Hi, team! 👊 Me again with the same reminder… You probably don’t need another new training method. You don’t need the latest supplement your favourite athlete is suddenly promoting. You don’t need to completely rewrite your programme because you saw a spicy HYROX workout on Instagram. And you definitely don’t need to change everything because you had one rubbish week. Most people already know the basics of getting fitter. The problem is that the basics are boring. Running consistently for months is boring. Getting your strength sessions done every week is boring. Going to bed instead of watching another three episodes on Netflix is boring. Eating properly, recovering properly and sticking to the plan when progress feels slow is boring. But do you know what’s even more boring? Training your arse off for six months and getting nowhere because you changed direction every three weeks. The athletes who make the biggest improvements aren’t necessarily doing anything particularly clever. They’ve just become very good at doing the obvious things over and over again. They train consistently. They eat enough to support their training. They prioritise sleep and recovery. They don’t panic after one bad session. They don’t completely change the plan every time Instagram shows them something new. And most importantly… They give the bloody thing enough time to work. So stop searching for the missing piece. You probably aren’t missing one. Get your sessions done. Recover properly. Eat well. Sleep. Repeat. Then do it again next week. Exceptional results are usually built from very ordinary things done consistently for a very long time. Keep it simple. Keep turning up

There seems to be this idea in HYROX that because the race is fast, everything we do in training also needs to be fast. It doesn’t. Sometimes the best thing you can do in the gym is slow everything down. If I give you 8 squats, I’m not particularly interested in how quickly you can get through them. I’m interested in whether all 8 reps actually did what we wanted them to do. That’s where tempo training comes in. You might see something like 3-1-X-1 written next to an exercise in your programme. That simply means you spend three seconds lowering the weight, pause for one second, drive back up as powerfully as you can, then take a second to reset. And yes, doing that properly will probably mean using less weight. That’s absolutely fine. Because we’re not trying to win Tuesday night’s squat session. We’re trying to get better at HYROX. Think about what happens towards the back end of a race. Your legs are tired, your heart rate is up and suddenly that sandbag feels considerably heavier than it did when you picked one up fresh in training. Having stronger quads and glutes that can control you through every lunge becomes pretty useful. When you’re halfway through a heavy sled push and every step feels like you’re trying to move a small family car, having spent months developing actual leg strength rather than just rushing through your squats becomes useful too. And when fatigue starts pulling your body into horrible positions, having strength throughout the entire range of movement gives you something to fall back on. Tempo work also gives us a way of making exercises harder without constantly adding more weight to the bar. A controlled set of split squats with moderate dumbbells can be absolutely disgusting when performed properly. You don’t necessarily need another 20kg; sometimes you just need to stop bouncing out of the bottom like you’ve stood on a drawing pin. That doesn’t mean every exercise should be painfully slow either. There are times we want speed and explosiveness.