see on social media, but instead they’ll be designed to give you a deeper insight and understanding of a certain style of workout these athletes and coaches run regularly as part of their training.
We will then sit down with the coach and discuss why they program this type of workout, what the aim of it is, what sort of scores athletes should be looking for, and more… I’ve even committed to doing the workouts, so you’ll get to hear my experiences of doing them (as a not-so-elite athlete) too!
The goal for this series is for you, as someone training for Hyrox events, to be able to take away the principles behind these workouts and apply them to your own training.
Athlete/Coach: Tiago Lousa
Tiago Lousa is head coach of The Lousa Way, the most dominant team in Hyrox.
In the Elite 15 race of the European Championships, 4 out of 15 athletes on the Men’s side were following Tiago’s programming. And, going into the race, Tiago, himself, held the fastest time of the season (57:54), which was then beaten by one of his athletes, Alexander Roncevic (57:26).
It speaks volumes that going into that race, over 25% of the Elite athletes were trusting Tiago for their programming. Clearly, they have a strong belief in Tiago as a leader and in his programming. It’s not just the Elite athletes seeing success either, Tiago has numerous Pro and Open athletes on the Men’s and Women’s side seeing big leaps in performance and shedding minutes off their Hyrox times throughout the season.
So, I was keen to invite Tiago to share a workout with us, so we good get an insight into the kind of workouts that he and his athletes are doing to improve their performance.
The Workouts: Improving Capacity & Pacing
We have three workouts here, each in a different time domain.
A. Short (12 minutes)
Every 3 minutes x 4 sets
Row Calories (see below target number based on ability)
20 Stationary Sandbag Lunges @ race weight
Ski Calories (see below target number based on ability)
Notes:
- Start standing 10m away from the rower.
- Alternate the order of the ergs on every set
- Very hard to pace. The rest is very short.
- Elite: 20/14 Calories, Pro: 18/12, Standard: 16/10 Calories.
B. Medium (30 minutes)
Every 5 minutes x 6 sets
25 Burpees – Must touch a 6 inch overhead target (e.g. pullup bar)
400m Run
13.5m Sled Push @ race weight
Notes:
- Goals – Elite: sub 3´20 / PRO: Sub 3´45 / Standard: Sub 4´15)
- If you take over 4 minutes on Set #1, adjust to: Every 6 minutes x 5 sets
C. Long (45-60 minutes)
Every 15 minutes x 3 or 4 Sets
3 Minutes Bike Erg @75% FTP*
1 Minutes Bike Erg @110% FTP*
1k Run @5k+10″
50 WB unbroken @race
Notes:
- FTP is Functional Threshold Pace. This is a hard pace, but one you ‘could’ hold for 60 minutes.
- *You should remain seated on the bike with a steady, consistent pace.
Purpose of this workout
The purpose of these workouts are to improve your pacing and capacity.
Tiago explains that ‘pacing’ is hugely important to a Hyrox athlete. Each athlete must understand their capabilities and understand the impact of accumulated fatigue. How many times have we seen an athlete start a race strong, but gradually fade over the course of a race only to have them tell us afterwards they went out to hot? Tiago says that athletes who train using workouts in the style he presents above will quickly begin to understand the impact lactate will have on them, even when their heart-rate and breathing seems OK. This will allow them to maintain a more consistent effort throughout the race, knowing when to push and when to hold themselves back, getting them a much better time overall.
Similarly, by including a variety of exercises within these workouts, athletes will begin to understand which exercises impact each other most extremely: e.g. how much worse a run will feel after burpees, lunges or a sled push.
It’s not all ‘mental’ and ‘intelligence’ benefits though, although these are massively important in improving your Hyrox times.
These workouts will help improve your lactic tolerance and lactic clearance.
Lactic tolerance refers to the body’s ability to withstand the accumulation of lactate (also known as lactic acid) in the bloodstream. When the body is working at a high intensity, it produces lactate as a byproduct of anaerobic metabolism. The accumulation of lactate leads to muscle fatigue and that all-too-familiar burning sensation in the muscles – which is essentially what will slow you down. By improving your lactic tolerance, you will have a greater ability to tolerate this lactate accumulation.
Lactic clearance refers to the body’s ability to remove lactate from the bloodstream. Essentially, this allows you to recover quicker between efforts. The more quickly lactate is cleared, the faster the muscles will recover ready for another effort. In a sport like Hyrox, where many athletes are flirting with that red line on the stations and then using the early part of the run to recover, this is an essential skill. If you can’t recover quickly between efforts, you will not do well at a Hyrox.
And if that’s not enough, you will also get the indirect benefit of bumping your VO2 (the amount of oxygen your body can consume and process during intense exercise) and system efficiency (the amount of energy used to perform a given task). Taken together, a more efficient system requires less energy to perform the same task, and, therefore, you can sustain a more intense effort for longer periods of time.
Goals for this workout
For the short workout, you want to go as hard as you can whilst being able to maintain the pace across all rounds. So, imagine you are doing 400m track intervals every 3 minutes: Lets say you can just about manage to do the 400m in 1 minute and 30 seconds with a 1 minute and 30 second rest for multiple sets – that’s perfect. What you don’t want to do though is do the first one in 1 minute and 20 seconds, the second in 1 minute and 24 seconds, the third one in 1 minute and 35 seconds and the forth one in 1 minute and 44 seconds – if that happens you’ve gone out too hot. Similarly, you don’t want to just coast the workout. So, if you are capable of doing the intervals in 1 minute and 30 seconds without dropping off, you shouldn’t do them in 2 minutes – this will have close to zero impact in improving your performance as the work rate is too low. Apply that same logic to the short workout.
