When building a successful hybrid athlete training program, the methods are many but the principles are few. The beauty of hybrid training is its flexibility. To harness this, every athlete should be able to design their own program and not simply follow some template.

This article outlines the fundamentals needed to build a running and lifting program. I then walk through my application of these principles to train for a same day sub 2:30 marathon and 1000lb powerlift.

For brevity, this article will be very direct. More context and scientific references will come when we do deep dives into each section in future newsletters. 

Fundamentals of Running

Running could be the simplest sport in the world. Common sense will guide you down a very successful path. There are opportunities to introduce a lot of complexity into your training, but you won’t gain much from this. While Olympic athletes need to pull every lever to squeeze out marginal gains over their competition, the rest of us benefit from leaning into the sport's simplicity.

The Magic Formula

“Two hard workouts a week, a long run, and as much easy running as you can handle, repeat for years.” - Olympic Gold Medal Marathoner Frank Shorter

Running Volume

The single most important factor in somebody’s running plan is the number of weekly miles (or minutes) they run. I’d go so far as to say that anybody who slowly progresses to averaging 80 miles per week for a year will run a Boston Marathon Qualifying time. Granted, it takes years of consistent training to reach this point.

In order to be able to run more, you need to make sure you’re running slow. Social media calls this “Zone 2” running, but this terminology is misleading. You shouldn’t be thinking about your heart rate on an easy run. In fact, most elite runners are actually doing their easy runs in “Zone 1.” Just run as fast as you can without it becoming uncomfortable. Which is to say, run as slow as you want. If you can’t debate the meaning of life while you’re running, you’re going too fast.

The Long Run

Most running programs will designate one run to be about 25% of the weekly mileage and call this run The Long Run. Its importance in a training program changes as you increase your mileage.

Early on, the long run is just a way to build up running capacity. Throwing a 6 miler on your calendar makes those 3 mile runs less intimidating. Once your long runs pass 13 miles in length, you start to get specific physiological benefits separate from your normal runs. Putting your body under this prolonged period of stress forces unique adaptations beyond logging weekly mileage.

Running Intensity

Only once you’ve reached a point where it isn’t practical to increase your running mileage should you start thinking about doing running workouts. Running workouts are an important part of an experienced runner’s training, but you increase the risk of injury and get little benefit from rushing into them.

Running workouts are designed to create physiological adaptations beyond those you get from simply running more easy miles. So, it’s useful to label different running paces based on the physiological adaptations they can help stimulate.

Note that these adaptations aren’t all tied to one’s heart rate. I’ll point out again that the obsession with heart rate zones while running is misplaced. Your heart rate helps indicate which training zone you’re in, but it doesn’t map to them perfectly. Here’s a more comprehensive breakdown of training zones by the physiological benefits they support.

While it may be exciting to pursue the physiological benefits that faster running paces offer, it’s critical to build an aerobic base with easy runs. You likely can’t perform the workouts necessary to trigger the physiological adaptations outlined above if your aerobic base isn’t high enough. Plus running at these faster paces creates a lot of nervous system and muscle fatigue, an important consideration for hybrid athletes.

A key indicator that you need more volume and less intensity

Easy running improves your ability to recover during a workout. When you’re doing an interval workout, you typically want all of your reps to be at the same speed. If you find you’re slowing down with each rep, or if it’s taking you longer to get your heart rate down before you start the next rep, that’s a good sign that you would benefit more from higher mileage weeks than higher intensity weeks.

Types of Running Workouts

You should enter each workout knowing what you hope to get from it and stay in the paces required for this stimulus.

Recovery during a workout plays an important role. Less recovery time will get you into a higher training zone faster in the rep. Manipulating recovery time is thus an effective way to vary the training stimulus you get out of a workout.

For example, shorter rest periods will ensure you spend more time at your max heart rate for each rep of an interval workout. You could structure an effective VO2 Max workout with 400m intervals instead of 800m intervals by giving yourself shorter rest between each one.

Heart rate monitoring is its most helpful when gauging recovery. While most runners use fixed time slots for their recovery window, some runners will wait until their heart rate drops below a certain BPM before they start their next rep.

