PODCAST - 3 hyrox workouts helping me get faster
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[00:00:00] Welcome to The Athlete with Asthma Show. I'm your host, Johnny Havey, an ultra runner, endurance athlete, and yes, a guy who's had an inhaler prescribed since birth. Despite doctors telling me I could never play soccer nor run a marathon, let alone 100K ultra, I proved them all wrong. This show is where I share everything I've learned, from breathing techniques to mindset shifts, to help you become the athlete and the person you truly want to be.
So if you're ready to achieve your goals despite limitations, let's get started.
I was able to cut two and a half minutes off my HYROX time in less than eight weeks while being sick and traveling. And today on the show, I'm gonna share with you the three workouts that I used in order to empower me to make this happen. Now, the [00:01:00] key to HYROX is to realize that HYROX is a hybrid fitness race that rewards you for having a really strong cardiovascular system.
Specifically, the longer that you can spend in zone three and four throughout your HYROX event, the better you're going to do. Now, this is really important. If you're new to zones, here's a quick summary about how zones work and how it impacts your HYROX training. Zone one is really your resting pace. You aren't really expanding very much energy.
This is something you do all day. It's something you can just continuously do. It's really just for resting. Now, zone two is a more active pace. This is what we call your all-day pace. [00:02:00] This is really where ultra athletes like myself find ourselves for these long events, is w- we're trying to maximize how fast we can go while staying in zone two.
This is what the best ultra athletes for running, biking, swimming, et cetera, really focus on. Long events. We're talking 12, 24 plus hour events. Next, we have zone three. Zone three is your really one-hour pace. Now, you could push it past an hour, but this is really where you feel most comfortable and confident for one hour.
So now this is what we're looking at for HYROX. But what I've seen online and what I've seen in my own practice, my own experience of training for HYROX, is we also are gonna find ourselves in zone four, and you may even find yourself in zone five. Now, zone five is [00:03:00] the top zone. Now, zone three, technically you can push this up to two hours, maybe even three hours if you've trained really well and you're used to it.
Well, zone four really is around 15 minutes all the way up to 45 minutes. So this is where HYROX happens. And then zone five, and this is why you gotta make sure that when you're training, you don't wanna spend that much time in zone five, 'cause we're really talking about three to 10 minutes is how long you can hold this.
And just remember, each zone is not just related to heart rate, but also energy output. So you're gonna get tired faster the higher zone you're in. When we're looking at the three workouts I'm gonna share with you today that have really empowered me to decrease my HYROX pace from about a [00:04:00] 1:09 and a half closer to a 1:06 and a half to 1:07 in just a matter of eight weeks while being sick and traveling, it's because of this theory and focusing on Zone three and four, and actually a little bit of zone two.
We'll get there, especially when I share workout three with you. So how do we get faster by training these zones? Well, if you can train your body to be able to perform at a higher level, put out more energy at a higher level, which means running faster, doing the exercises faster, transitioning faster between exercises, and you can do that at a lower zone or when you're lower within a zone, there's a big difference between being close to zone five while you're in zone four or being close to zone three when you're in zone four.
And same thing, if you're in zone three and you're pushing to zone four, that's a lot different than being in zone four and near the border of zone three. So the more of the workout you [00:05:00] can do, the more of Hyrox you can do at lower zones at a higher pace, the better you're gonna do, the easier it is on your body, and the more likely you're not gonna burn out at the end once you get to wall balls.
So when you're looking at your workouts, I want you to take inspiration from what I'm about to share with you, and really thinking through and tracking and making sure that you aren't spending too much time in zone five, you're only spending the proper amount of time in zone four, and, you know, you could be spending a lot more time in zone three.
You need to be safe. Here we go. So workout one. Now, I've tried a lot of different workouts over the past six to 12 months that, uh, have been created based on these zones for Hyrox. This is one of my favorites, and it's something where you see this, it's gonna make a lot of sense why this works so well. So I've been doing this once a week.
I'm about to up this to one to two times a week, and I may even do one and a half times a week. I'll [00:06:00] explain what that means. But really, workout one is pretty simple, and it really comes back to when I used to race duathlons, I would train running, I would train biking, but the first duathlon I ever did, I didn't train them together, and that transition was brutal.
