Endurance Extras  |  Vol. 76

If You Have a Hyrox on the Calendar, Read This

In December 2025, the Hyrox Sports Science Advisory Council published the sport's first peer-reviewed Sports Science Report. Two studies. Five universities. A scoping review of 39 prior studies. A data science analysis of more than 14,000 race results. The first time Hyrox has had its own evidence base instead of borrowing from CrossFit, marathon running, and HIIT research one piece at a time. If you are training for a Hyrox in the next six months, here is what actually changed in how to think about your prep, and how the APEX team in Tigard helps Portland-area athletes do it well.

What the Report Actually Found

The most-cited study in the report is by Tom Brandt and colleagues at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich. They ran a controlled simulation of a Hyrox race with 11 recreational athletes (median experience 18 months) and tracked heart rate, blood lactate, and rate of perceived exertion across the entire event. It is a small sample, and you should treat the findings as directional rather than definitive. That said, the patterns were consistent across all 11 athletes and align with a separate large-scale data analysis we will get to in a moment.

The headline numbers from the simulation:

• Median total time: 86.2 minutes. 51.2 minutes running, 32.8 minutes on stations. Hyrox is 59 percent running by time, not 50/50 as most athletes train it.
• 70.5 percent of the race was performed at "hard" or "very hard" heart rate intensity. Defined as 70 to 100 percent of max HR. This is not a pacing event. It is an 80 to 90 minute threshold grind.
• Wall balls produced the largest spike in HR, blood lactate, and RPE of any station. Counterintuitively, the heaviest loaded stations (sled push and sled pull) were completed fastest of all.
• Faster Hyrox times correlated significantly with higher VO2 max and lower body fat. Body composition matters in this sport more than most realize.

The second key data source is a PhD-level analysis by Maxence Duffuler at Racing 92, the French rugby club. He scraped 14,072 race performances from the Male Open category across 15 races held in 2024 and 2025 and ran a correlation analysis on which segments most predicted total finish time. The dataset is roughly 1,300 times larger than the simulation study and gives the second study a different kind of statistical confidence.

Runs 5 to 8 Decide the Race

This is the finding that changed how a lot of Hyrox coaches think about prep. Of the eight runs in a Hyrox race, the four mid-to-late running segments (runs 5, 6, 7, and 8) showed a 0.79 correlation with total race time across 14,000-plus performances. That is a strong correlation in a real-world dataset.

Translation: everyone runs fast at the start. The athletes who fall apart in the back half are the ones losing the race. If you can hold pace through runs 5 to 8, you finish well. If you cannot, no amount of station optimization will save your time. The aerobic base you bring to that back half is the single biggest predictor of how fast your finish reads.

Practically, that means most adult amateur athletes preparing for a Hyrox should be spending more of their training week on running, particularly extended threshold work and Zone 2 base mileage, than they currently do. The instinct is to drill the stations because the stations feel uniquely Hyrox-shaped. The data says runs 5 through 8 are where the medals are.

Three Stations Carry Disproportionate Weight

Within the station work, the same large-scale analysis found that three stations had both the widest performance variability across athletes and the strongest correlation with total race time. This is the combination that matters: stations where the spread between fast and slow is biggest, and where the spread predicts who finishes well.

Wall balls, sandbag lunges, and burpee broad jumps are the three stations to drill under fatigue. They are the hardest to master, the hardest to keep clean form on when your heart rate is at 90 percent of max, and the most punishing if your technique falls apart. Wall balls in particular were the single biggest spike in heart rate, blood lactate, and RPE across the entire Bundeswehr study.

The other stations matter, but they have lower variability and lower correlation with total time. If your training time is limited, drill the three above first. The sled work and ergometer stations are mostly capacity tests, the wall balls and lunges are capacity-plus-skill tests under fatigue. Skill compounds.

Hybrid Training Wins, And It Wins Faster Than People Think

The most useful piece in the report for adults preparing for a Hyrox is the scoping review by Villarroel López and Juárez Santos-García at Universidad de Zaragoza and Universidad de León. They examined 39 scientific studies published between 2015 and 2025 on High-Intensity Functional Training (HIFT) and hybrid competition formats.

