Marker Sessions: Essential Insights to Elevate Your Hyrox Training

How to use testing to build your Hyrox program.

What is a marker session? How to use them and why they are important.

Marker session can be called many different things but they refer to sessions that are used as a guide to establish a bench mark in your current training cycle.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you're in a strength phase, and as part your program you hit a triple back squat for X weight 6 months ago. You can use this as a bench mark in your training cycle to review your progress.

During our track season, we held test sessions to assess our progress. For 400m runners, one of the sessions we used was 3 x 200m at our 400m pace, with 6 and 8 minutes of rest in between each run.

If athletes achieved their target times during set rest periods, they were on track to meet their 400m race times.

These session would allow us to adjust training over the coming cycles based on the results. If an athlete had the speed for the first and second 200m, but faded in the 3rd run, we would work on speed endurance. If they couldn’t get close the time on the first run we would work on speed.

They can be a very good guide throughout your training program to use these as a guide to adjust your training.

As a Hyrox athlete you could have different marker sessions based on:

1. Strength (3 x X back squat)

2. Running (5km time or 10km time.

3. Speed (5 x 800m) with set rest periods

4. Speed endurance (3 x 2km with set rest periods)

5. Compromised Running - Use any combination of exercises that simulate the stress of a Hyrox. The session should be approximately 45min-1hr. Test every 8-12 weeks. Once you have a recorded time use this as your guide to assist with your programming.

   1. 400m run

   2. 10 x Squats (70% of 1 RM)

   3. 25m Sled Push (race weight)

   4. 50m Walking Lunges (Race Weight)

   5. 400m run

Marker sessions give you the confidence coming into a race that you have done the work. They also assist with programming giving you or your coach feedback to make adjustments in your program.

Happy Training.