Preparation for HYROX® and DEKA® Competitions – Alessia Del Mastro

Preparation for HYROX® and DEKA® Competitions – Alessia Del Mastro

My name is Alessia Del Mastro, I am 48 years old, a Functional Training instructor and Spartan Race and HYROX® athlete.

In this article, I will talk about how to best use and prepare for the SLED PUSH and SLED PULL stations in the ‘brand new HYROX® and DEKA® competitions’ that are also becoming popular in Italy.

WHAT HYROX® and DEKA® ARE

HYROX® is the new running and functional circuit race in which everyone can participate and which combines 8 km of running and 8 interval workouts, focusing on performance and endurance. The Hyrox® format has among its key aspects, accessibility, but also aggregation, team spirit and competition. It perfectly embodies this idea of sport as a landing place for various inputs: born in 2017 in Germany, it brought together functional fitness and endurance, becoming a preferred platform for amateurs and professionals alike. Success was immediate, with a discipline that went far beyond continental borders. Now, Hyrox® has arrived in Italy, with its debut in June at Rimini Wellness, one of the most important trade fairs in the world, and its second stop in Milan last October. But we are only at the beginning. It has been so successful that the first 2024 competition to be held next February in Turin is already 75% sold out. Italy thus became one of the thirteen countries in the world where Hyrox® is distributed – in addition to Germany, Holland, Sweden, England, Scotland, USA, Hong Kong, Spain, Ireland, Denmark, Austria and Switzerland. The growth has been disruptive, as much in geographical terms as in size and numbers. Today’s forty world events are double the number of just two years ago. The number of participants has risen from 6,000 to 83,000 since 2018. Over the same period, the average number of participants per event has risen from 770 to over 2500.

DEKA® means Ten, it comes from the Greek as the Greeks were the first to use the game and test fitness. With the 10 DEKA® zones, a complete functional competition format has been created for all fitness levels. Each zone is based on rudimentary movements that require no specific training or instruction to complete. Lifting, carrying, pushing, pulling, kneeling, jumping/walking/climbing on something, getting down and getting up and three basic forms of transport: rowing, skiing and cycling.

These two formats have many stations in common including SLED. It is true that they are competition formats for everyone, but they are still competitions with athletes who are increasingly well prepared and performing. Many affiliated and non-affiliated gyms are springing up in which to prepare to the best of their ability and certainly having an excellent SLED can be a strong point. In DEKA® the Sled is mechanical with different resistances, which simulate the load, but the technique for the push is the same while it varies in the pull.

Both involve 50 m of pushing and 50 m of pulling.

THE TWO HYROX® STATIONS WITH THE SLED

The Hyrox® includes, before each station, 1 km of running and the sled stations are, the second Sled PUSH and the third Sled PULL. The sled has different loads according to man-woman, open and PRO and must be pushed or pulled on a carpet-like surface for trade fair use. Such a surface creates friction with the slide, risking braking it in the pull and curling and pointing in the push. This is the importance of using good techniques at both locations. Not only because of the friction with the floor, but also because of the high load, care must be taken how to use the Sled in order to avoid injury, first and foremost, but also waste of energy that will serve as fuel in the continuation of the race.

For in-depth information on race regulations and weights, I recommend visiting Hyrox® Italia.

Here we will look at the recommended techniques to best tackle the post and how to train them.

• Let’s start with the SLED PUSH: as you can clearly see from the following photo, two athletes, two different techniques.

In the race, there are two white lines marking the stretches to be travelled (4 stretches of 12.5 m each) and the sled must always cross these lines. One starts from the first white line by pushing the sled through the two vertical black posts. Once you have passed the next line, you go to the opposite side of the sledge where you will find 2 more holds and return, covering the route a total of 4 times.

Let’s analyse the techniques:

1) You start off by gripping the sled with your arms at 90° and then you place your body inside the grips and begin the push, with the risk of having the entire fulcrum of the push on the grip side of the sled and causing the sled to recoil, which will point to the front (direction side). To avoid this, it is necessary to stand with the body projected very low. In this first case, the thrust will be very arm-tight and with very flexed elbows you risk inflaming them. The grip must be very strong and the wrists must work in line with the forearm and not extra rotated to avoid injury.

2) I grip the sleds with my elbows and rest my hands and forearms along the two tubulars to get a strong and secure grip and to unload the pushing work on a larger surface. In the latter case, I can project myself with my body inside the sled in order to prevent it from buckling when pushing. The force imparted with method 2 is greater because the lower limbs are able to impart it more.

3) Thrust with arms fully extended. I would say that of the 3 it is certainly the most disadvantageous in terms of energy consumption because the mass producing the thrust is far away from the body that has to be moved. More force must be exerted.

• Let us now look at the SLED PULL. In this position there are 4 rows, two at the start and two after 12.5 m. The 2 rows must never be exceeded. They indicate a space of movement within which I must retrieve the rope which is attached to the sled and within which I can move backwards. Again, 50 m of sled pulling must be covered, so 4 times the distance. The sled will have one rope in front and one in back so that I can retrieve it from either side.

