WDM Coaching

Race week is not the time to find out how much more training you can squeeze in. By that point, the work capable of meaningfully improving your fitness has already been done. Another big session will not create an adaptation quickly enough to help on race day, but the fatigue it creates can certainly still be there when you reach the start line.

That does not mean training should disappear completely. A good taper reduces volume and accumulated fatigue while retaining enough intensity, familiar movement and normal rhythm to keep you sharp. The aim is to arrive fresher without feeling completely disconnected from training.

Some athletes feel brilliant as the workload drops. Others feel flat, restless or begin questioning whether they have lost fitness. Neither feeling is a reason to start adding work just to reassure yourself. Tuesday’s session is not the test.

Build fitness throughout the training block. Use race week to uncover it. Then trust the plan and arrive ready to express what you have already built.

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Big weekend across HYROX, fitness racing and running.

32 results, 18 podiums and plenty of PBs across 11 different events. But the numbers are really just the outcome. Behind every one of them is an athlete consistently getting the work done, week after week.

Different goals, different events and different levels of experience, but the same principle applies: train consistently, have a clear direction and give the process enough time to work.

Some weekend for the WDM crew.

Pacing is not about going slowly. It is about spending your effort where it gives you the greatest return.

Yesterday, I recorded the 69th-fastest SkiErg split and the fastest Wall Ball split. That was not because I couldn’t ski faster. I simply had no interest in proving how fit I was at the first station and then paying for it across the rest of the race.

I settled into the effort, kept the running controlled and allowed the race to come back to me. By the time I reached the Wall Balls, I still had the capacity to properly race them rather than just survive them.

This is exactly what I tell my athletes. HYROX is one continuous event, not eight separate opportunities to show everyone how powerful you are. A few seconds gained by getting overexcited early can easily become far more than that when the fatigue catches up with you later.

The aim is not to feel like a hero in the opening ten minutes. It is to still be racing properly when everyone who went out too hard is beginning to unravel.

Control the beginning, compete through the middle and empty the tank when the finish line is actually close enough for it to matter.

I’ve never loved terms like tempo, threshold, sub-threshold, Zone 3 and Zone 4 because they often create the illusion of precision without actually giving the athlete much clarity. Different coaches use the same words differently, different zone systems draw the lines in different places, and the physiological markers we use can shift with fatigue, heat, fuelling, recovery status and testing conditions.

Heart rate adds another layer because it doesn’t behave the same way across every modality. Running, rowing, skiing, cycling and mixed-modality work can all produce different heart-rate responses at a similar perceived effort, and in HYROX that gets messier again because stations, grip fatigue, strength demands and transitions all change the cost.

Duration matters too. RPE 7 for 3 minutes is not the same as RPE 7 for 15 minutes, so the pace and heart-rate response will not line up neatly. That is why I prefer to coach intensity with context rather than pretending one label or number tells the whole story.

For me, effort and breathing sit at the centre of the prescription. Pace and heart rate still matter, but they are feedback. If the athlete understands how the session should feel, how controlled the breathing should be, how long the effort should be sustainable for and what the session is trying to achieve, the prescription is doing its job.

I do not hate threshold training or physiological testing. I hate confusing language.

We often talk about getting fitter as though every useful adaptation moves together at the same speed. It doesn’t.

Movement skill, pacing and the ability to use the strength you already have can improve relatively quickly. Aerobic development, muscular endurance, tissue tolerance and long-term running economy generally require far more repeated exposure before the change becomes obvious in performance.

This is why judging a programme solely through PBs can be misleading. Progress may first appear as a lower effort at the same pace, better movement quality, faster recovery between efforts or a greater ability to repeat the same output. Those changes matter, even if the result sheet hasn’t caught up yet.

If you keep changing the training every time improvement isn’t immediately visible, you never give the original stimulus enough time to reveal whether it is working. Apply it, repeat it, recover, monitor the response and adjust when the evidence supports making a change.

Don’t confuse “not yet” with “not working.”

Save this for the next time you’re tempted to judge an entire training block from one session or one result.

WDM IS GROWING 🟡⚫️

We’re excited to announce that Lee Tynan is joining the WDM Coaching team.

