Hyrox is a game of two halves. Literally – you spend around 50-60% of your total time running. In fact, I quizzed some of the top 10 at the Hyrox World Championships last year, asking whether their standalone 10K times would reflect the final podium, and most of them agreed.
That being said, no matter how good you are at running, you have to nail those stations. And you have to be able to come out of the other end of those stations and keep running on fatigued legs. That’s the secret sauce, such as it is.
But that's not what we’re talking about with this workout.
We’re talking about a Hyrox conditioning piece, sans running.
The reason this sort of workout works so well is that running is high impact. These movements aren’t. You can pepper them in more judiciously, and still recover enough to go again tomorrow.
This is especially true of the sled, which doesn’t have an eccentric loading portion, allowing you to get in some serious strength work without worrying too much about stressing the lower body so much that you can’t walk for a week, let alone run.
What to read next
This sled, lunge, ski combo jacks up your heart rate, forces you to work hard pushing heavy loads under fatigue and keep your head together for the lunges, and then it asks you to repeat it all again, tackling mounting fatigue each round.
It won’t just help you build Hyrox-ready levels of conditioning. It’ll also boost your conditioning, build lower-body muscle, and build the sort of ‘ready for anything’ fitness that we’re all chasing.
The Workout
The protocol is simple.
You’re going to warm up thoroughly, and then load up a sled as heavy as you can – aiming for a weight you can just about push unbroken for 2 x 10-metre lengths. It’s pretty short, so go heavy here – that parts non-negotiable.
Grab a sandbag or a light set of dumbbells for the lunges, and drag your SkiErg close to the track.
Once you’ve established your heavy sled weight, set a countdown timer for 30 mins and perform:
A) 20m sled push
B) 40 x weighted walking lunges
C) 800m SkiErg
Repeat this as many times as you can in the 30-minute window.
Record your weight, as well as your finishing rounds and reps, and aim to beat this on subsequent attempts.
With almost 18 years in the health and fitness space as a personal trainer, nutritionist, breath coach and writer, Andrew has spent nearly half of his life exploring how to help people improve their bodies and minds.
As our fitness editor he prides himself on keeping Men’s Health at the forefront of reliable, relatable and credible fitness information, whether that’s through writing and testing thousands of workouts each year, taking deep dives into the science behind muscle building and fat loss or exploring the psychology of performance and recovery.
Whilst constantly updating his knowledge base with seminars and courses, Andrew is a lover of the practical as much as the theory and regularly puts his training to the test tackling everything from Crossfit and strongman competitions, to ultra marathons, to multiple 24 hour workout stints and (extremely unofficial) world record attempts.
You can find Andrew on Instagram at @theandrew.tracey, or simply hold up a sign for ‘free pizza’ and wait for him to appear.
