The new Hyrox Academy Podcast brings you the highest quality insights into sports science and coaching, making cutting-edge research accessible and actionable for your practice. This episode is part of a special series featuring the exceptional speakers and experts who will be presenting at the Hyrox Coaches Summit on March 27th and 28th in London at the historic Twickenham Stadium. These conversations offer you an exclusive preview of the topics they’ll be covering at the summit, giving you a taste of the knowledge and expertise that awaits. Let’s dive in.
Piers Plowman:Hello and welcome to the Hyrox Academy Podcast. My name is Piers Plowman, Hyrox Academy Education Manager. Today, I have the pleasure to be joined by Thierry Willigenburg and Hidde Wiersma. Both are experienced and highly qualified within the fields of sports science and strength and conditioning, but also, very importantly, elite 15 athletes in themselves within this great sport. Thierry and Hidde, great to see you both.
Thierry Willigenburg:Thank you very much for this invitation, and thanks for having us here, Piers.
Piers:Could I ask you both to just share with the audience at home a little bit more about yourselves? Can you give us a bit more of a background towards previous experience both in sport but also academically?
Hidde Weersma:Yes, sure. I’ll start. My name is Hidde Weersma. As an academic background, I studied Human Movement Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. On the side, I first started with triathlon, but after that, I discovered Hyrox. The first race was a real struggle, but after that, I enjoyed it more and more. Luckily for me, it got a little bit out of hand, and last year I also raced the elite race in Chicago at the World Championships, both in the solo and at the doubles. My plan is to do that for a very long time. So, that’s a short background story from my side, and now I’ll give the word to Thierry.
Thierry:Yeah, thanks Hidde, and also thanks for being my doubles partner throughout the last two seasons. Not yet qualified in the doubles division (*in the meanwhile they have qualified to the Pro Doubles World Championships), but you are individually qualified for Stockholm, so that's a great of course. Yeah, I also rolled into Hyrox with a triathlon background. Before that, I mainly did track and field athletics. When I was 18, I started studying, so the whole competition element from track and field kind of dropped, but then I discovered triathlon and I got into competitions again. But what did I study then? I studied biomedical research, more specifically Human Movement Sciences. After my studies, I started googling; I wanted to work in sports, and then a company popped up that allowed me to do some sports myself but also explain sports to other people. More importantly, sports science and then some cool training tools on how to perform sports science. Now I've stepped a bit away from science and focus more on the commercial market, but with a similar scientific foundation still, and that’s kind of the origin story of Train.Red.
Piers:Very good. Well, thank you both for sharing that. I think it’s going to be super interesting for the coaching community to get insights and knowledge from you guys, both from your academic backgrounds but also within your experiences as an elite athlete as well. We have a super exciting topic to kind of share with the global audience regarding your session at the Hyrox Coaches Summit. Can you both give an outline towards what it is and what can be involved and what can the coaches get from it?
Hidde:Yes. To maybe start with that what’s now often used in endurance sports are metrics like heart rate, RPE, but also VO2 max. But since Hyrox, you don't do one modality for the whole duration, but you switch between running and the different stations. We believe that you need a different approach to really get an understanding about the demands of the sport, and therefore we want to tell you more about NIRS.
Thierry:Yeah, NIRS is an abbreviation which stands for Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. Basically a light-based technology to measure muscle oxygenation, and with this muscle oxygenation, you can do a whole lot of cool things which we are linking to the Hyrox performance pillars. So: speed, endurance, strength, power, flexibility, coordination, all have their metabolic cost. With our session, we want to explain how the muscle can be used and trained, as well, of course, in order to reach your new Hyrox personal best.
Hidde:Yeah, and to maybe quickly add to that, an example is just that, for instance, to take the sled push as an example. There, your heart rate, I don’t know how that is for others, but in my case, your heart rate is actually quite controlled and your breathing as well, but you’re still pushing really hard and you’re still pushing a limit, but it’s kind of unknown what exactly is that limit. With NIRS, we try to explain what that limit actually is, and if you know what your limits are, then you can also train better for it.
Thierry:Yeah, and besides training, you can do exercise testing as well. If you have a good coach, you maybe visited a sports medical practitioner already who helped you with these types of tests; maybe you already have experience with NIRS from that instance. But what we can do is we can define local versus systemic thresholds. If you know your thresholds, you know how to improve; you can use that in your day-to-day training sessions, or you can use them as metrics to follow up over time and make sure that your thresholds are at a higher cycling output in terms of power or a higher running speed which you can then use in your races again.
Piers:That's super interesting, guys. Thank you. And I think it goes to, you know, without saying that the majority of the community see performance testing like, for example, VO2 max and lactate threshold as like the bread-and-butter go-to forms of measurement. And what we’re starting to unpack here, and obviously for those coaches fortunate enough to be in the room to experience your session, is that we’re kind of reframing how we can view performance on a physiological level. Is that something that we hope to achieve in this session?
Hidde:Yeah, we for sure do. And of course, VO2 max testing or lactate testing are still very helpful indicators to determine your thresholds, but like we said at the beginning, Hyrox is more than just one single modality. You need to find it out for the runs and all the different stations. So, that’s what we will try to discover, how to use it in a sport where you need to do different modalities.
Thierry:Yeah, and the beauty of the technology is that you can actually wear it during the race. I have not seen any Hyrox athletes wearing a VO2 mask or doing lactate measurements over the course of a race, and we actually had some exciting elite race data that we are going to present in our talk as well.
Piers:Amazing. That's really, really cool. I think it is so important that coaches look into booking onto this session with you because this really will look into how, you know, the future of the sport has to, you know, include this. So, from your perspective on that note, why do you believe that this is an important aspect of the future?
Thierry:Oh, I think we’ve touched upon the local versus systemic part quite a bit already, but to add to that one more time: fatigue in Hyrox is not coming from one single energy system. It’s a combination of running, it’s a combination of strength, but also the strength parts are often strength endurance, and there’s not one single metric that can account for that, but with NIRS, I think we can get quite close.
Piers:Excellent. Well, Thierry and Hidde, thank you so much for being expert speakers at the summit next year. We very much hope that the planning and the delivery will go well and look forward to seeing what 2026 will bring for you both as athletes too.
Thierry:Yeah, we’re excited to be part of the summit and looking forward to the talk.
Hidde:Yeah, and I will hope to see a lot of coaches and also, of course, Piers, you over there.
Subscribe here for the Hyrox Coaches Summit: https://registration.hyroxcoachessummit.com/hyrox
Listen to the podcast here:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0WaoJAefIyuiAhPSFVlO0h?si=Iiq5o07HTpyVvaJlvZhMzA