Here are some commons ways of structuring workouts

There is a ton of flexibility in how you structure a workout. This flexibility gives elite coaches the chance to really focus on a specific training stimulus, like working on the ability to respond to mid-race surges and still have a strong kick at the end of a race.

Don’t let this flexibility cause you to overcomplicate a workout. Not much out there beats the example workouts listed in the table. You only need to vary the number of reps and your speed based on your fitness level.

As you increase in fitness, you’ll be able to increase the number of reps and/or run faster speeds in the same training zone. This is how you can apply the principle of Progressive Overload to running.

Warmup

Every workout should start with a warmup at an easy pace and end with a cool down at an easy pace. An appropriate warmup is typically 2 miles plus some strides.

Choosing Your Running Zone

Using the principle of Periodization, many running coaches will have an athlete focus on one training zone for several weeks at a time. They often build from lower intensity (slower) workouts and higher volume to higher intensity (faster) workouts and lower volume when peaking for a race. This mirrors what powerlifters do as well. For example, a mile-5k runner might follow this structure:

1. 8 weeks building up higher mileage at an easy pace with strides 2 times a week.

2. 4 weeks with LT workouts in the middle of the week, no longer building up mileage.

3. 4 weeks with VO2 max workouts in the middle of the week, likely dropping mileage a bit because intensity is going up.

4. 2 weeks at low mileage with a focus on faster paced intervals, like 400m repeats.

5. Race. Then take a couple weeks to recover and start the above cycle over again.

Fundamentals of Lifting

Powerlifting’s Magic Formula

Lift 3-5 days a week, and do 3-5 exercises each day. For each exercise, do 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps each. Rest 3-5 minutes between each set. Always leave 1-2 reps in the tank. Increase the weight as you get stronger. Repeat for years.

This guidance is a really powerful starting point, but the key to becoming a high performing hybrid athlete is to figure out how to play with the appropriate variables in strength training to continue to make gains once the above advice is no longer enough.

The different types of weight lifting

When you lift weights, you’re potentially training for the following components of fitness:

When you’re new to lifting, you are likely improving multiple fitness components at once. You have a ton of flexibility with your rep/set combos to make progress. As you become more advanced, you will likely have to decide which component you want to focus on when you structure your workout.

To optimize your hybrid athlete ratio, you need to lift like a powerlifter. This means you’re trying to maximize strength without drastically increasing your body weight. Most of the advice on the internet focuses on optimizing hypertrophy. This means most of the advice on the internet isn’t written for you.

Lifting really heavy weights (rep range 1-5 at RPE8+) has a far greater stress on your body than lifting medium heavy weights (rep range 6-12 at RPE8+). To avoid injury and setbacks, you need to think carefully about how you juggle lifting volume and lifting intensity if you’re a powerlifter. Standard gym bros lifting for hypertrophy can go a lot harder without getting injured, which means they have more room for error in their programming.

The role of the nervous system

It might seem odd that building bigger muscles and getting stronger aren’t the same thing. To be clear, there is a lot of overlap. Strength depends heavily on muscle size, but not entirely. The deciding factor on whether or not you can move a weight is if your nervous system can coordinate all of the muscles needed to move that weight.

For complex movements like squat, deadlift, and bench, training your nervous system is even more important than building muscle size. For this reason, it’s critical that you maintain perfect form when you lift to improve strength.

Nervous System Fatigue

Hybrid athletes optimize their training by managing nervous system fatigue. While your muscles may be ready to bounce back after heavy lifting sessions or big running workouts, your central nervous system needs to be ready to workout again also. Lifting heavy weights can be incredibly taxing on your central nervous system (CNS). Often, CNS fatigue is the limiting factor in how frequently you can train hard.

Exercise Selection

Compound Lifts and The Big Three

Not much beats the big three powerlifts (bench, squat, and deadlift) when it comes to building strength. These are all compound lifts, which means they work many muscle groups at once. If you only did these 3 lifts, you would still develop well-rounded total body strength.

