HYROX training: how to run well after the stations

The runs between the stations take up the largest share of your race time at HYROX (Brandt 2025). Your 10K best matters less than the pace you can still hold after 50 meters of sled push. Good HYROX training treats those eight runs as a skill of their own and builds the week around them.

What the race asks of you

A HYROX race is eight times 1 km of running, each run followed by a station. In order, the stations are the SkiErg (1000 m), sled push (50 m), sled pull (50 m), burpee broad jumps (80 m), rowing (1000 m), farmers carry (200 m), sandbag lunges (100 m) and 100 wall balls. The clock runs through every transition, including the walk from the running lane into the station. As a rough planning figure, the runs take up about half the race time.

The first study on the sport put eleven recreational athletes through a simulated race (Brandt 2025). Heart rate and lactate stayed high from start to finish, and the stations in particular drove lactate up. The runs made up the largest share of race time and were the only segments that tracked the athletes' characteristics, and the finish time correlated most closely with maximal oxygen uptake (Brandt 2025). A review of HYROX performance lists four determinants: aerobic capacity, anaerobic power, local muscular endurance and maximal strength (Davids 2025). It also points out that sport-specific research is still thin. So take what follows as a starting point and adjust it to what your own sessions tell you.

Why running after a station feels different

You step off the sled and your legs don't answer the way they do on a fresh run. Your heart rate sits higher at the same pace, and each kilometer costs more. This is compromised running, and triathletes know it from the run after the bike.

A review of the cycle-to-run transition in triathlon found that in the first minutes off the bike, running economy is worse and heart rate is higher. Cadence changes too. Specific brick training, a bike ride followed directly by a run, reduced the effect (Millet 2000). So the switch can be trained.

Strength work leaves a similar mark over a longer stretch. A single strength session, especially for the legs, lowers the quality of endurance training in the hours to days that follow, with poorer running economy and sore legs among the effects (Doma 2017). HYROX packs a version of that into a few seconds, eight times over.

How to train running under fatigue

Most advice on HYROX for beginners starts with the stations, because they look like the hard part. Give the runs at least as much attention.

The central session is the compromised run: one station, then 1 km at your goal race pace, repeated a few times. The job is to find your pace within the first few hundred meters after the station, instead of drifting through half the lap before you settle. Watch the first split of each run more closely than the last one. Use whatever stations your gym allows; a rower or a set of wall balls will do.

Every few weeks, a partial simulation is worth the effort: four stations with their runs, at race intensity. Save full simulations for a few occasions in the build-up to a race. They take days to absorb, and a partial one teaches most of the same lessons.

Most of your running stays easy. Well-trained endurance athletes spend about 80 percent of their sessions easy and about 20 percent hard (Seiler 2010). In HYROX that base pays off directly, because aerobic fitness carries the recovery between the hard efforts (Davids 2025). For the hard sessions it helps to know your numbers, and here's how to find your threshold pace for intervals.

Practice station technique separately and on fresher legs, so the movement holds up once you're tired. A sled push with a steady body angle and a wall-ball rhythm you can keep both save seconds and spare your legs for the next run.

Then there's pacing. Start the first run slower than it feels like you should. Everything feels easy in the first kilometer, and the bill arrives at the sled. Move through transitions briskly without turning them into sprints, so you reach each station breathing in a way you can still work with. Budget your grip, too: the sled pull and the farmers carry both draw on your hands and forearms, and squeezing everything out of them early costs you later.

How it fits into a week

A HYROX training plan for someone with a job usually holds one hard compromised run, one station session, a few easy runs and strength work. In the gym, strength endurance comes before maximal strength, though heavier lifting keeps a place: heavy or explosive strength training improves running economy in runners without weakening endurance (Rønnestad 2014).

Keep the simulation away from your hardest run and your heaviest leg session, since lifting can blunt endurance work for hours to days afterward (Doma 2017). Don't stack two hard days back to back, and put rest days into the plan on purpose. Load and recovery have to be planned together (Kellmann 2018).

A sample week might look like this:

• Monday is an easy run at a conversational pace, the same kind of run a plain running plan is built on.
• Tuesday is the compromised run session, the hardest running of the week.
• Wednesday is a rest day.
• Thursday is station technique plus strength endurance in the gym.
• Friday is another easy run.
• Saturday is a longer easy run, or every few weeks a partial simulation.
• Sunday is rest.

If you're new to the sport, keep the shape and shrink the doses: fewer rounds in the compromised session and shorter partial simulations.

If HYROX is one goal among several, our lead article on hybrid training shows how to combine strength and endurance in one plan.