Hyrox season is just around the corner, and a big question is how can you help prevent your season being impacted by injury.
As you will all know by now that you can’t fully avoid injury but there are a few things that you should considered when looking at your training week to help keep injury risk low.
A lot of people dive right into their Hyrox training with no specific programme, highly motivated and wanting to go all out on every session. I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear that they’re leaving themselves open for an increased risk of injury and here are the most common mistakes:
- Trying to manage 3 separate programmes rather than looking at things as a whole.
Trying to execute a running programme, an S&C programme and Hyrox programme, whilst trying to perform @100% is only likely to lead to overuse.
- Focusing purely on strength and or purely on running, and expecting the race to go smoothly. Your training should be consistent with what is expected from Hyrox, which is a combination of strength, endurance and running. It’s ok for your training to favour one aspect if you are weaker across one of the disciplines but making sure your weekly training has the variety in it is super important.
- Increasing too much too soon and ending up putting too much stress on your body that you can not cope with.
If you are doing any of the above it is likely that you have or will pick up an injury along the way.
Now your next question probably is what do I do if I feel a niggle crop up during my training?
Let me take you through a process that I would recommend using runners' knee as an example, a common injury that I have seen with the increase in intensity of our Hyrox sessions.
Runners knee is a broad term used for patella femoral pain and is usually a result of overtraining, lack of focus on strength work and increasing distance/intensity too soon.
- Book in to see a therapist to get a better understanding of what is going on. Your therapist should take you through a full assessment and be able to provide more tailored advice to help you get back on track.
- Reduce your load and intensity from your running schedule or remove it completely if you feel like it’s really impacting your symptoms.
- Continue with your strength training, adapting any exercises where necessary and reducing the load to a tolerable level.
- Add in some injury specific rehab work which should be guided from your assessment with your therapist.
- Slowly reintroduce speed/distance in your running schedule, increasing 10% at a time and never changing both speed and/or distance simultaneously.
This is just a rough guide that can be adapted depending on your injury. As always, iIf you are struggling and feel like you need more advice please get in touch and we will be happy to help.