HYROX is tough, and the level of competition is high. To excel, athletes need to not only train hard but also nurture healthy daily habits outside of their training sessions to give them an edge in their sporting performance. While natural talent provides a base for top athletes throughout the world of sport, much of their sustained dominance stems from the habits they have meticulously crafted over decades. Here are 13 key habits that elite athletes use (and which you can too!) to continually maximize their potential…
1. Prepare for Problems
Athletes often use visualisation techniques to imagine how they want their event to go. That’s great. But a top athlete needs to prepare for when things aren’t going so well…
You plan your travel to the event, only for the bus to be cancelled last minute.
You prepare your food for the big race, and your fridge packs up overnight.
You’re told, mid HYROX, that you’ve made a mistake that’s led to a penalty.
The start to your race is delayed by 2 hours because of problems at the venue.
What do you do? How do you deal with it?
You can’t let the unexpected slap you in the face.
As coach of the England World Cup winning rugby team, Clive Woodward was known for his meticulous planning. He would think through numerous possible scenarios and prepare the team to be able to appropriately deal with those…
If a certain player gets injured, what do we do? How about a streaker runs on to the pitch and the game gets delayed? How about we concede two tries in the opening 5 minutes – what changes? And so on.
“There shouldn’t be anything you come across in sport or business where you haven’t at least thought about.” says Woodward.
2. Cultivate Mental Toughness
While physical abilities are foundational, the ability to dig deep when a race (or training session) is getting tough often separates the most successful HYROX athletes.
Highly effective athletes prepare themselves for where their mind will go when times are getting tough. What will they think about (perhaps a certain person, or their ‘why’)? What mantra will they recite? This is something we often speak about on the Rox Lyfe podcast; in this episode, for example, we’ve combined responses from many of the top athletes talking about this subject, and it’s also covered in this episode with sports psychologist Josephine Perry.
3. Prioritise Recovery
While top athletes obviously train hard, they appreciate that recovery is an incredibly important factor that allows the body to adapt and get stronger. Insufficient rest leads to stagnation and raises injury risk.
If you’re training well, but then coming out of the gym and leading an extremely stressful, busy, active lifestyle, with poor sleep and nutrition, your lack of effective recovery may be holding you back.
Without a doubt, sleep is the foundation for all physical and mental recovery. By all accounts, basketball icon LeBron James aims for a solid 8-10 hours nightly, napping frequently to obtain 10+ hours daily, and swimmer Michael Phelps would sleep 12+ hours at the peak of his training. We don’t all necessarily need that amount, but taking action to help facilitate quality sleep is something that many top athletes will do.
4. Constant Improvement
One of football manager Alex Ferguson’s greatest successes was the ability to continually evolve his Manchester United teams. No matter how successful they were, he would never settle, always questioning how they could improve, and always being wary about letting the squad become stale.
On the day after a Premier League title was won, he would start discussing what needed to be done to achieve success in the following season. Squad changes would be made – sometimes ousting big name players – to ensure things were kept fresh and no one was resting on their laurels.
It ran into the team too. On the night they won the treble in 1999, Dwight Yorke commented that he had achieved everything he dreamed of in football. The ever-friendly Roy Keane quickly told him he should leave then because players at United needed to have hunger to win more.
Another example would be with legendary quarterback Tom Brady who repeatedly adapted his throwing motion, footwork, release technique and nutrition throughout his career to sustain dominance into his 40s.
Hunter McIntyre has recently won the 2023 HYROX World Championships and is the World Record holder. Is he resting on his laurels? No, he has set targets to continue to improve upon his times, and is working with a new coach, and mentors, to help him do that.
The greats constantly evolve.
5. Work with Coaches / Mentors
Even the most knowledgeable, experienced HYROX athletes can benefit from guidance to unlock their potential. Coaches can motivate you, provide a differing point of view, analyse form, be a knowledge base, educate and more. Very few, if any, top sportspeople in the world have been able to get to where they are without having a coach.
Of course, there is always the financial consideration of such a luxury. But you don’t necessarily have to have 1:1 access to whoever you’d like as your coach or mentor. You can listen to their interviews (hint hint on the Rox Lyfe podcast and blog!), read their books, follow their social media, watch their videos, and more.
And if you would like some personalised coaching help, check out our options here or our 12 Week Training Plans (individuals and doubles).
6. Train Hard (Consistently)
This one perhaps goes without saying, but you do need to put in the hard work to your training. Very few of us are so genetically gifted that we can still perform at a high level without training to a high level. Of course, we don’t all have the time (or energy) to train as many hours as some of the top performers in HYROX (for example, Mikaela Norman told us in this interview that she trains for 5 hours a day). But we do need to push ourselves enough to stimulate adaptations in the body if we want to progress.
It’s worth adding that this is a habit – like all the others – that needs to be done consistently. There will be days when we don’t feel like training. When we don’t want to go for that run in the morning when it’s cold and wet outside. When it would be much nicer to stay in bed. Top athletes have those thoughts too – but they ignore them and do the work anyway!
7. Record Keeping
Rather than obsessing over opponents or rankings, the most effective athletes challenge themselves to surpass prior personal bests. What our opponents do is largely out of our control, but we can focus on ourselves.
