WDM Coaching

Specific Training for Peak Performance

You can get extremely fit doing general training.

But general fitness only takes you so far when the goal is to perform your best in HYROX.

As you get closer to your peak, specificity matters more. You need to learn what compromised running actually feels like, how to transition from stations back into running, how to settle quickly, and how to keep producing when the race starts to bite.

Those are skills as much as fitness qualities.

The more often you practise them in the right way, the better you get at expressing the fitness you already have on race day.

That does not mean every session needs to look like HYROX all year. But when you are deep into a race build, random training has less value than work that directly improves the demands you are about to face.

Build the fitness generally. Then learn how to use it specifically.

Tempo vs Intervals: My Approach

I used to programme a lot more continuous tempo work, sometimes forty to fifty minutes straight.

The problem was not that the session could not work. It was that a lot of athletes struggled to hold the right effort for that long. They would go out too hard, drift upwards, turn the session into something more expensive than intended, and then carry that fatigue into the rest of the day or week.

That is why I now prefer breaking a lot of that work into intervals.

Something like 4 × 10 minutes with short recovery can produce a very similar physiological stimulus, while making it easier to control pace, heart rate and total fatigue.

The goal is not to prove you can suffer continuously for fifty minutes.

The goal is to accumulate the right amount of work at the right intensity, then recover well enough to keep training.

Cycling: Volume vs Intensity

More intensity is not automatically better.

The cycling data we discussed suggested that the relationship between volume and intensity changes as total training load increases. At lower weekly volumes, having more quality sessions appeared to matter more. As volume increased, athletes could get similar improvements with fewer intense sessions because the larger amount of total work was already providing a significant training stimulus.

That does not mean intensity stops mattering. It means its role depends on the rest of the programme.

The important caveat is that this was retrospective cycling data, not a controlled HYROX study, so I would not turn the exact session numbers into a universal rule.

The useful principle is simpler: as training volume rises, you may not need to keep adding intensity at the same rate.

More work does not always need to mean more hard work.

You Don’t Need to Run Fast to Get Faster

A lot of athletes assume the only way to improve their top-end running is to spend more time running at top-end pace.

That is not how adaptation has to work.

A huge amount of running improvement comes from the bottom up. More aerobic capacity, better running economy, more durability and a stronger ability to hold form as fatigue builds can all make you faster without constantly training at the speed you eventually want to race.

My own example is pretty simple. One of my best 5K performances came off marathon training, not a block of 5K-specific speed work. I had barely touched that pace in training.

There is still a place for strides and faster running, especially for neuromuscular efficiency. But the highest-speed work also carries more cost, and for a lot of athletes the return is not worth making it the centre of the programme.

You do not need to constantly practise your fastest pace to become a faster runner.