To optimize your Hybrid Athlete Ratio, you will want to hold these lifts above all others. This means each workout will likely include at least one of these lifts, completed with high intensity. If you find yourself short on time, don’t compromise on these. Skip your other lifts instead.

Accessory Lifts

Any lifts you do beyond the big three are considered accessory lifts. I use accessory lifts to address weaknesses limiting my powerlifting performance, to prevent injuries, and to get extra hypertrophy work on my biceps. Gotta work those glamour muscles.

I don’t get fancy when picking exercises. The really popular ones are popular for a reason; they work. If you work with a personal trainer, you will likely get hyper specialized lifts that vary from week to week. You’d feel ripped off if they told you to just do squats, deadlifts, and bench presses everyday. However, all this variation means you spend more time learning new lifts each workout than you spend making gains.

Workout Splits

You have a lot of flexibility in how you structure the order of your lifts. You can do a full body workout every time you go to the gym, or you can focus on a specific muscle group each day. Ultimately, it’s the preference of the lifter, as scientific evidence shows no major difference among each method.

Since I lift 4 times a week, I prefer to keep my lower lifts to one session and my upper lifts to another. If I did fewer sessions, I’d do more full body days to fit in all the bench, squat, and deadlift workouts I need.

Movement Types vs. Muscle Groups

Another way to think about which muscle groups you are targeting is to focus on the movement of the resistance training. A common way to think about this is to break lifting down into Push, Pull, and Leg lifts. I personally like to break this down a bit further, as outlined in the table below.

I try to pick an exercise from each movement type to do throughout the week, but I recognize that I’m getting marginal gains over simply doing the big 3. These extra movements are mostly for injury prevention. Except biceps, which serve no purpose beyond making my wife happy.

Unilateral Movements

Unilateral movements are movements that focus on one side of your body at a time, like doing a single leg squat. I like to use these as injury prevention for running and to ensure I’m not developing any muscle imbalances from subtle flaws in my form for core lifts.

Lifting Intensity: RPE and RIR

Lifting intensity refers to how heavy a weight is compared to your maximum capability. Relative Perceived Effort (RPE) and Reps In Reserve (RIR) are powerful ways to guide your lifting intensity. An RPE of 10 means you failed on your last set, or you had 0 RIR. An RPE of 8 means you could have done two more reps before your form would have broken down and/or you failed to lift the rep. So you had 2 RIR.

Using RPE allows you to adjust your workout based on how you're feeling any given day. Training this way is called autoregulation.

Intensity is an incredibly important metric when you are trying to increase strength. You have to practice lifting heavy weights to get better at lifting heavy weights. Physiologically, this means that you need to train your nervous system to get better at firing the right muscles in unison to complete a compound movement. 

If the weight isn’t heavy enough, your brain won’t have to think about moving it, and you aren’t really increasing top end strength. If you lift enough reps and set, you may be building bigger muscles, which ultimately make you stronger, but muscle size can only take you so far. A general rule of thumb is that you need the weight to be greater than 80% of your one rep max (1RM) in order to stimulate your nervous system enough to make gains.

Rep Ranges

Your strength manifests itself in your 1 rep maximum (1RM). So to improve strength, you need to be lifting close to this max. If you are doing over 5 reps in a set, you are likely using a weight that is too low to stimulate nervous-system-based strength gains. You’ll likely still get stronger, but that will be due to increased muscle size instead. This works fine until you start to reach your limit in muscle size, either biologically or based on your desired running weight.

People often say the hypertrophy rep range is 6-12. This is right and wrong. You get hypertrophy from virtually any range, including reps of 1. It’s proximity to failure RPE 9+ and weekly volume that matter the most for hypertrophy. But, the 6-12 rep range allows you to push higher RPE with less chance of injury and at a faster recovery rate than lower rep ranges. This allows a higher weekly volume of workouts close to failure, or higher time under tension, which makes this rep range a solid one for hypertrophy.

Lifting Volume

Similar to running volume, the best predictor of how much you’ll improve in your lifting performance over time is the total volume of your lifts. There are a couple different ways to think about lifting volume.

