Cycling Is the Best Form of Cross-Training! Why Top HYROX Athletes Spend Hours on The Bike: Dan Plews (#23)

**John Paton** (0:00)
Dan, welcome back. Why do you think we're seeing so many elite athletes spending a lot of their training hours cycling for Hyrox?

**Dan Plews** (0:07)
So yeah, it's a very good question, and it's something that I've definitely noticed just from on social media and browsing the web. There are a lot of Hyrox athletes who are taking to the bike more and more. I would say it seems to be more indoor cycling though, wouldn't you agree, rather than outdoor cycling for the most part?

**John Paton** (0:26)
Yeah, for the most part, it's gonna be indoor cycling. Although, we have seen a number of Hyrox athletes coming from an outdoor cycling background. So, Hunter McIntyre famously spends a lot of time on his mountain bike. We've got Charlie Boderall, who is an extremely accomplished cyclist. But for the most part, it does seem like Hyrox athletes are training on the indoor cycling. And maybe you can explain some of the differences.

**Dan Plews** (0:47)
And I think that's key, right? Is that the ons who are far more of a cycling background are obviously more comfortable with riding on the road. And to be honest with you, I don't think there are that...
Well, there are not that many differences physiologically in terms of indoor versus outdoor cycling. An old rule of thumb from my triathlon coaching days is that typically you do weight indoor cycling a little bit more than outdoor cycling just because of the continuous nature and the continuous pressure that you're always applying to the pedals. So the old rule of thumb was like an hour on the road, an hour indoors is worth an hour and a half outside, two hours indoors is worth three hours outside. That kind of idea was always pushed around because of that reason that you are never freewheeling, you're never going downhill, but also you're not going uphill. So I don't think it's been actually proven, but this is a general thought for most people. But to answer the question, it's a very interesting concept, and I think it comes down to, I was actually just writing an article about this yesterday, which I'll hopefully publish quite soon. And it comes down to this, like what I like to call, and I did the same in the old triathlon methodologies, is this hierarchy of training needs. So my philosophy is when it comes to training, there's definitely a hierarchy of needs that need to be met in like a pyramid fashion, just like we talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You have your basic shelter, water, and then parts on top of that. But without the first parts of the most fundamentals that you need to get right before you start stacking on top. And what I would always put at the bottom of the pyramid is training frequency and volume. And that part, and it's exactly what we talked about last week when we talked about your training, John, was we said, OK, how are we going to get John get strong to his next best performance, right? And that was that we said we need to get you from the train to train phase to the train to compete phase. And by doing that, we're going to mainly increase your training frequency and volume. So what cycling allows you to do really nicely is you can very well easily increase your volume and you can increase your frequency, gaining a lot of aerobic conditioning with minimal impact and minimal injury risk, which means that your training consistency over time becomes, one is it becomes very consistent, but also you can maintain that higher training volume week in, week out. So to accumulate a 20 hour week when you're including cycling is very, very easy. But if you want to accumulate a 20 hour week when you're only doing running, that becomes really, really hard. And the recovery processes are also much slower for running. And the reason is, is because when we think about the time course of recovery, there's a number of different physiological mechanisms that are responsible on that kind of time course, right? So you might have something like at the very, very low end, very fast to recover is your ATP, phosphocreatine system, like your energy systems, and then glycogen repletion, then your autonomic nervous system. But one of the latter things, in fact, the last thing that takes the longest to recover is things like muscle damage. And there's a lot of muscle damage from weight training, especially eccentric components and running. And I think this is even more important or a bigger consideration for Hyrox athletes, because they will undergo more muscle damage than most, just typically because they're heavier athletes, and there's more impact for every time they're running compared to a 60-kilo athlete. 80-kilo athletes are just going to have more damage. So I think that's the biggest reason really.