The latest fitness craze to hit the scene is the Hyrox race! For those who are not familiar or have not heard of this, Hyrox is a type of crossfit race/competition, consisting of 8 gruelling fitness stations with 1 km of running between each station. The race is timed, with participants having to complete all the running and stations within the shortest time possible.
For those who are curious, these are the stations and the sequence in which they have to be done in:
Image source: https://hyrox.com/the-fitness-race/
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In this week's article, I will share three injury prevention tips for those participating in upcoming Hyrox races.
Tip number 1: Plan and progress your training sensibly
The difficulty with planning for a crossfit event like this, is that you have to monitor both cardiovascular strength (running, rowing, ski erg) and muscular strength (all the other stations not mentioned) exercises.
For cardiovascular exercises, the common rule for progression that is used is a 10% rule - that is to say you should not be increasing 10% of training load from week to week. This is the common rule of thumb that I give to my patients who are athletes to better manage their training stress and load.
As for the muscular strength stations, the rule of specificity applies. The rule of specificity in sports indicates that in order to become good in a certain sport or movement, the said sport or movement has to be practised in the way that the athlete has to compete in.
For example, to become good at marathons, an athlete would have to practise running and not cycling.
A useful tool that is readily available is the fitness related fatigue score, also known as TSS. TSS stands for Training Suffer Score, and is measured either by heart rate, power (if you have a cycling power meter, this score can be calculated from that as well). TSS scores are much better at calculating training fatigue accumulated from cardiovascular based exercises, rather than strength-based exercises.
The beauty of using TSS to measure cardio-based workouts is that it takes into account environmental variables such as humidity, level of fatigue etc., especially when compared to having simply just having number of reps and sets as the only measure of training stress.
Example image of a sportswatch with a readout that calculates Training Stress Score (TSS)
The downsides to using TSS however, is that this unit of training stress measurement does not take into account things like joint or ligamentous stress, muscular load of a workout. Do keep this in mind if you decide to use TSS as the main unit of training stress measurement.
Tip number 2: Better to be not as fit, than to be injured
This is a difficult pill for competitive athletes to swallow: it takes longer to recover from an injury, than it is to take a couple of days off to allow a niggle to settle. The number of patients that I have treated, who insist on exercising despite injury are way too common.
Sometimes the line between injury and post exercise aches and pains aren't clear, and this creates ambiguity. A typical soft tissue injury sustained from sport, depending on severity, can take anywhere from 2-8 weeks for full recovery. Rather than earning a DNS (Did Not Start) to the race, it could be more strategic to take a few days off.
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Increases in fitness happens over a prolonged period of time - sudden increases in fitness are typically unsustainable, and can increase the risk of injury exponentially. For a race like Hyrox, a sensible time to start building up fitness to match the demands of the event would be around 2 months before the event.
In the scenario where the commitment made to join the event is made later, and the start is less than 2 months from the race date, it would be sensible not to over-exert and 'rush' the level of intensity.
Tip number 3: Building muscular strength takes longer than developing cardio fitness
Building muscular strength and resilience to be able to complete and ace the event takes time. If you in a bind, and have to choose between strengthening and cardio, do keep in mind that developing muscle strength takes longer than cardio fitness. Improvements in strength for a beginner takes around 2 weeks to see a small but significant improvement in strength, while on the other hand, cardio fitness improvements are relatively more noticeable, and can be trained over a shorter period of time.
What this means, is that if you are time-poor, you might want to focus more on strengthening first before progressing on to cardio exercises at a later stage to avoid injury.
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