A big part of being able to compete against yourself comes from meticulous record-keeping. Of course, in HYROX we always have the data from our previous race to beat. But how about also tracking our performance (and volume) in training? Marathon legend Eliud Kipchoge logs every training run in a journal. Michael Phelps’ coach Bob Bowman kept detailed performance data over his career, allowing fine-tuned training adjustments. Tia Claire Toomey knows how she performed in pretty much every training session dating back several years (something that James Newbury told us when we spoke with him).
Progress comes from analysis of what’s working, and having motivation from previous performances to beat.
8. Pre-Race Routine
Top level athletes will normally have a very clear, effective, pre-race routine they follow. Before a race is a time where we get our body and mindset in place for optimal performance. It is an incredibly important, often under-looked, part of the performance process, that can get you to a place where you feel prepared, confident, and focused.
Every second counts in HYROX, and the difference that an effective pre-race routine can make is huge. Are you clear on what yours is?
9. Surround Yourself with the Right People
The people you surround yourself with can all be affecting your performance and mindset. Parents, teammates, friends, and coaches, and the way they speak to you, the language they use, how they train you, encourage you, and feed you will all have an impact on how you think, function and perform.
Of course, we are all individuals, but we are much more impacted by our environment than we might like to think. As Tim Ferris says “do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.”
It’s worth adding here that you don’t only need to spend time with people who are like you. Rather you should spend time with people who make you better. They are not necessarily the same thing. It’s important to have people with differing perspectives, perhaps with different backgrounds, and who will provide constructive criticism.
Top athletes are very protective over their inner circle. Who do you spend most time with? Are they improving you, lifting you up, filling you with positivity? Or dragging you down, tempting you, negatively impacting your sporting performance? Do they help move you closer towards your goals, or further away from them?
10. Trust the Process
The achievement of goals is not 100% within your control. There are many external (uncontrollable) factors that stand in the way; it may be a judge’s decision, the action or abilities of an opponent, an issue in your personal life, injuries, rule changes, just plain bad luck and much more.
Because of this, top athletes don’t only focus on outcome goals, but also actions within their control. They direct their energy towards what needs to be done in any one moment, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, to move them closer to their goal. They focus on doing the right thing, day in, day out, trusting the process and then have faith that, to use the words of NFL great Bill Walsh, “The score will take care of itself”.
Lebron James, one of the greatest ever Basketball players, says: “I focus on The Process, not the outcome. A champions mindset means total focus in the present. It means if I keep my head down right now, then the future takes care of itself. I concentrate on what’s below my feet as I take this step, not what’s a mile down the highway. While I’m training, and practising, and recovering, I’m not daydreaming about what it’s like to hold a trophy. When I’m running sprints across the football field, I’m fully present. I don’t like to look at the ending, I like to live in the moment. Yeah, I hold on to a vision of where I’m heading, but I try to stay locked into the moment and I trust that the work is going to take me there.“
11. Fuel Properly
Nutrition provides the raw materials to power training, recovery and performance. The metabolic demands of HYROX require your body to be in the best possible shape, and nutrition plays a critical role in ensuring that. Of course, this doesn’t mean that all top athletes follow the same diet, but they do fuel themselves sufficiently for the demands of the sport and eat in a way that energises them and allows them to recover effectively.
For more on this important topic check out this “nutrition for HYROX” article and / or book in for a private call to get personalised nutrition support that can transform your performance.
12. Remind Self of Goals
Most people, if asked, could tell you what their goals are, but very often aren’t reminding themselves often enough of them. This can lead us to compromise our long-term goals in exchange for short term pleasures.
Top athletes will often surround themselves with visual reminders of what they are striving towards. That might be, for example, pictures of the trophy they are planning on winning, or photos of a sportsperson who they aspire to be like.
This is something that swimming legend Michael Phelps still does (even after retiring), keeping reminders of his current goals in his wardrobe so he sees them when getting ready each morning: “I write my goals down on a piece of paper and they’re there where I can see them because I have to have a reason, I have to see something for why I’m getting up in the morning and what I’m doing that day,” he told CNBC. He continued “not every day do I want to get out of bed, not every day do I feel great. So I want to see exactly what I’m doing and why I’m putting myself through this.”
Hunter McIntyre has spoken about doing similar with post it notes around his home containing things such as names of athletes he plans to beat, certain mantras, or legendary athletes he is inspired by.
13. Time Management
If there is one resource we must manage as effectively as we can, it is our time. With more time, we can do, and achieve, so much more. Top athletes will be very appreciative of this.
The problem is, these days, there seem to be PLENTY of ways to waste our time. It’s easy to spend hours flicking through social media apps. Or lose time watching dull programmes on TV. It’s easy to do jobs that could easily be outsourced to someone who will do them for you cheaply and effectively.
We all have 24 hours; we just need to ensure we manage those hours as effectively as we possibly can. Of course, the ability to do that may differ from person to person – depending on their job, financial situation, support circle, family, etc – but none of that stops the need to be as efficient with our time as far as our situation / personal circumstances allow.
Ask yourself today, where could you be wasting time? And how could you be using that time more effectively, to help support your sporting goals?
The path to HYROX excellence undoubtedly requires a lot of hard, physical work. But integrating the above habits into your life helps create an optimal framework for long-term development to help you perform at your best.