Moving on to the medium and long workouts, each athlete will approach them slightly differently. Tiago explains that the pace you go depends a little on your characteristics as an athlete. Tiago, says he, personally, prefers: “to go out a little to hard and have some time to rest.” But explains: “I have very good recovery rates. That might just be one of my biggest strengths. There are athletes that would rather use almost all the time available and just take a few short breaths before going back into it!”
Tiago says he would advise athletes to be mindful of the following things during these workouts as well:
Transitions: keep them fast, don’t lose time between exercises.
Even effort: There shouldn’t be drastic differences in time between repeated rounds.
Slowest interval is your score: This helps keep an honest, even effort.
Recover where you can: Learn where and how you can recover best and use it.
How often should you do them?
Tiago explains that this depends a lot on your level as an athlete and how much time you spend on your training.
The shorter workouts are typically used on the early mesocycles, and after a strength session (like a finisher). You can use them as much as 2-3 times a week: similar to how you would in CrossFit classes.
The longer pacing workouts are used in the second half of the season or around 6-8 weeks coming up to an important race. They are used only about once a week and usually on a Saturday.
Tiago warns that the “medium” workouts are the most mentally taxing, so need to be inserted into your programming carefully. They can really mess with an athlete´s motivation, especially if you have other stronger athletes to compare performances to. He recommends they only make an appearance around every other week.
My Experience
To begin with the short intervals: these felt aggressive! I decided to go for the 18 calories (Pro) level on the row and the ski, with 20 lunges at 30kg between them. I tried to keep both the ski and the row at 1400 calories/hour (which had me done in around 45 seconds) and then go through the lunges as quick as I could (around 45 seconds as well). That’s 2:15 without transition times, so you can see why Tiago said to be mindful of transitions. I was getting around 25-30 seconds rest per round, my fastest round was 2:30 and my slowest was 2:35. Although my ‘output’ each round was roughly the same, the mental demand to maintain that effort definitely increased. I can see why Tiago’s recovery is so impressive, because exposing yourself to these type workouts you are desperately paddling, trying not to drown in building fatigue!
Moving on to the medium intervals: It would be very easy to go out too hot in the early rounds of this workout. For me, my running is not where I’d like it to be and so I aimed to get each round done in around 4 minutes, so I could have a 1 minute rest. The 25 bar touch burpees took me around 1 minute and 20 seconds, the 400m run on an Assault Runner was 2 minutes, and the 202kg Sled Push for 13.5m was 40 seconds. Rounds one and two I thought maybe I’d gone a little too conservative, but those burpees into run into sled push began to really sap me by round 4. Round 5 and 6 I really had to dig deep to stay near my first round times. Inevitably, I did fall off a little, but there was only 12 seconds between my fastest and slowest round, which I feel is acceptable. My warning here would be that you could very easily break too much on this workout. You could pause between each burpee. You could stop between stations. You could break the sled push. You really want to think about whether you ‘need’ to break or if you just want to. If you ‘need’ to… maybe you went out too hot.
Moving on to the long intervals: These have a very different feel to the first two. They certainly aren’t easy, but they’re more like borderline threshold efforts. They suck, but they always feel achievable. For me, personally, the workout really began at the runs – the work on the bike was just enough to make that 5k+10 seconds feel worse than it should and then those 50 wall balls were about hanging on for dear life. I’m not particularly great at wall balls, but 50 is manageable for me – just miserable! I liked how this workout puts you in a spot similar to the end of a Hyrox… where you REALLY want to drop that wall ball, but you’re almost finished and so really shouldn’t. You get a much longer rest on these intervals. Around 4 and a half minutes for me.
Takeaways
This is a great set of workouts that each challenge you in slightly different ways.
Adding these kinds of workouts into your training you will become a better athlete.
Your power output will improve, you will become more efficient, you will recover better, and perhaps most importantly: you will learn a lot about yourself as an athlete. These workouts force you to consider: How fast can you or should you push on a run or station? How fast can you recover? Are you resting too long between stations? Do you need to break or just want to?
I really liked that the EMOM format allowed me to focus on the work being consistent. So, as an example, I was able to keep an eye on the clock and say, ‘right, I need to finish this row within 45 seconds. I need to get to the lunges by 50 seconds. I need to by back on the ski by 1 minute and 40 seconds.’ That’s all I needed to focus on. This can be especially useful if you’re an athlete (like me) who trains primarily alone as you have motivation pre-built into the workout.
I also think it’s very measurable over time. So, this time round I was doing 18 calories on the ERGs, but if I begin to improve then I could eventually up the ergs to 20 calories (as Tiago suggests for more advanced athletes in the notes).
Want more?
If you enjoyed these workouts, Tiago offers three levels of Hyrox Programming: Open, Pro and Elite at a very reasonable price. He also offers programming for Doubles athletes. If you are keen to join Tiago’s team, he provides his athletes with 5-6 days of training a week, with sessions lasting between 60 and 120 minutes a day, depending on the level you sign up to. Training is delivered through an app with clear explanation and guidance given for each workout. There’s also an active community to interact with and leaderboards too. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, you can see the training options here.