Why HYROX and CrossFit are Different Sports: Comparing Training and Nutrition Strategies

hro is Fitness racing CrossFit is a sport of Fitness both use functional movements performed at high intensity combining aspects of strength and endurance this naturally makes them quite similar however different types of athletes tend to excel in the top competitions of each sport in this video I will dive into the differences between H rocks and Crossfit not from a technical point of view but rather from a physiological and nutritional perspective if you you are an athlete considering trying hrock but you're not certain if this is the right fit for you this is a video you

don't want to miss let's dig into [Music] it hi everyone I'm gar I'm a senior scientist at eth Zerg based in Switzerland and for the last decade or so I studied the interaction between exercise and nutrients and how they affect muscle growth but lately I've been more and more involved in functional fitness and the research behind CrossFit and also hos so what would be the obvious differences between H Roos and Crossfit most of the people who follow this channel know CrossFit but hyox is a little bit less known it has been founded in Germany in

2017 and it's obviously a derivative of CrossFit but there are some key differences for example the duration of the events in hru are usually much longer than CrossFit that's a key difference here go ranging from 60 to 90 minutes a little bit depending on your level so the major focus in hros would be conditioning compared to CrossFit I will get into that later in this video would be more power output short burst of energy production then the predictability obviously we all know in hiero exactly the workout that will be put forward to us so the

high predictability is a major difference I would say also between H Rock in Crossfit because CrossFit is known for known and unknowable most people athletes sometimes don't know the workouts when they are warming up for a workout for example in the games or semi-finals also here we don't know much about the workouts the level of skill I have uh put here low for hrock obviously it's not low but it's clearly lower for Hier rocks than for CrossFit CrossFit has these gymnastic movements or weightlifting movements that for uh normal people would not be something that is

very obvious and then I will also get into that H roox is attracting taller athletes because the move are biomechanically more made for taller athletes for CrossFit it is a little bit shifting certainly in the games and the semi-final so at the later stages of elite competition but when you have Crossfit workouts that have been or that are predominantly done in the gym like burpees snatches most of those movements are uh let's say predominantly positive for smaller athletes these are some more obvious differences so let's look at how we can then understand these differences from

a more physiological point of view and how we can then adapt our training as well as our nutrition to hieros or to CrossFit so if you want to move your muscles move your body the muscles need ATP and this ATP can be looked at as the energy currency of the body this means that it can never deplete or go down to zero it always has to be replenished by the energy systems listed here on the slide so um you have different types of energy systems we're not going to go too much into DET detail most

importantly is that you have very powerful energy systems such as a keratin phosphate system and alactic glycolytic system so here you produce energy via anerobic without oxygen Pathways and then you also have the more uh let's say aerobic Pathways where you break down glucose such as aerobic glycolysis pway and then also we all know the fat oxidation or the fat adaptation pway all right so the higher the intensity the more you have to look at the left side of the curve and the lower the intensity and the longer the duration the more you have to

look at the right side of the curve and then it's very obvious that CrossFit is more sitting on the left side of the curve with their workouts from 3 seconds which is obviously very alactic creatin phosphate system for example a muscle up or a 1 RM deadlift but then also 10minute workout where you're really sitting into this glycolysis metabolic pathways but then you also obviously have HX and HX is much more conditioning to the right side of this graph where you have always let's say depending a little bit on the athlete more of a mix

between a fat oxidation as well as glucose oxidation so that's something that is very basic from physiology point of view but what are the implications so I tested not so long ago a couple of elite elite CrossFit athletes I'm talking about semi-final level games level and what was interesting to me is that their aerobic base so their basic conditioning is actually not that high so you see here the lactate curve if the athlete would have a bigger base the lactate would be shifted more to the right that makes sense right because lactate obviously is produced

by anerobic systems and when the athlete has to tap in their anerobic system from the early intervals obviously lactate would be or lactate production would go up a little bit and you would uh see that in the lactate curve so I never tested HX athletes but something you can look for as a coach or also an athlete is that the curve would be shifted much more to the right and also exponentially would not go up to very high lactate levels that is something I always found quite interesting I have to say is that this aerobic

base in CrossFit athletes also the best in the world is not very high so why is the the body adapted this way so then we have to look at a little bit of data here they did a very cool study so they did Fran the workout Fran 2159 thrusters and pull-ups but they just didn't do them continuously they always let the athletes rest between the 21 rounds the 15 rounds and the nine rounds so it was an intermittent Fran and then they measured oxygen uptake and also the contribution of the aerobic versus the anerobic systems

and here the black bars the big black bars you see also on the right are the contribution of the Aerobic System in the first round so 21 thrusters 21 pull-ups and then the gray is the lactic production of the anerobic system and then the 30% here light gray is the anerobic system where there's no lactate production so that's a creatine phosphate system and you see here that the first round is more or predominantly let's say 50/50 aerobic anerobic but when the rounds become shorter and shorter there's more contribution of the anerobic systems so this means

that actually the anerobic system is highly highly important in CrossFit specific exercises and that's maybe also why we see such high lactate and maybe a low aerobic base in many of the CrossFit athletes interestingly enough in another study the same authors the same group did also Fran but continuously so 2121 15599 and there you already see a larger contribution so 62% of all the energy was produced from aerobic sources and only 38% would be from anerobic sources sources while when you do this intermittently so with rest there's a higher contribution of anerobic sources and that's

also something I always find myself if I do a CrossFit I'm much better in let's say interval type workouts like team workouts because I'm a more anerobic based athlete or Average Joe I would call it rather but that is interesting uh right because this means that if there is some rest I can always go hard anerobic energy production and then have to Throttle Down but once there is a workout that is like 10 20 15 minutes long with all types of different exercise I usually do bad because I also have a low aerobic base and