Well, same thing with Hyrox. You can train all the things. You can train running. You can train rowing, farmer carries, sled push, pull, lunges, wall balls, burpee broad jumps, et cetera. But if you don't train it in relation to running, then the day of, your body's gonna freak out. So that's the theory here. I like to start with a warm-up always when I'm doing these workouts, and this is something that I want you to mess with because when you're at Hyrox...
Day of, I invite you to think about how you can help your body get ready for the event. For me, I have to do a warmup. My body doesn't like just going straight into that sprinting that first kilometer. When I'm running ultra, like, it takes a couple of [00:07:00] miles for my body to get to the place where I feel like I'm doing a safe pace, and my body feels good, and I'm ready to really crush it.
So warm up with HYROX is so important to do because you don't have 62 miles to use the first few miles to warm up. I don't typically warm up that much before an ultra. Maybe I'll run half a mile in relation to a 62.2-mile ultra. Well, for HYROX, what I do for this workout is I do at least a .3 to half a mile warmup.
Now, this is a pretty progressive warmup too because I'm starting around, like, a 10-minute mile pace, and I'm progressively, during this .3 to half a mile, working my way up to a seven-minute mile pace. Now, this is important because what you need to do is slowly warm yourself up to what your race pace is, 'cause what you're gonna do during this workout is race pace.
And here's the workout itself. Wanna start with 1,000-meter race pace. And [00:08:00] do this however you can. I've been doing this on the treadmill really because it's easier for me to do all the other exercises at the rec center I work out at and keep coming back to the treadmill. The other reason why I do it this way is because my race pace that I'm training for is a six-minute mile or faster pace.
Well, the treadmill allows me to push that. Now, I don't usually like running on treadmill. I think it's harder on the body. I don't run on the treadmill when I'm training for ultras, but for this one, I'm really trying to push myself. Now, you gotta be safe with that though because you could put the treadmill at a speed that you're not able to keep up with, so you gotta be really careful.
I'm just sharing what I do. And remember, if you have asthma or anything else that could impact your training for HYROX or anything, I highly recommend that you check with a healthcare professional. I'm not a healt- I have a disclaimer in the show notes and in the YouTube description. I'm not a healthcare professional.
I teach based on my experience, so you definitely always need to talk and consult with a healthcare professional when deciding to do things like this. So 1,000-meter race pace. For me, [00:09:00] this is about a six-minute pace, and that's why my warmup, I'm warming up towards that six-minute pace. Then I go into burpee broad jumps.
I have messed with this. What I'm currently doing is I'm doing 40 of these. Now, I didn't start with 40. I started with 25, but now that I'm getting closer to my HYROX event and I'm really upping my training even more, I'm doing 40 of these. Now, this is really because burpee broad jumps is one of the hardest parts.
This is one of the hardest transitions that you're gonna run into in HYROX, is doing your 1,000-meter run into burpee broad jumps, into another- thousand meter run. Which thousand meters, by the way, is one kilometer, which is exactly what HYROX is in between each of your stations. So that's why I train this, 'cause it, this helped me so much.
Burpees felt so much better. I felt so much more at ease doing burpee broad jumps in my last simulation because I was [00:10:00] doing this. And then, once again, we go right back into that thousand meters running at race pace. And then guess what? We're gonna jump into another event. This is where I go into the rower.
And you can mix up how you're doing these. This is just how I'm currently training with this workout. Rower, and I'm really doing 800 meters. And I'm doing this 'cause, once again, what I've found in HYROX is you don't really get that many spots where you can rest, especially if you're doing solo. If you're doing doubles, it's different.
You should build time into every single functional workout station. You and your partner should each get rest during every single one. That's gonna help you so much. But when you're doing solo, you don't really get a chance for this unless you make the rower your rest. But you need to make it your rest while keeping your pace going.
So that's why I like to throw the rower in here, along with the fact that rower is one of the exercises I am [00:11:00] responsible for in my relay that I'm doing in my next HYROX event. I'm doing solo and I'm doing the relay. But the rower, if you can really get yourself used to doing thousand meter run into the rower, into another thousand meter run, this is gonna help you catch your breath while rowing and set you up for the second half of the race.
That's why I like the rower section, too, because this sets you up for the second half of HYROX. So now we get into the really hard stuff. We're gonna throw in, after our next thousand meter or one kilometer run, we're gonna go into lunges, and we're gonna do another thousand meter run, and then we're gonna do everyone's favorite, wall balls.
