HCP #92 - Coaching High Performance Athletes HYROX365 Coaches Summit

**Anthony Peressini** (0:28)
This is episode 92 of the Hybrid Coaching Podcast. This is a live episode of my presentation at the HYROX 365 Coaches Summit in London this past week. The topic is going to be coaching high performance athletes in HYROX. So please enjoy this episode, coming to you live from the HYROX Coaches Summit.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:48)
Hey team, I hope everyone enjoyed their lunch. We're looking to get stuck into another awesome afternoon of speakers and sessions. I'm gonna kick things off with looking at the high performance athlete. Now, I'm delighted to bring our next guest to the stage. This is a man that has come from the world of CrossFit. He, with a background in wrestling, he's got a CrossFit level three. He's a British weightlifting coach. And more recently, he's helped the three time world champion Lauren Weeks, his wife, make it to the top of the sport and stay there. This is a guy that knows the ins and the outs of technical proficiency, but also how to bring the best out of athletes. I think we might have had one Elite 15 major where eight, nine of the athletes on the female start line were under his programming and tutelage. So there is quite literally no one better to learn from in this sport. And that's also why he's a contributor to our level two program here at HYROX 365 So can you put your hands together warmly for Anthony Peressini?

**Anthony Peressini** (2:00)
All right. How's it going, everyone? I was not going to start that way. You know what? The whole time I worked on the slides and everything, and I was like, I don't know how to start. And I said I was not going to say, how's it going, everyone? But that came out naturally. So I'm just going to roll with it, I guess. I don't have like Frederick Zillin, the ability to jump up and run around and have you say, hey, Frederick, or my name. But I'm going to talk to you just about high-performance athletes and how to coach them, actually, is where I'm going to take this. It's not necessarily we can get into questions and everything at the end, but I'm going to talk to you about how I coach, actually, high-performance athletes and what I mean by that. So, coaching high-performance athletes in HYROX. I'm Anthony. It's Anthony Peressini. As Lauren said, my wife is Lauren Weeks. I've also coached a lot of the other elite athletes. I believe the first major was November 2023 Since then, I think there's been 11 or 12 of them, if you include, you got to include world champs and regionals and everything. And I've had over 60 of the athletes in the fields throughout there, multiple world champs, 10 elite major world champions, and multiple podiums. And like she said, my background, I wrestled in the United States. She said, British weightlifting. I'm a USA weightlifting sports performance coach. And then I've ran triathlons and marathons, done a lot of CrossFit. But that's just my background. So a little bit of overview of what we're going to talk about here today is, like the time scale of success. So to start with on this, I want to discuss what is a high performance athlete. In HYROX, it's kind of defined. We say that the Elite 15, that's where I'll start. As the Elite 15 is a high performance athlete, it's the tip of the spear in the sport. It's the ones going for the highest performance. It's the ones going for the fastest times. So that's where I'll start with the Elite 15 But I would also extend that down to probably the 16th through 40th or 50th place on those lists as well. And those are the ones that are striving to be in the Elite 15, the ones that are striving to get into the majors. So I'm going to be talking to you from a place of experience. I don't have a sports science background. If I went back to school, I probably would get a sports science degree instead. But I grew up knowing that I was going to be an engineer. I went the engineering route, have a master's degree in engineering, professional engineering license, and that's the route I took. And so I learned sports science through application as a coach. And I've now spent, after graduating college, about 15 years or more coaching athletes. After working as an engineer in the evenings and everything, went to coaching classes. So that's just where I'm going to be speaking to you from. And one thing I want to talk about that is like, through the experiences that we've had coaching athletes, I've used sports science, and I was kind of self-taught that way, I've used it as kind of validating, oh, we did this, and then I go look at sports science and say, oh, that says that the reason this worked is because of this method. And so that's just kind of how I've adapted and tried to learn and apply it.