Volume Optimized for Strength Training

For powerlifting, you are heavily concerned with the total number of heavy reps you do for a given compound movement.

As a hybrid athlete, your goal is to get these reps in with as little fatigue as possible. For myself, 5 sets of 2 reps creates less fatigue than 2 sets of 5 reps, even though the volume is the same.

According to Pavel Tsatsouline, Soviet powerlifting coaches found 20-30 heavy reps per training session to be optimal for increasing strength. This depends heavily on the athlete, so you should use this range as a starting point and find what’s best for you.

An effective workout for me is to do a heavy “top set” of a lift of 1-2 reps and then several lighter “back off sets” of 3 reps. I try to get the total number of reps I do that are over 80% of my 1RM, including warmup set, to be over 20.

I’m also a fan of lifting 5 sets of 3-5 reps at RPE 8. But I can’t handle rep ranges over 3 for my leg lifts when I’m also running. I save this workout for squat and deadlift for when I have fresh legs, but I do it frequently for bench.

Volume Optimized for Hypertrophy

To optimize hypertrophy, you want to maximize Time Under Tension. This means you tend to think more about sets than reps. Each set brought close to failure (RPE 8+) is contributing to muscle mass. The science-based guidance to optimize hypertrophy is to get 10-20 sets in for a given muscle group each week, ideally over 2-3 sessions.

Weekly Frequency

Some studies have shown that lifting a muscle group 2x a week, when total volume is held constant, can lead to greater muscle growth than when lifting that muscle group 1x a week.

When it comes to powerlifting, the focus should be on recovery. Early on, you may be able to lift each compound lift several times a week. As the weight you can lift increases, you will likely need to reduce this volume. The most common source of injury in my hybrid athlete journey has been too frequent sessions of heavy squats and deadlifts.

I used to do 2 sessions of each big 3 powerlift a week. Now I do 1 deadlift session, 1 squat session + a fairly heavy bulgarian split squat session (RPE 7-8), and 2 bench sessions + some heavy bench variation accessories each week.

Total Volume

Combining weekly frequency, reps, sets, and weight, you can calculate your total lifting volume for any given session or week. This is an important metric to track for progress and fatigue. I like to calculate this for each individual powerlift as well as my total weight moved for the week.

Example:

Rest Between Sets

If you’re training to increase strength, then you should take as long as you need to be recovered between each set. Practically, that’s usually 3-5 minutes. Longer rest isn’t a bad thing; it just makes the workout take longer. Longer rest may actually force better adaptations in your nervous system. 

For hypertrophy and muscular endurance work, shorter rests may be beneficial. They speed up workouts and can increase the intensity of these lifts by pushing you into a higher RPE for the same weights. 

Progressive Overload

As you get stronger, you need to continually increase the amount that you lift to get the same stimulus. This concept is called progressive overload.

An important note: this doesn’t mean you have to add weight every time you lift. Early on, you will likely be able to do this. As you get to heavier weights, you eventually have to start thinking over longer time horizons. Progressive overload for an experienced lifter might mean lifting a bit more this month than you did the last month.

Typically, lifting programs are designed so that each week you lift a bit more than you did the previous week. This increase might come from varying intensity, volume, or both. Then, after several weeks, you drop the weight and slowly build back up again.

Experienced lifters cannot spend all of their time lifting near their max. They must develop more creative ways to progressively overload over time. Most of my injuries as a hybrid athlete have happened because I fundamentally misunderstood the concept of progressive overload. If you simply increase the weight each week (use linear progression indefinitely), you will eventually get hurt.

Your goal as a hybrid athlete is to continually be able to lift every week. This means you’re better off lifting at RPE 8 continuously than lifting to RPE 9-10 and getting hurt. Hypertrophy focused athletes may encourage you to lift to failure consistently with a “no pain no gain” mentality. This can be effective for bodybuilders, but it will likely sideline you once you become an experienced powerlifter.

