HCP #101 - Temperature and Humidity effects on HYROX Performance

**Anthony** (0:13)
In this episode, I go solo. I talk a little bit about my experience at the Hyrox World Championships in Stockholm, followed by a presentation I gave to the Sports Science Advisory Council for Hyrox on the temperature and humidity effects on elite Hyrox performance. So, I'm going to bring that to you here in this episode. And next time, we'll discuss what that means in greater context of your risks. Let's make Hybrid Fitness work for you.
How's it going today, everyone? I'm back. Today, I am doing a solo episode. JK is taking a break after World Championships. He is actually off to his stag party. He gets married in a few weeks, and he made the trip back to Australia from Stockholm. And he is going out of town for his stag party. So it's just me. And I wanted to jump on here and talk to you guys a little bit about one of the things that happened in Stockholm, which was a talk, a keynote speech I was able to give as a member of the Sports Science Advisory Council for HYROX. I wanted to go over that on this podcast after having presented it to several members of the HYROX Sports team, the Judging team, the medical staff and the Sports Science Advisory Council and other elite coaches on Saturday morning while we were in Stockholm. That was a real privilege that I was given to be able to present and talk in front of all those members. So the talk that we gave, I had prepared in advance and it just so happens that the venue itself lended well into this topic. So the topic is temperature and humidity effects on elite performance in HYROX. And it was geared towards elite performance, but it really applies across the age groups and everything to a lot of other performance as well. And there's a lot of takeaway from this to give you an idea of what could happen and how to prepare for it in your coming races. So I just want to start with that. I will start this talk at the end before I get into that. I'm still kind of getting my voice back from the weekend. It was actually really difficult to talk on Friday, Saturday and Sunday while I was there. We traveled back on Tuesday and since then it's just been work and getting back into the swing of things and waking up extremely early from the jet lag coming back home. Before we get into this presentation, I just wanted to go over a little bit about what happened at Stockholm. There's a lot of podcasts and other things out there going over all the details and doing summaries and reviews so I'm not going to dive into deep on it. There's a lot of good ones out there. I'll just touch on some things from my perspective, watching a lot of the races because I got to be attached to the venue and the hotel was at the venue. So just what we're going to. So first off, this was our seventh HYROX World Championships. This was the fifth one that I've been to. The only two I've missed were the Elite 12, which was very restricted in Hamburg, wasn't able to go to that World Championships and the Manchester one. Lily was very young still and so I stayed home with her during that one. Otherwise, I've been to all the rest.
Seeing the progression from just my perspective in 2021 in Leipzig, going from there, which was a really cool event at the time, it was probably a lot like what a normal big event HYROX is nowadays though, into what I saw in Vegas, Nice, Chicago last year, and then just Stockholm this year. The progression has been really astounding. The level of competition is going up. The spectacle itself is pretty amazing. And just the quality of the event is really great. So those are some really fun aspects of the world championships and just goes to show the growth of the sport itself.
I don't know if I ever thought in 2019 when we first did our very first HYROX, that seven years later, we would be doing this event that has over a million people participating in one season and expects 1.5 to 2 million people next season. And as far as I heard, they can grow up to about four and a half to five million people within a season when they're capping out, which is just absolutely astounding. So that's some really cool growth numbers that can come up as HYROX continues to evolve. And just being at the World Championships, whether you're competing or not, is a really fun time. The elite races in person are a different experience than being able to watch them over the live streams.