Stair Stepper + Weight Vest: Dom Sheppard’s Low-Impact Build Back to a Sub-60 Hyrox (#24)

**John Paton** (0:00)
Okay, I'm here today with Dom Sheppard. Now, Dom is one of the best Hyrox athletes in Australia. He's run a 57 minutes in the Hyrox Open. He's also run as fast as a 53, 56 in the Hyrox Pro Doubles. That was just outside of elite qualification for the World Championships. Now, what's most impressive about Dom is that he achieves these times whilst working a very high pressure nine to five job. Dom, welcome to the show.

**Dom Sheppard** (0:29)
Thank you, mate. Good to be here and I appreciate the invite.

**John Paton** (0:33)
So, Dom, give us a sense. So, you're someone who is trying to compete for podiums at Hyrox. When you go into a Hyrox, you are trying to race with the best. So, give us a sense just how much training does it take to be trying to race for those podiums at Hyrox events?

**Dom Sheppard** (0:48)
It's a good question. It takes a lot. So, as we all know, Hyrox is a multi-discipline sport in the sense of its conditioning, strength and running. So, you do need to kind of focus across those three disciplines each week. And unfortunately, if you do want to compete at the high end, you're going to struggle to do that through just doing a couple of gym classes a week. Like, you do really need to spend a lot of time committing to that. So, at the moment, I'm probably running around, well, running, I mean training, about two hours a day, so across two sessions. Sometimes, if I've got the time, I'll just do one session after the other, but just, as you said, with work and stuff at the moment, it's typically across two sessions, so it's two hours each day. Obviously, the intensity of that varies, and that's across, again, those three disciplines of kind of strength, conditioning and running. But yeah, it's a lot of focus that I'm able to give. I've had to sacrifice a lot of other stuff, more so probably social in the last year, as it has begun to get a bit more serious and, you know, thankfully have had some really good races, but then I've also had to really focus on a lot of rehab work over this last eight months now to try and get back to this. So it's still been training, but it's just a slightly different focus, but I've still given it as much time as I was with my training prior anyway.

**John Paton** (2:11)
Okay, so it's about two hours of training a day. So that's about 14 hours a week. And trying to fit that in with a nine to five job, that's no easy feat. But Dom, why don't you quickly tell us about your goals for this new year?

**Dom Sheppard** (2:22)
Yeah, so I was actually thinking about this yesterday, because I do like to have my kind of goals set out around, and it usually is fitness and work for the most part, because they kind of tie in with my personal goals as such anyway. But as much as I want to take off loads of different things, loads of different events, loads of PBs, I think realistically just with what's happened in the last eight months, I need to just scale it right back and be like, right, what are we going to do for Jan? What are we going to do for Feb? What are we then going to do for March? Break it into almost monthly and quarter goals because I'm starting to get frustrated where I book an event. Let's say Auckland is actually a great example, January. I'm not going to be able to do it because my foot is just still not even close to being up. Hopefully, it's not ready to run on yet. If I race Auckland, I'm just going to put myself out further again.
I'm really just focusing on, for me, the January goal is to return to full fitness in the sense of begin to run again, still working on my hamstring, and then focus on, say, Brisbane as the next race, which is first weekend of April. That's really all I'm focused on from a fitness perspective and a 2026 perspective, as well as just achieving good things with my actual job and having a good start to the year there as well. But that's it, mate. It's quite simple. I just don't want to get ahead of myself. I've done it too many times in the last eight months and then just got disappointed because I then had to cancel races, etc.

**John Paton** (3:52)
Yeah, and I think this is one of the real challenges of getting injured. It really forces you to change your expectations and it can be quite difficult, especially when you're racing at such a high level. We'll come back to the Dom of 2026, the current state Dom, but I want to go back to your very first Hyrox. Back in 2023, you actually won your first ever Hyrox. You raced a one hour and one minute in Melbourne. I want to understand, Dom, what was your training going into that very first Hyrox? What do you think you got right in terms of your training? How did things look like way back then?