The synthesis: properly structured concurrent training (running plus strength) improved VO2 max by 8 to 15 percent and maximal strength by 10 to 20 percent across the controlled studies, with no trade-off between the two adaptations. The old gym-bro fear that endurance work blunts strength gains, or that strength work blunts endurance gains, has been pretty thoroughly debunked when the program design is reasonable.

A separate finding in the same review: 87 percent of participants in a 6-week high-intensity interval protocol showed significant aerobic capacity improvement. Six weeks is enough to see real change if the program is structured. Six weeks of vague "I should probably train more" is not. The Liverpool John Moores University team in the report concluded explicitly: "In order to maximize your performance, one should prioritize endurance over strength in a structured programme of training of at least six weeks."

Translation for someone with a Hyrox 8 to 12 weeks out: build the aerobic base first, layer the station-specific strength on top of it, and trust that 6 to 8 weeks of structured prep is enough to materially change how race day goes. It is not enough to win an elite division. It is enough to finish 5 to 15 minutes faster than you would have otherwise.

Test, Don't Guess

The two metrics the Hyrox studies track most heavily are heart rate and blood lactate. The Bundeswehr team measured both throughout their simulation. The Zaragoza/León scoping review identified VO2 max as one of the strongest predictors of HIFT performance. None of these are abstract academic numbers. All of them are testable, and knowing yours changes what your training week should actually look like.

VO2 max

Your VO2 max is the maximum volume of oxygen your body can use during exercise. The 39-study scoping review found it consistently correlates with Hyrox finish time, and the Bundeswehr simulation found faster Hyrox finishers had measurably higher VO2 max scores. Knowing yours gives you two practical things. First, a baseline you can re-test against six or eight weeks later to see whether your training is actually moving the needle. Second, personalized heart rate zones (Zone 2, threshold, VO2 intervals) calibrated to your physiology, not to a 220-minus-age estimate of max heart rate that carries a 10 to 15 beat error margin in either direction. Most amateur Hyrox athletes are training in zones that are slightly off from where they should be. Twenty minutes in a metabolic cart fixes that. We offer VO2 max testing in Portland and Tigard for athletes who want their actual numbers.

Lactate Threshold

Blood lactate is the single best real-time indicator of where your aerobic system is starting to break down and your anaerobic system is starting to dominate. That transition point, your lactate threshold, is precisely the intensity zone the Brandt study showed Hyrox athletes spend most of the race operating at or near. Knowing yours tells you specifically what pace and heart rate you can hold for an 80 to 90 minute event before form starts to break down. It is also the most useful number for designing threshold interval workouts that target the right physiological adaptation. We offer lactate threshold testing in Portland and Tigard for athletes who want to dial that pace in before race day.

These tests are not required to train well for a Hyrox. Most amateur athletes finish strong without ever taking either one. They are useful for athletes who want to remove the guesswork, retest progress, and train with the same data the studies the report cites are built on.

How APEX Prepares Hyrox Athletes in Portland and Tigard

Most of our members are not training for an elite Hyrox finish. They are working adults who want to do one (or another one) in the next six months, finish strong, not get hurt, and walk away enjoying the sport. That is a different prep than what shows up in the all-elite Hyrox content on social media. Below is how we actually help.

The Bottom Line

The Hyrox Sports Science Report is a useful first cut at the data behind a sport that has, until now, been mostly run on instinct. The clearest signal in the data: this is an endurance event with a station tax, the back half of the run is what decides finish times, and three of the eight stations carry far more weight than the others. Build aerobic base first, drill wall balls and sandbag lunges and burpee broad jumps under fatigue, and use a simulation a few weeks out to find out where your race actually breaks.

If you are training for a Hyrox in the Portland or Tigard area and want a coached approach to any piece of that, we are here. Run consult, ongoing coaching, group training, PT, or a full simulation at our facility. Most members use a stack of two or three.