Various techniques exist here as well:

1) Remain motionless at your position close to the centre line so that you can lean forward to pick up the rope and then, exerting a push backwards in a ‘squat’ position, begin to pull the rope with the strength of your upper limbs alone; this may be advantageous in terms of time, but it is not recommended because working all the way to the third position with your arms could be detrimental to the continuation of the race

2) Start as in the first case so staying close to the central line to be able to grab the rope but then begin to pull using your lower limbs, so, you grab the rope, throw yourself backwards with your weight similar to a Squat and then, as soon as the sled starts to move, having overcome the elastic tension of the rope, you perform backwards steps with your arms outstretched and your body projected towards the second line that must never be crossed with your feet. Arriving at the back line, I return forward and repeat the gesture, taking care to throw the rope to one side to avoid tripping over it. A mistake that is often made is to start very low and with the torso very far forward in order to catch the rope over the foot line. This gesture causes me to find myself unbalanced forward and when I have to initiate the movement of the sled, I severely strain my lumbar area and just tire my body.

TRAINING WITH SLEDS

Hyrox® has different weights between women and men, between Open and PRO:

Open:

PRO:

But how best to train?

Let’s start with the premise that Hyrox® was created as the Fitness Race for All, but let’s not forget, it is still a fitness race that requires both strength and endurance training and preparation. 8 x 1km runs and 8 functional workouts! So even the Sled Push or Sled Pull start with functional movements but……there’s a but…..you have big loads and as Functional training teaches you, they have to be conditioned in stages. You can’t expect to include 102 kg of push or 78 kg of pull in a beginner’s workout, but you must first learn the gesture, assess the conditions around it, such as the available space, the sled’s gliding surface, etc., then “have fun” with the loads. It is important to familiarise yourself with the Hyrox® movement standards in order to train the exercises in the right way and avoid incorrect movements and potential injuries. If the gym has the sled available, it is always good to test the various techniques that can be applied and find the one that works best for you.

Once you have learnt the technical gesture you have to start increasing the loads by training with weights much higher than those of the race precisely because you already arrive with a workload due to the race and the previous stations where you often start, mistakenly, at a thousand without thinking that the race is long and intense. Then you never know what kind of surface you might find under the sled, the friction is not always the same in every race. Sometimes you feel like you have to push or pull a mountain.

Having said that, let’s also think about the gesture we have to do, which is a push and pull, so I can, or rather I must, include push and pull exercises with increased load in my training to increase the strength specific to the gesture.

We can use Deadlifts, Pullups, Dip Presses. All exercises that can be trained even in a small space, where I may not have a sled available.

Let’s see how to improve and train the sled pull, one of the most frightening positions. In order to best train the technique for the sled pull, it is best to train the short pull in order to strengthen the gesture by moving back and using the lower limbs. The short pull has two advantages, one related to space because not all gyms have more than 10 m of distance to pull the sled and second because I learn, using either two handles or a belt to tie around my waist, to pull backwards by pulling the load with me with the activation of the core and exploiting the strength of my hip and pelvis, which allow me to bring my body leaning back while keeping my arms fully extended.

This will be very useful in competition, especially in the first few metres of the pull-up where the weight makes itself felt. With the short pull, in training, I will definitely have to increase the weights a lot compared to the competition weights. With this body position I create a straight line from the sled to the point of pull strength, dissipating as little energy as possible. A single arm rope line.

The pushing and pulling of the sled are therefore functional exercises of strength in the first place, which is then released in power, explosiveness and in the case of the Hyrox® race, also endurance. Sled training is for the whole body because it involves all the major muscle groups and is one of the few ways to exercise the upper and lower body muscles at the same time. It also helps to increase the heart rate while burning a lot of calories.

Sled pushing exercises and alternatives are designed to improve body function. The pushing motion of a sled will help increase speed, while the pulling motion will help increase strength. This is why sled can be included in the training of many athletes as part of their discipline-specific physical preparation.

All gyms should be equipped with a sled to allow targeted and effective training

Let’s look at a typical training example for a Hyrox® athlete with a sled:

• First 15 minutes: Warm-up
• 40 minutes: Main Part
• 5 minutes: Cool Down (consists of the unloading phase to bring the body back to a state of calm)

I recommend Primitive Functional Movement exercises for Warmup, as they are effective and complete.

This is just an example, assuming you have space to run or a treadmill and Hyrox® race equipment with skierg and rowing. It is still possible to perform the same circuit with alternative exercises.

If you have no possibility of running, you can use a bike or insert 3′ of alternative cardio instead of the 500 m of running.

The rowing can be replaced with the row at the Flying and the skierg with the smesh with the medball.

There are many alternatives and many combinations to train best with sledding. It is certainly a good idea not to improvise in order not to get injured and, if you want to prepare for a competition in the best possible way, contact certified trainers or gyms.

My sport is Hyrox® and Yours?