You can get stronger and fitter in the same block. It just needs the week laid out so the hard sessions aren't standing on each other's toes. Below are a few rules we stick to, then example weeks for four, three and five days.
A few rules first
Never more than two hard days in a row. After two, take an easy session or a day off.
Keep heavy legs and hard running about 24 hours apart where you can. A heavy back squat session leaves your legs flat for a day, and hard intervals on flat legs turn into slow intervals.
When you lift and condition in the same session, lift first. You need to be fresh to move a heavy bar well. The conditioning still does its job when you're a bit tired; the squat doesn't.
And keep most of your running easy, properly easy, at a pace where you could hold a conversation. That's where people go wrong more than anywhere else. Every run becomes a moderately hard run, and they're too tired to lift and not fresh enough for genuinely fast intervals.
How easy is easy?
Easy running means you could hold a conversation in full sentences. If you use a heart rate monitor, it's roughly zone 2; work out your zones with the heart rate zone calculator. For many people that pace feels embarrassingly slow at first, and that's fine. It gets quicker over months without any extra effort.
Watch for signs the week is too much: lifts stalling for two weeks running, sleep getting worse, feeling heavy-legged on every run. Any of those, take a deload week early rather than pushing on. It's far cheaper than an injury.
The four-day week
For most people with a job, four days is the sweet spot. Here's a week we'd happily give someone starting out:
- Monday: back squat 5 by 5 at around 75 to 80 per cent of your one-rep max, Romanian deadlift 3 by 8, then a 10-minute EMOM alternating 12 to 15 calories on the rower with 10 kettlebell swings.
- Tuesday: easy run, 30 to 45 minutes.
- Thursday: strict press 5 by 5, weighted or banded pull-ups 4 by 5, then a 12-minute AMRAP of 10 wall balls, 10 burpees and 12 calories on the ski or bike.
- Saturday: five 1km repeats at a hard pace you could repeat, two minutes rest between. Every other week, swap it for 4 rounds of 800m run then 25 wall balls straight off the run.
Wednesday and Friday off. If Saturday doesn't work, Sunday is fine, as long as there's a day between it and Monday's squats.
Three days or five
With three days you can't separate everything, so every session does two jobs. Day one: squat 5 by 5, then a 15-minute AMRAP of a 400m run, 15 kettlebell swings and 10 push-ups. Day two: strict press and pull-ups 4 by 5 each, then six 2-minute rowing efforts with a minute off. Day three: deadlift 4 by 4 and a steady 30-minute run, or 5 by 1km if you fancy the harder version. Leave a rest day between each.
Five days is the four-day week plus one more session, and the temptation is to make it another hard one. Don't. Make it 30 to 40 easy minutes on the bike or rower and 15 minutes of skill work. Easy aerobic volume is what builds the engine over months, and it helps you recover for the hard days rather than adding to the pile.
If you're training for a hybrid race
A hybrid race tests running in between functional stations, so the week shifts a little. Keep the two strength days, but make the Saturday session compromised running most weeks: run, do a station, run again before your legs have recovered. Four rounds of 1km running with 20 wall balls, or 1km running with 25 walking lunges carrying two kettlebells, are both good starting points.
Sled pushes and pulls aren't available in most gyms. Heavy prowler work, a weighted carry or walking lunges are reasonable stand-ins; none are perfect, so if your gym does have a sled, use it at least every other week in the last eight weeks.
Add a little running volume rather than more stations. Most people who struggle in their first hybrid race find the running, not the stations, is what slows them down. Our five tips for a first hybrid race go into the day itself.
Progressing it
Change one thing at a time. On the lifts, add 2.5kg a week while every rep still looks the same; when it stalls, repeat the week rather than forcing it. On the running, keep weekly volume increases to roughly ten per cent. For conditioning, repeat the same interval session or AMRAP every two or three weeks and try to beat the score.
Every fourth week, keep the same sessions but cut the volume by about a third. Most people grumble about deloads. Then they come back and hit a lift they'd been stuck on for a month.
It's also worth logging everything. If your squat keeps going up but your 1km splits are drifting, shift a bit of volume towards the engine. The other way round, take some out of the running. You'll see that in a training log within a few weeks, whereas memory alone takes months to notice anything. (It's one of the reasons we built the Fiz app around logging every session.)