Varying lifting intensity, sets, reps, frequency, exercises, and total weekly volume are all effective ways to generate a new stimulus. Advanced lifters will need to tailor their programs to take advantage of all of these options to best serve their current needs. While this sounds like a lifting program should be really complex, it actually promotes the opposite. Simplicity makes it easier to tweak variables subtly and see large impacts over time.

How I do progression

Core Lifts

I used linear progression (just adding weight or reps every single week) for too long, and I kept getting hurt. Now I use wave progression so that I spend more time at a lower intensity for any given month. I increase the weight week to week but frequently drop the weight with a deload week and restart my next wave with the weight I used in week 2 of the previous wave. Each wave starts slightly higher and builds to a slightly higher peak than the previous one. At some point, I’ll completely reset the wave and start building it back up again.

Accessories

When doing accessory lifts, which should be lower in intensity than your core lifts, rep ranges are useful for tracking progressive overload. For example, you can use a rep range of 6-9 by starting with 3 sets of 6 reps and slowly increasing the number of reps each set until you can do 3x9. At that point, bump up the weight and start over at 3x6 again.

Periodization

Similar to running, powerlifting coaches will typically break their training into specific blocks with clear goals for each. A powerlifter might follow this kind of schedule:

1. Build work capacity: 8 weeks where you build up volume at slightly lower intensity. Lots of 5x5s.

2. Maximize Strength: 4 weeks where you increase intensity of workouts and slightly lower volume or keep it the same. Reps of 3.

3. Peak: 2 weeks where you drop volume heavily and focus on some heavy singles.

4. Compete, rest, then start over.

Putting it all together

Compound growth is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it. - Albert Einstein

If you go too hard, you’ll end up staying home.

It’s better to be consistently good than occasionally great. Your goal is to get as close to your limit as possible without crossing it. Consistent training always beats going too hard and facing setbacks (illness, injury, overtraining).

When evaluating your own hybrid athlete program, you need to constantly pay attention to your fatigue levels. An ideal running program might have 2 running workouts a week, plus a long run, and high mileage. An ideal lifting program might have 3 bench sessions a week, 2 squat sessions a week, and 1 deadlift session a week, all pushing high volume and intensity. An ideal hybrid athlete program likely has 1 running workout max, 1 squat workout, and 1 deadlift workout, all juggling intensity and volume carefully.

If you pay close attention to your body, you will eventually learn what works best for you. You’ve just got to play with all of the fundamentals outlined in this article to find your magic formula.

Train with the seasons

As a hybrid athlete, you have a lot more to optimize for than specialized athletes. This makes periodization even more important. You will likely want to include seasons where you bulk up to build muscle (maybe over the holidays, when those cookies won’t stop eyeing you) and other seasons where you cut weight and focus on running faster (maybe in the spring when beach season and summer road races are on the horizon). 

It’s easier to hold onto strength and aerobic capacity than it is to improve them. An effectively training will occasionally prioritize the development of one fitness category over another. However, true hybrid athletes never give up on one category altogether. Use the Hybrid Athlete Ratio as a way to benchmark your combined performance over time.

Consolidation of stressors

The coaches at Omnia Performance are big fans of consolidating stressors throughout a week to ensure you maximize recovery. This means they put high intensity work together early in the week and more volume focused work later in the week. I incorporate this into my training, front loading squat, deadlift, and running workloads in my week.

What I’m doing

My current training block focuses on building up and maintaining running mileage of 50+ miles per week while prioritizing increasing my 1RM of each core powerlift. Since I’m focusing my volume on running but intensity on powerlifting, I lift in the mornings when my body’s fresh and run in the evenings. Given my schedule and ability to recover, I aim for running 6 days a week and lifting 4 days a week. Here’s the routine I currently follow:

The key takeaways

A hybrid athlete has many variables they can play with to customize their training plan to fit their specific needs. It’s important to carefully experiment with all of these to find what works best for you. But never forget the simplicity of the task. A solid training plan can be completely expressed as:

1. Bench press, deadlift, and squat weights more than 80% of your 1RM as many times as you can in a week.

2. Run as many miles as you can in a week.

3. Listen to your body so that you can keep doing both of these for years with as few setbacks as possible.