Why VO₂ max is overrated for HYROX

The common belief: raise your VO₂ max and you'll race faster. It's the number every watch reports and every athlete brags about, so it became the goal. But chasing peak VO₂ max sends HYROX athletes into endless all-out intervals — and often nowhere.

Why the belief is flawed

Performance tracks the fraction of VO₂ max you can sustain, not the peak itself. Two athletes with identical VO₂ max scores can finish minutes apart because one holds 85% of it across a HYROX and the other holds 70%. Sustainability — your aerobic durability — is the trainable lever, and it comes from base, not from living in the red.

On how to raise the ceiling: a 2024 meta-analysis (Rosenblat et al.) found polarized training — lots of easy work plus a little very hard work — is superior for improving VO₂ peak, especially in trained athletes, while the painful "middle" adds little.

How to shift

Stop grading yourself on a peak number. Go polarized: keep most sessions genuinely easy, make the hard ones genuinely hard, and cut the grey-zone tempo that feels productive but isn't. Build the aerobic base that lets you hold a high percentage deep into the race.

Expect a race that no longer falls apart on run 6 — because you trained the number that actually matters.

Keep reading

• Is HYROX strength or cardio?
• Runner vs CrossFitter: who's built for HYROX?
• How to build your HYROX aerobic base
• Free 8-week HYROX plan