The 4 Pillars of Hybrid Performance

• Strength
• Endurance
• Muscle Mass
• Recovery

In this post I break down what I believe are the 4 key pillars of hybrid performance and how each of them are trained in the MARCHON Hybrid program.

Hybrid training can really be any two or more sports or athletic qualities that don’t necessarily complement one another, but I believe there are 4 pillars to hybrid performance as most people see it within the current fitness landscape.

Strength

Strength is a very broad term but when I am defining strength, I think of powerlifting, which is the Squat, Bench Press and Deadlift. When most people think about defining someone as strong, they are asking “what do you bench?” or “what do you squat?”

In my view, people aren’t thinking “what do you atlas stone?” or “what do you log press?” even though they are just as much feats of strength as a bench press or a squat are. While I am writing this, I am also giving myself ideas of how I could incorporate more strongman-style strength work into the Hybrid program.

But, to summarise, the general athletic population are thinking: if I want to get strong, I need to squat, press and deadlift, typically with a barbell.

In order to develop strength in the Squat, Bench Press and Deadlift (SBD), there are several things we need to do.

1. Technical Improvements

Technique is as important as being physically strong, particularly over the long term if we want to maximise strength and reduce injury risk.

There are two ways I do this in the Hybrid program.

The first is increased volume, particularly at the start of a training phase. When intensity is low, we can afford to have higher volumes through linear periodisation. This allows us to spend more time practising the skill of the movement and we know that the more time we spend practising a movement, the more efficient we will become at it.

The second way I improve technique is through variations of the key lifts. Things like pauses are a great addition to a program because that positional awareness teaches people where they need to be in a lift to get the most out of it.

Getting physically strong takes a lot of time. Months, years and decades. But technical improvements can happen in a matter of weeks, so improving technique is a surefire way of maximising performance in a short space of time.

2. Manage Intensity

If we started at an RPE 10 at the very beginning of a training phase, we are most likely going to struggle to make progressions week after week.

Typically on the Hybrid program, I start RPE targets at around 7 or 8 out of 10 and slowly build intensity as volume decreases towards the end of a training phase.

We will inevitably make technical improvements and build confidence over the training phase as we continue to expose ourselves to the same movement patterns again and again. Combining this with a sensible progression of RPE allows us to continue to progress week on week, as opposed to starting hot and burning out or getting injured.

3. Manage Fatigue

Intensity and volume both contribute to fatigue. I believe that volume plays a much larger role in fatigue than intensity does.

I’ve talked about this in previous posts, but all too often I see heinous amounts of volume being thrown at an athlete, which in most cases doesn’t create better results when you’re trying to peak multiple sports or physical attributes at the same time.

A few things I do on the Hybrid program to manage fatigue include undulating running volume every week. For example, one week doing 30 minutes of an easy run and the next week doing 60 minutes.

Another is slowly progressing RPE targets across powerlifting movements, as previously mentioned. Thirdly, providing the minimum effective dose to elicit hypertrophy.

Bodybuilding-style training can be incredibly fatiguing alongside endurance training. Both create a lot of local muscular fatigue, so if you’re hammering your legs with high-volume bodybuilding work and then trying to run on top of that, you’re essentially asking the same muscles to deal with two big training stresses.

By keeping bodybuilding volume at the minimum effective dose, we can get the vast majority of the possible gains without creating a deep hole of fatigue that we’re going to struggle to climb out of.

Endurance

Again, endurance is a very broad term, but for the vast majority of people, when you ask them what hybrid training is, it’s running and lifting.

So for 90% of the people on the MARCHON Hybrid program, progressing running alongside lifting performance is what people are after.

So what do we need to do to improve endurance and, more specifically, running performance in a hybrid-style program?

1. Aerobic Capacity/Base

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but the bigger the base, the taller the peak. This is pretty true of endurance.

Don’t worry, I’m not one of those people who thinks all you need to do to get better at running is Zone 2 training. But we do need to have a very strong aerobic base if we want to go fast or if we want to go far.

I’m also not one of those coaches who thinks 80% of your conditioning needs to be easy and 20% needs to be hard regardless of context. If you’re only running 2 to 3 times a week, you’re never accumulating that much moderate to high-intensity conditioning across a training phase anyway.