Similar thing, I did not start like this, but now I'm doing 40 lunges. I'm doing race pace again, and then we're doing 40 wall balls. But I started with 25 of each of these things. So this is the workout Now, I invite you [00:12:00] to just have this be the whole workout. Then after wall balls, do some sort of warm-down that you like and be done.
Or you can work up to doing this times two. This is where I am right now, is I'm working up to doing this times two, and that counts as one workout. My goal, though, because this can be really crazy to look at and be like, "I don't wanna do that twice." Fine, do it one time through. Or you may look at that and be like, "Hey, there's other exercises I want to practice more."
Okay, you can swap one out. I do highly recommend you keep the burpee broad jumps and the wall balls here, though, 'cause those are parts where if you can really get those down, your High Rocks time is gonna plummet. Those wall balls are extremely hard, and setting that up after all this fatigue is gonna really help you on race day.
But right now, my goal is to do this twice through once a week and one time through once a week. Working my way up to doing this twice through twice a week. We'll see if I get there, though, 'cause this is really intense, and [00:13:00] I have other workouts I do throughout the week. Let's get to workout two. Now, it's really interesting because ultra-running, ultra-endurance competitions, and High Rocks, which is a much shorter, you know, hour to two-hour-long competition, the training is different.
But we're using some of the same concepts, and really the goal is to elevate other zones while we're training other zones. What do I mean by that? Well, when you're training zone three and zone four, you're actually elevating zone one- Zone 2, zone 5. When you train zone 2 and you get better at zone 2, you're elevating zone 1, zone 3, zone 4, zone 5.
And your body actually likes training different zones and bringing the other zones up. In ultra-running, that's why we train zone 3, zone 4. We train it because we're really looking at bringing zone 2 up. With this, we're training it because we need to get used to being in zone 3 and zone 4 for a long time.
[00:14:00] That's why when you look at ultra-running, you're gonna spend most of your training in zone 2, but you're still gonna do zone 3 and zone 4 so that you can bring it up, but you need to be comfortable and confident in zone 2. For HYROX, you need to be comfortable and confident in zone 3 and zone 4. That really brings me to workout number two.
Workout number two is also intervals, but we're mixing it up a bit and we're throwing in some strength. Because one thing that I found the first solo HYROX simulation I did, is that when I got to the sled push, the sled pull, when I got to the things, the exercises that were more strength-based and I wasn't used to really pushing my heart rate before, I struggled.
So workout two is really, I built this to put some strength in so we can get our triceps, our chest, our biceps, our legs all ready for going all out cardiovascularly and then having to do strength. So here it is. We always start with that warmup. This one's a little different because this is using rowing as our cardiovascular [00:15:00] base.
So the warmup for this one is gonna be a 500 meter row. For me, I'm actually shooting for my race pace. But remember, I do the rower as a relaxing, a recovery exercise during HYROX. So for me, I'm shooting for a two-minute 500 meter row. But really, we're getting yourself warmed up. When I'm doing the rower for doubles or a relay, I'm more in the 130 to 145-minute 500 meter.
So the two minute is a warmup pace for me, and I'm doing that because when we get into the actual workout, once we finish that row, that's when I push. I'm pushing faster than what I'm planning on doing the day of for HYROX. So really we have four sets. That's it. Or four circuits. Well, one circuit, we do it four times, we add to it as we go.
The first one is we're gonna start with a 500 meter row, and then we're gonna go into 10 pull-ups, [00:16:00] 10 burpee broad jumps. So we're still throwing our HYROX events in here. And then we go into 10 dips. But that's not it. From there we go into 20 Bulgarian- Split squats. This is how we build strength for our lunges, and this is gonna help with your sled pushes.
We go into 30 wall balls. I like to have wall balls at the end of each of these because fatigue. How can you do your wall balls? How do you feel doing wall balls when you're fatigued? So let's break this down, 'cause this is how two, three, and four are gonna go. We're just gonna add to each of these.
Pull-ups right after doing a row are gonna feel real tough. This is similar to how it's gonna feel after sprinting and then going into your sled push and your sled pull. Same thing, doing dips after doing burpee broad jump's gonna feel real tough. It's gonna help you with your triceps. If you don't have access to a ski erg, your triceps are gonna be hit [00:17:00] real hard with the ski erg.
