I have discussed at length what hybrid training is and gone into detail about how to programme for hybrid training, if you need more of a general background of hybrid training and hybrid programming I suggest referring to these articles

What Is A Training Split

A training split is a bit of a vague term that as far as I am aware comes from the bodybuilding world and refers to how the week is split into different session e.g. upper, lower split or full body split or push pull split etc. When it comes to hybrid training it refers to how the week is designed (split into different sessions) without referring to the specific session design. It is like the broad view of your week.

Why The Training Split is Important

The training split is crucial to achieving specific goals. If you are striving to improve your 50k bike time on a specific circuit but your only cycling once per week and strength training four times a week, your weekly hybrid split is way off the mark. The training split will help push you in a specific direction that you want to go towards. A number of factors will dictate how much training you can perform including, training age (experience), training economy (time) and lifestyle factors such as sleep and nutrition.

Pick a Goal, Then a Split

Before you can pick a training split you need to select a specific goal. Lets say you want to perform a Hyrox or run a marathon while maintaining strength, or maintaining cardiovascular capabilities and strength while going through a period of high work stress. All of these are specific goals which will require very different hyrbid training splits. Now you have a clear goal and from here you can select a training split that makes sense for you. Once you have your goal you can then create a needs analysis, the needs analysis will be highly dependant on your current abilities and specific goals.

For our example I am going to continue with the goal of performing a Hyrox. Our avatar has been doing CrossFit for over 10 years and has a surplus of strength in order perform the Hyrox. However they are an inexperienced runner, they have a well developed cardiovascular system, but are not in any means excellent on the Ergs that are involved in the Hyrox race.

Although they are an inexperienced runner, they have been running twice per week for the last two month as they knew it would be important prior to starting a Hyrox prep. In this scenario, we have four months to prepare for the Hyrox race. This means that our avatar can run three times a week without risking injury.

Choosing A Hybrid Split for A Hyrox Race

With four months preparation time, the training split is going to be divided into two blocks of two months each. The first month will be attempting to lay the foundations of running volume and cardiovascular capability before attacking a more intense Hyrox specific block prior to the race.

Month 1-2 Training Split

Month 3-4 Training Split

Here we can see how we can come up with a training split that makes sense for a specific athlete. If the athlete was a former marathon runner, then their training split would be completely different. If the goal changes then the training split will change radically.

I am not going to outline the specific details of each session, but it is important to see that there are many different intensities throughout the week and the hear rate is only raised to a very high level twice in the week in this example. As a rule of thumb, it shouldn’t be going into very high intensities more than three times a week like it does in the second block of training.

Hybrid training can be so many different combinations, imagine you would like to be a strong powerlifter but also run marathons, this would require a completely different training split than someone looking to perform a Hyrox.

Experimenting with different variations

The joy of hybrid training is that you can change your split into so many variations. If you love training like a I do and love playing around with different ways of moving your body, you can have endless fun trying different mixes of training for specific goals. Training splits can sometimes be the goal itself. If I have just finished a marathon block, I miss doing strength training, so even if I am not that interested in getting stronger for a specific event I perform strength training four times a week because I love it, this is a viable goal. I hope this article helps you understand the rational that should go into designing your own programming split.