We definitely want easy runs in our training program every week. They allow us to accumulate aerobic volume while keeping fatigue relatively low, improve our ability to utilise fat as a fuel source, improve mitochondrial and cardiovascular adaptations, and build the tissue tolerance required to withstand higher forces when we do run faster.

2. Tempo Efforts

Tempo training, or moderate conditioning, is also important to include when trying to develop endurance.

In relatively simple terms, this is where we are starting to rely less on fat as a fuel source and more heavily on carbohydrate. If you’re tracking your heart rate, this will most likely fall somewhere around Zone 3.

Tempo work gives us an opportunity to accumulate a decent amount of work at a faster pace without the same fatigue cost that comes with threshold or higher-intensity conditioning. We can spend longer periods running at a moderately hard pace, which helps improve our ability to sustain faster speeds and makes us more economical at those speeds.

I also think tempo work is particularly valuable for hybrid athletes because there is already so much intensity coming from the gym. We don’t necessarily need every conditioning session to bury us. Tempo work gives us a really useful middle ground between easy aerobic work and hard threshold training.

3. Threshold Training

Threshold training is where we start pushing closer to the fastest pace we can sustain without fatigue and lactate accumulation rapidly taking over.

The benefit of threshold training is that it improves our ability to sustain faster running speeds for longer periods of time. We become better at producing and clearing lactate, and we can essentially push the point where a pace goes from feeling controlled to becoming unsustainable.

If we improve our threshold, a pace that previously felt very hard can start to feel much more manageable. This is obviously going to benefit 5K, 10K and half-marathon performance, but it also has a knock-on effect at slower running speeds because we now have a bigger engine to work with.

The downside is that threshold training comes with a higher fatigue cost than easy or tempo running, particularly when you’re also trying to squat, bench, deadlift and build muscle. So, like everything in a hybrid program, the dose matters. We want enough exposure to create an adaptation without doing so much that it starts negatively impacting everything else.

Muscle Mass

When I talk about bodybuilding, I’m talking about trying to build muscle. This doesn’t mean that the goal is to step on stage in a bodybuilding competition, but it’s using techniques from bodybuilding-style training to maximise muscle growth alongside the other physical attributes we are trying to develop.

As I’ve previously mentioned, we have to be careful with the dose of bodybuilding training as it’s very fatiguing when done alongside endurance training or powerlifting.

For the majority of people, having more muscle mass will improve strength, so we know that adding in some bodybuilding training alongside powerlifting will benefit performance.

We’re not looking to pack on kilos and kilos of muscle, as this could negatively impact running performance, but there’s plenty of evidence to support that regular strength training improves running performance and can help improve tissue capacity and reduce injury risk.

In the Hybrid program, as previously mentioned, I will program the minimum effective dose required to continue to build muscle without negatively impacting the other physical attributes we’re trying to develop.

Recovery

The final pillar of hybrid performance is recovery.

Assuming you are following a well-structured and balanced hybrid program, which is often half the battle, there are a few things that we call world-class basics at MARCHON.

They are:

• Nutrition
• Sleep
• Stress management
• Recovery tools

This could be an entire post in itself, but ensuring you’re eating enough calories, protein and carbohydrates is essential to maximising performance. If you’re trying to push performance whilst being in a calorie deficit, there’s only a matter of time before your overall stress increases and you see a plateau in results.

Life gets in the way, so it can be very difficult to get the 7 to 9 hours everyone tells you you should be getting. But whenever you’re able to get to bed on time and put your phone away, do it, because it will benefit your performance in the gym. Things like a cool and dark room, light exposure early in the morning and reducing caffeine intake after lunch can also help.

You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react. Some situations are going to be stressful, so finding ways that allow you to deal with that stress are going to benefit you in the long run. Going for a walk outside, journalling and breathwork are some of my favourites.

I’ve put recovery tools last because I think people rely on them too heavily. Saunas and ice baths are nice to have, but they are going to be like a fart in the wind if you’ve done a 60K week on Strava alongside 15 to 20 sets per muscle group.

If you can add them into your routine then great, but everything else I have mentioned above, in my opinion, is far more tangible than 15 minutes in a sauna.

I’ve let you in on some of my trade secrets, so if you’re thinking “I wanna get stronger, bigger and fitter all at the same time without feeling absolutely buried”, then you know the drill.

Sign up to the Hybrid program.

See you on the leaderboard.