This helps us build that strength. And as we increase our dips, it's gonna help us build endurance in our triceps as well. Our triceps are actually used a lot throughout the entire HYROX experience, so building up those muscles is really good. Then we got Bu- Bulgarian split squats. Like I said, this is the key, this is the strength key for your lunges, so work on these.
And what I like to do is I start with lower weight for the first one. For all this, we're warming our body up, 'cause then when we get to two, three, and four, we're gonna hit it even harder. Well, I like to add a jump at the end of my Bulgarian split squat. I don't always do it in the first round, but I definitely do it in two, three, and four.
And then wall balls, of course. So now I'm gonna write the rest of this on the board, and then we'll go through why I increase things like I do. There we go. So I increase my row by 200 meters each time all the way to in set four doing more than what we actually do in HYROX. [00:18:00] And that is on purpose, because what I'm doing here is I'm going faster than my HYROX pace, and I do that for 1,100 meters.
This really is helping me create the row as a place where I can rest or catch my breath during HYROX, because I'm getting used to going even faster. And then I'm just increasing everything else. We're increasing pull-ups the least, and it's really just because pull-ups are real tough, so I'm only going up to 15 pull-ups.
We're increasing burpee broad jumps by five each time, so we go from 10 to 15 to 20 to 25. And then dips we're increasing slowly at first, and then we're going all the way up to 20 dips. Uh, Bulgarian split squats we're increasing slowly, 'cause I'm also increasing weight really when I'm doing Bulgarian split squats, so do whatever feels good to you.
And then, uh, I'm keeping my wall balls the same. Now, if you wanna increase wall balls, you can. I just [00:19:00] like the fact that after this I do 120 wall balls, and I'm doing them with a 20 pound wall ball, which is significantly more than what you actually do if you're doing the men's open. 120 after doing all of this is extremely powerful.
That was workout two. Another zone three, zone four workout. Getting used to the different exercises. Getting used to mixing cardiovascular with strength so that you're ready for HYROX. Now workout three. This is by far my favorite workout to do, and for you, this is something that I highly recommend that you integrate into your HYROX training.
You could probably just integrate workout three and see faster HYROX times, especially if you're a strength first HYROX athlete. Workout three for me right now is running. Now specifically- I'm running 30 miles per week. I'm probably gonna increase this to 35. This is simple. Here with running, some of the running I'm [00:20:00] doing is gonna be in zone three, zone four.
Most of it is zone two. You know how I was saying before for ultra, we train zone three, zone four to bring our zone two, to bring our capacity at zone two up? Well, for HYROX, you train zone two in running so that you can bring your capacity for running up, and you can bring your zone three and zone four up.
But what this is really gonna do is the more miles you can get underneath your feet, you're gonna feel much better when you're actually running at HYROX. The running is gonna feel so much easier. The 5 miles or 4.9 miles that you run as part of HYROX are going to seem a lot less when you put in 30 miles a week.
Or if you're at zero right now, just increase it a little bit. Put in 10 to 15. Maybe get all the way up to 15 to 20 miles per week. This is huge. Just add running into your daily routine. I run every morning, at least two miles, all the way up to five, six, seven, sometimes eight miles. [00:21:00] I'll even find myself in a 10-miler here and there.
Keep in mind, I'm an ultra runner, so what does that look like for you? Add running into your training and add a lot of running, or as much running as you can conceptualize as a lot of running for you and your training. This could be going from running not at all to running once per week. This could be running once per week to running three times per week.
This could be doing zero miles a week to doing five miles a week. Whatever it is for you, I highly recommend you integrate running into your HYROX training. Now, I wanna hear how your HYROX training is going, so I invite you to leave me a comment if you're watching this on YouTube, and let me know what your favorite HYROX workout is.
Maybe you've also been able to cut two, three minutes off of your HYROX time in just a matter of a couple months. I wanna know what that workout is. And if you're listening to this as a podcast, email me at john, J-O-N-N-Y, @athletewithasthma.com, and I'll see you in the next episode.
Thanks for tuning in to The Athlete With Asthma show. I hope [00:22:00] today's episode inspired you to overcome any perceived limitations you may have. Remember, your health and wellness journey isn't about perfection, it's about progress. So I invite you to take a small step right now towards your goals. And if you found something helpful here, make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share the podcast with others on a similar path.
Until next time, keep challenging yourself and redefining what's possible
