What a HYROX-style class rehearses well
A HYROX race is eight runs of about 1 km, each followed by a station, in a fixed order that ends with 100 wall balls. Your own running covers the runs. A good HYROX-style class covers much of the rest, with a clock and a room full of people. A typical one is about 45 minutes of intervals or circuits that mix cardio with strength work, which is how Dietz describes her F45 classes.
- Stations and standards. Meredith Dietz of Lifehacker, who raced doubles at HYROX New York after weekly classes at her local F45, called those classes completely necessary. A prep class, she wrote, gives you most of the stations and, ideally, the standards the race enforces. Her coaches broke down the sled push, the sled pull and the sandbag lunges for someone who had never done them.
- Transitions. Going from a run straight into a station and back out again is a skill of its own. Orangetheory describes its workouts as built to train you to run under fatigue and move efficiently through transitions.
- Race effort. In a lab study of the race, 11 recreational athletes spent most of a simulated race at hard or very hard heart rates. A class is a good place to learn what that feels like in short blocks; holding it for well over an hour is the pacing a class cannot give you.
- Movements done tired. Dietz's lesson from race day was to practise the stations tired and in sequence, not only fresh in a 45-minute class. A class that puts a station straight after a run gives you the tired part; the full sequence needs a longer session of your own.
Dietz's class used dumbbell thrusters in place of wall balls, and she reached race day never having thrown a proper wall ball to the target. She put it down to what her gym had. Before you count a class as station practice, check for:
- A sled you can load to your race weight, including the sled.
- A wall ball at your weight, and a target at 2.70 m for women or 3.00 m for men.
- A SkiErg and a rower, not only a bike.
- Now and then, the stations in race order straight after a run.
Whatever is missing, you practise somewhere else.
What a fixed group session cannot do for your week
After racing, Dietz and her doubles partner, Lifehacker senior health editor Beth Skwarecki, agreed that their gym's classes alone had not been enough. Dietz writes that a 45-minute group class does not have the time or resources to cover the mechanics, the pacing and the race-specific skills in depth. That is their view, from one race, and the formats point the same way.
F45 describes its classes as 45 minutes of HIIT, circuit and functional training. In that lab study, the median finish was 86.5 minutes, 51 of them running. The class is about half the length of the race and built from intervals; the race is one long effort you have to pace. HYROX Elite 15 racer Ida Mathilde Steensgaard put it bluntly to Red Bull: "Don't just do HYROX classes. I think that's a mistake."
Three things a class cannot do for you
- Lengthen your easy runs. Most endurance training is easy. In Stephen Seiler's 2010 review of competitive endurance athletes training 10 to 13 times a week, about 80% of sessions were at low intensity. Even F45's own HYROX guide calls steady aerobic runs, alongside intervals, crucial. A class built on intervals cannot be your long easy run. See how easy easy should be.
- Add load as you get stronger. The ACSM position stand on resistance training suggests adding 2 to 10% once you can do one or two reps more than planned. A class programmes the same session for everyone in the room and changes it on its own calendar, so tracking your loads from week to week is left to you. The strength guide has the lifts that carry over.
- See the rest of your week. A class does not know your race date, the match you played yesterday or the long run you have tomorrow, so it cannot move its hard work out of their way.
| What the race needs | A HYROX-style class | What to add |
|---|---|---|
| Stations and standards | Yes, if it has the kit | Race weight and standard |
| Transitions | Yes, if it runs between stations | Run-to-station practice if it does not |
| Race effort | In short, hard blocks | Holding it for the whole race (next row) |
| Easy aerobic running | Rarely | A longer easy run |
| Strength that progresses | Set for the room | A lift you add load to |
| Pacing one long effort | No, about 45 minutes | A longer station session |
Fitting classes into a plan
A HYROX-style class is hard work. Most training should be easy: about 80% of sessions in the Seiler review above, with a few hard ones among them. The case for counting each class among your hard days is made in the CrossFit and HYROX crossover. Light classes are a different case, covered in the reformer pilates crossover.
- Put your class nights in first. The timetable fixes them, so everything else moves around them.
- Keep the day after a hard class easy or off. An easy run you could talk through, mobility or nothing.
- Give the long easy run fresh legs. Not the morning after a class.
- Place the strength session away from the class, then fit in any station your class does not have.
The wider case for planning your sports and classes as one week is in hybrid training for HYROX. If you want a checkpoint, run the PFT on a fresh day, never straight after a class. It suggests a division; it leaves the sleds out.
How many classes a week
Steensgaard's advice for a three-day week is one HYROX-style class, with the other two days spent on strength and running, aimed at your weaker side. A strength-based athlete uses both for running; one with the stronger aerobic base does one day of running and one of strength with aerobic machine work. Coach Tiago Lousa, in the same piece, builds three days from a long steady aerobic session, a strength-endurance session and a running session.
Dietz went to one class a week for five weeks before her first race, and said afterwards that it was not enough on its own.
Neither source covers four or five days. Our reading of the same advice: a second class fits when three things stay in the week, the long easy run, the strength session and an easy day after each class. If a second class pushes one of them out, it costs more than it rehearses. How to add a day without losing that order is in days a week for HYROX.
Orangetheory, F45 and gym classes
One rule covers every brand: judge a class by its kit and its standards, not by its name.
Orangetheory
Its HYROX page, checked on 15 October 2026, describes coach-led, total-body workouts that combine strength, endurance and heart-rate-based intervals, built to train running under fatigue and transitions. Its November 2025 announcement added race-prep classes at participating studios, with treadmill, rowing and functional strength work. Ask whether your studio has a sled, a SkiErg and wall balls at your weight, and keep a long easy run outside class.
F45
Its workouts page, last modified on 24 July 2026, describes 45-minute classes that combine HIIT, circuit and functional training, and a HYROX Signature Series at select studios, in three phases that practise the race movements and simulate race scenarios. Its own HYROX guide pairs those intervals with steady aerobic runs, so plan those outside the circuit.
Gym, leisure centre and box classes
A class with HYROX in its name can be anything from a full station circuit to a HIIT class with a new label. Run through the checklist above before you count it as race practice. How the race itself differs from a HIIT class or a CrossFit competition is in HYROX compared with CrossFit.
Your classes in Smash Coach
If you train with Smash Coach, this is where your classes go.
On You, under Sports stack, tap + Add and pick HYROX class from the Group classes list; if yours has no sleds and no running, HIIT class is the closer match. A class starts on Fixed days, because a timetable decides when it happens, so you pick the days yours runs before you save. With Pro or during your trial, your coach counts it as training you have done and adjusts what it gives you instead of adding on top.
Your coach sessions are a separate number, set under Coach sessions, so lower it if your classes already fill the week. With Pro or during your trial, saving a new number reworks your fortnight around it. Also with Pro or during your trial, turning on Coach warm-up and cool-down for a class offers an activation routine to do before it, since the class brings its own warm-up. More in Add a sport or a class.