Lee brings years of training, racing and coaching experience, alongside competing at a high level in HYROX. His addition allows us to support more athletes while maintaining the individualised, performance-focused coaching WDM is built on.

Applications for 1-to-1 coaching are now open. Comment “coaching” below to get the link to the application form.

There is no one right way to train, and one of the easiest mistakes in coaching is confusing personal preference with universal truth. Polarised training can work. Pyramidal training can work. Threshold-focused work can work. VO2-focused work can work. Higher volume and lower volume approaches can both work. The question is not whether a method has ever worked for someone. The question is whether it makes sense for the athlete in front of you, the demands of the sport, the recovery cost and the bigger plan.

Coaches build systems from what they have learned, what they have tested, what they have seen work repeatedly and what they believe they can apply consistently across athletes. That means two good coaches can look at the same problem, choose different routes and both still arrive at a sensible solution. The important part is being able to explain the rationale, the trade-offs and why one option was chosen over another.

I do not regularly prescribe faster than threshold running, but that is not because I think it does not work. It is because I generally prefer threshold work for the athletes I coach because I think it is more specific to what we are trying to achieve and, in most cases, slightly safer to apply consistently over time. That is a coaching preference, not proof that another method is wrong.

Ultimately, the method only matters if it allows you to train well, recover well and repeat the process for long enough to improve. Consistency is still the common denominator. There are plenty of roads that can take you forward, and good coaching is about choosing the one that makes the most sense for the athlete rather than pretending there is only one road at all.

Beware the absolutist. If someone tells you there is only one way to do it, that is usually where the bu****it starts.

The biology behind adaptation is enormously complicated. Every training session sets off a web of signalling pathways, changes in gene expression, protein synthesis, mitochondrial adaptation, neural changes, tissue remodelling and a host of other processes that interact with each other over time. The mistake is assuming that because the biology is complex, the programme needs to be complex too.

In practice, effective training still comes back to a fairly simple set of fundamentals. Start by finding the training frequency you can realistically sustain, then build the volume you can actually recover from, and only then decide how much intensity that structure can support. From there, identify the qualities that are limiting performance, give them enough exposure to improve, and continue developing the strengths that are already contributing without trying to train everything equally.

Progressive overload should also be exactly that: progressive. The aim is to gradually increase the amount of useful work you can absorb, not to keep creating bigger and more destructive sessions in the hope that more suffering automatically means more adaptation. That progression also has to sit inside the rest of your life, because sleep, work, family, travel, nutrition and stress all influence how much training you can recover from.

So the mechanisms underneath adaptation can be incredibly complicated, while the practical process remains relatively simple: choose the right dose, direct it at the qualities that matter, keep the training specific to the outcome, progress it gradually and repeat the fundamentals for long enough for adaptation to occur.

Low skill doesn’t mean low technique.

HYROX movements might be simple compared with highly technical sports, but simple movements can still be done inefficiently.

And inefficiency has a cost.

Poor positions create extra movement. Extra movement creates more muscular work. More muscular work increases the physiological cost. Repeat that across dozens or hundreds of reps and suddenly a “small” inefficiency is no longer small.

Technique also has to survive fatigue. It is one thing to move well when fresh. It is another to keep your rhythm, positions and standards intact when breathing is high and the race has already taken its toll.

Build efficiency first. Then add speed.

Fitness gives you capacity. Efficiency decides how much of it you waste.

You don’t need to simulate HYROX every week to get better at HYROX.

Race-specific work matters, but it is expensive. It combines running, stations, muscular fatigue, cardiovascular demand, mechanical loading and a decent recovery bill afterwards.

Most of the time, the better question is whether you are actually developing the qualities the race requires.

Aerobic capacity. Threshold. Running economy. Strength. Movement efficiency. Strength endurance.

Then, as the race gets closer, you progressively connect those qualities and make the training more specific.

Simulations still have a job. They can be useful for pacing, tactics, transitions, movement splits, fuelling and race confidence.

But testing the system is not the same as building the system.

Build the capacity. Integrate it. Sharpen it. Then race.