Hybrid Training – Everything You Need to Know

Hybrid training is an approach to training that develops both strength and stamina concurrently. When you follow a well-structured hybrid training program it’s possible to build seriously impressive lifting and running/cycling capacity.

What hybrid training ISN’T, is CrossFit. It’s an important distinction to make.

Hybrid training focusses on maximising your ability in two aspects of fitness, whereas a general fitness approach such as CrossFit looks to improve everything.

Defining the Approach

The important distinction between specific hybrid training and general fitness such as a CrossFit approach is the specificity of the purpose. In general fitness for example, the focus is spread across broader time and modal domains. This means there’s less structure, and more randomised workouts.

You’ll be looking for improvements across the board. You’ll want to be stronger, faster, have better localised muscle endurance, be able to swim, cycle and run faster and for longer. You achieve that with high intensity effort across lots of different elements of fitness.

When performing workouts for CrossFit, your training will likely be multi-disciplinary within the one workout. You might use cardio equipment, strength equipment and bodyweight within the session.

With hybrid training, you’re looking to maximise the strength and the cardio. Improving aesthetics is a bonus by-product.

That means in hybrid training your workout time is focussed on improving specific elements of your fitness – you’ll be looking to improve your strength numbers and your endurance capacity. You won’t be bothered about your sprint speed, how many pull ups or push ups you can do, how many kettlebell snatches you can perform in a minute etc for example.

When training like a hybrid athlete, you’ll be training like a powerlifter on your strength days, and like an endurance runner on your cardio days.

How to Structure Hybrid Training

The most effective hybrid athletes I know have a very clear training pattern, delineating sessions strictly between their strength days and their endurance days.

This approach allows the athlete to give their maximum to each session, knowing they don’t have to leave anything in reserve for the cardio or strength element that is still to come later on. They’re all-in to build their ability.

The best structure of hybrid training is to alternate workouts. This means you’re training different movement patterns, energy systems and placing fresh demands on the body each time. This allows your system longer to recover between workouts.

Rest is important. With a hybrid training model, you’re only focussed on a couple of fitness disciplines, not all of them. That means you can fit in additional rest. For most people, two rest days are sufficient.

A sample hybrid training plan could look like this…

Day	Training
Monday	Heavy Strength Day
Tuesday	Lighter Cardio Day
Wednesday	High Volume Strength Day
Thursday	Rest
Friday	Heavy Strength Day
Saturday	Long Cardio Day
Sunday	Rest

This is schedule is a basic outline and you’d refine it based on your goals and personal circumstances.

Fundamentally, the idea is that you rest two days per week. You’re also doing the harder sessions (heavy strength and long cardio days) around the rest days. This reduces injury risk, and ensures you’re fresher to start with.

Notice how the workouts have only two focus points – strength and cardio. This is on purpose – if you add bodybuilding or HIIT style workouts into the plan, it moves away from hybrid and towards general fitness.

How Fitness Training Has Evolved

Thanks to the evolution of an interest in general fitness (rather than the approach of building strength, muscle or stamina in isolation), hybrid training has developed more of a following.

To those of you with less than 10 years of training experience under your belt, you’ll probably wonder what hell I’m talking about, because you’ve spent all of your training life in a world where hybrid training isn’t a new thing!

So let me give you some history…

Back when I started working as a personal trainer, there were a few beliefs that were held tight by gym goers. These opinions that governed the way most of us trained back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, …

• You couldn’t build muscle and lose fat at the same time. This meant people would go through a ‘bulk’ to gain size, then a ‘cut’ to get lean
• Cardio would strip your muscle mass. This belief turned some gym bros off cardio for years in the mid-naughties through to the last couple of years.
• You could be big and strong, or thin with great endurance… But you couldn’t be both. This forced people to choose a path – and you rarely deviated from that path!

These have been largely disproven now thanks to a combination of the sports science labs, athletic performance breaking new grounds, and CrossFit showing the general public that it’s possible to be both jacked and have a great engine.

And that’s when hybrid training started to grow a following.

Hybrid Training Following Wider Fitness Trends

If we look deeper into the way fitness has gone, it has followed a path of extremes that many facets of life do.

Take money for example – there’s an old saying ‘the rich get richer, the poor get poorer’. Apply that to fitness, and we have ‘the fit get fitter, the fat get fatter’.

And it’s true. Back when I was younger, gym members were far fewer in number. According to industry figures, 16% of the UK population are gym members. This has doubled from 7-8% in the early 2000’s. In the USA, 20% of the population are gym members, up from around 11% in the early 2000’s.

Within that population, what the gym population is doing has increased significantly.

Gyms used to be full of fixed resistance and cardio machines. It was 3 sets of 10 of your favourite exercises. Programming wasn’t really a thing – you just trained, then left. All cardio was steady-state work, no variety.

As training evolved and we saw classes, HIIT, more free weights etc being added, the gym population got fitter.

As CrossFit exploded, things kicked on again. Weightlifting, kettlebells, single dumbbells, prowlers, sleds, tyres, ropes, bodyweight exercise and new protocols of cardio training became more widespread. More than any other fitness modality in history, CrossFit changed the way we looked at generalist fitness training.

On the back of CrossFit we have HYROX and various other functional fitness competitions growing. Fitness isn’t just about health any more – it’s a sport in its own right.

Impact Has Spread From the Gym

The increase in challenge and intensity has spread from the gym and into the wider fitness space.

There used to be fun runs and 5Ks dotted around. You still have those, but in terms of event size they’ve been dwarfed by extreme obstacle course races such as Tough Mudder, Spartan Race, the Rat Race etc. The fitness community was seeking bigger, tougher challenges.

IronMan is another example of the growth of people seeking further challenges. At the first IronMan in 1979, there were 15 competitors. Now, over 200,000 people compete in the event annually.

Ultramarathons, multi-day events and extreme cycling events are further proof of the growth.

Hybrid Training – The Takeaways

Here’s what you need to know about hybrid training, so you can become a hybrid athlete yourself…

1. Focus on TWO goals only – strength and stamina are the most common two.
2. Don’t distract your training with anything else – focus on those alone.
3. Maximum 5 sessions per week – give yourself rest.
4. Don’t train the same way on consecutive days – give yourself a better chance of recovery with variation.
5. Don’t confuse hybrid training with circuits, CrossFit or anything similar – they’re different altogether.

Hybrid training is a clean approach to fitness, and it helps you work on two important physical abilities at the same time. If that sounds like something you’d be up for, go for it!