How to Build a Hyrox Training Plan That Fits Your Week
Hyrox has quietly become one of the most interesting things to happen to fitness in years.
It's a race, but it isn't really a running event. It's strength, but it isn't really a lifting competition. It's eight one-kilometre runs interspersed with eight functional stations — the ski erg, sled push and pull, burpee broad jumps, rowing, farmers carry, lunges, and wall balls. To do it well, you have to be a genuine hybrid athlete: someone who can run, carry, push, pull, and grind, all on the same day.
Which is exactly why building a Hyrox training plan is so hard.
Most training plans are built for one thing. A marathon plan assumes running is the priority and everything else is support. A strength program assumes the gym is the centre of your week. Hyrox refuses to sit neatly in either camp — and if you train it like a runner, your stations fall apart, and if you train it like a lifter, you blow up on the runs.
So here's how I think about structuring it.
Start with the demand, not the schedule
The mistake I see most often is people building their week around what they like doing rather than what the race actually asks of them.
Hyrox demands three things at once: aerobic capacity to keep running, strength endurance to survive the stations, and the ability to switch between the two without falling apart. That last one — what people call "compromised running," running on legs that are already cooked — is the thing that catches everyone out.
A good plan trains all three, every week. Not in separate phases months apart, but together — because the race never lets you do one at a time.
How to structure a Hyrox training week
For most people training around a job and a life, three to five sessions a week is realistic. A simple, sustainable shape looks like this:
Two running-focused sessions. One easy aerobic run to build your base, and one harder interval session — think 1km repeats at race pace with short rests, which mirrors exactly what the race feels like.
Two strength sessions. Keep these compound and functional: squats, deadlifts, lunges, presses, plus the carries and pulls that show up on the floor. You're building strength endurance, not a one-rep max.
One "hybrid" session. This is the one that matters most and the one people skip. Combine running and stations in the same workout — run, then sled, then run, then wall balls. Teach your body to run tired.
You don't need all five every week. But you do need the blend every week.
Running and strength in the same plan
The fear with hybrid training is that the two sides cancel each other out — that running kills your strength and lifting wrecks your runs. It can happen, but usually it's a scheduling problem, not a physiology problem.
A few principles that keep it working:
- Separate your hardest efforts. Don't put your heaviest leg day the day before your hardest run. Give the big sessions room to breathe.
- Easy days stay genuinely easy. Most of your running should feel comfortable. The intensity is supposed to live in a small number of sessions, not all of them.
- Respect recovery. Hybrid training is more total load than either sport alone. Sleep and food aren't optional extras here — they're part of the plan.
None of this is complicated. But it's almost impossible to manage if your training is scattered across a running app, a separate gym tracker, and a note on your phone for the hybrid stuff.
Keep the whole plan in one place
This is the exact problem I built Aevo to solve.
Aevo is training software for hybrid athletes — people whose training doesn't fit in a single box. Instead of juggling one app for your runs and another for the gym, it plans gym, running, conditioning, and station work in one connected system, built around your goal and the event you're working towards. For Hyrox specifically, that means your runs and your strength work finally live in the same plan, so you can actually see whether your week is balanced or quietly tipping too far one way.
It's in beta right now, and I'd love more hybrid athletes testing it — especially anyone training for a Hyrox. You can join the beta here.
Train both sides. Train them together. And keep it all in one place.
— Vince