I should improve my conditioning here so that is something you can always uh think about then as a third aspect of a difference between HX and and Crossfit would be the type of athlete so we did a study I talked about this in a previous video where I talked about the difference in VO2 max or why athletes or CrossFit athletes have a low V2 Max it's popping up right here if you're interested in this uh video it's it's quite a good one but we did a study where we profiled 60 very well-trained and even elite

elite worldclass CrossFit athletes and what you what we immediately saw here is that they were obviously this is just the men they were not very tall 176 cm but what was more interesting is that there was a strong correlation between the length of the arm or the length of the thigh and their open open rank for example here 28% of the variance in open rank so how well they did in the open style workouts was determined by their core length as well as their arm length Etc which was highly significant obviously the smaller the length

or the shorter the length the better they performed in the open so in open style workouts it's clearly a benefit to be small so I looked at hiero obviously there's no real scientific research yet in hiero at least I didn't find find any if you did please let me know in the comment section so I just looked at how tall the the top 10 athletes male athletes were that have the the best times in the the pro Division and you see here they are substantially uh taller they're uh 5 and a half cmet on average

taller than the CrossFit athlet which is quite a lot I would say so for example here Hunter McIntyre uh is 1 m88 and most of them are above or around 1 M80 that makes sense right because you have uh sled pushes you have wall balls you have lunges all movements you have rowing you have running literally all movements that are are better bi mechanically for taller athletes compared to burpees snatches pull-ups etc for CrossFit athletes which obviously are more for smaller athletes one caveat here maybe if you have followed the CrossFit semifinals that were just

the last a couple of weeks you see that actually there taller athletes do well yell hosta Jason H Hopper Dalin pepper all these guys they actually did very well in those CrossFit style workouts because in the semi-finals and also at the games the programming is more tailored to taller at least more powerful athletes with a lot of muscle mass and a lot of energy production on a short time frame so that's something to take into account all right so talk about training so how should you then train for a CrossFit compared to Hier Rock there

would be obviously some similar ities but also some differences as we know hiero you can structure your plane training much better you can do interval sets you can do move you can use the movements that we know are going to pop up in the workout and combine this in intervals or eoms or M wraps of longer duration with Crossfit it's more difficult you don't know what's going to happen so you have to train everything it's going to be more random there's going to be more interference between strength and endurance and that's why yeah it's just

a different type of training random versus structured High rocks you can do long intervals clearly for example 5times 8 minutes four time 5 minutes with a bit of rest CrossFit I would go for shorter intervals High burst of energy output and then rest longer times because that is exactly what you need this anerobic energy output from Crossfit at least a large percentage of the workouts then if you want to look at it from a more physiological point of view Hier rocks they will need a large aerobic Bas so a lot of the energy production need

to come from aerobic energy sources and that you can improve by long intervals but also Zone 2 training zone two you've heard about that maybe a lot it is very uh loow intensity Long training sessions for example 75% of your functional threshold power for 45 minutes so sitting on an irk going very slow for 45 minutes in CrossFit it's less of an issue because again it's more anerobic energy production but I would say most of the CrossFit athletes train in this zone four and five instead of the zone two except if you are really really

bad in conditioning you can also incorporate Zone Zone 2 in CrossFit in my opinion and then H roox is less technical you know the movements so you can really nail down your movement efficiency on the sled push on the more more technical movements such as wall balls and and the lunges while in CrossFit you have to be technical in every aspect of gymnastics and weightlifting which obviously makes the the programming and the whole training plan much more challenging let's go to the last part H that would be nutrition so nutrition is also again a derivative

on how long the workouts are in hos we are talking about 60 to 90 minutes so then you are really tapping into your glycogen reserves glycogen is basically stored glucose in your liver and your muscles you need to have those as as fuel and if you at the end of a hrock so after 60 70 80 minutes are low in glycogen you will have to Throttle Down and actually decrease your power output all right so it is recommended to actually have some carbohydrates in hyox during the competition because the workouts are longer than 45 to

60 minutes and depending on the athlete and how well your gut is strained you can go up to 60 to 90 gam of combination of glucose or multiex and fructose in CrossFit obviously you cannot eat during a 10-minute workout so there the the nutrition will be much more structured around and before your training because obviously you can also do a lot of volume in CrossFit training two three four sessions a day all right that doesn't mean that you don't have to eat the carbs but you just cannot eat them during the training and that's an

important I would say difference all right that was already it for today's video I hope you like the content if you are interested in some tips on CrossFit specific programming just click the video right here [Music]