Hybrid training: why most people get it wrong

Most people trying to train hybrid are doing far more than they need to and getting far less out of it than they should.

And it’s not because they’re not working hard enough.

If you’re anything like most of our members at Principal Athletic, juggling work, kids, and everything else life throws at you, you probably don’t have unlimited time or recovery like you did 10Y ago. You want to feel fit, strong and capable - not constantly fatigued and wondering why your hard work isn’t resulting in progress.

The Issue with hybrid training

The most common mistake we see is people adding a load more running into their lifting programme, or bolting some lifting onto their running, calling it hybrid and not really thinking about what that’s doing to their overall training load.

Each one of those training modalities is already demanding on its own. Put them together without any real structure and the result is almost always the same - over fatigued, not recovering properly between sessions, and progress in both directions eventually stalls.

In other words, doing a lot but getting very little in return.

If that sounds familiar, it’s probably not your effort that’s the issue...

What hybrid training actually is

Hybrid training isn’t about doing everything all at once. It’s about knowing what you’re trying to build right now and managing everything else around it.

Think of it like turning the volume up and down on different qualities throughout the year. Strength, running, power, conditioning - they all stay in the mix, but they don’t all sit at 100% at the same time.

The athletes who get the most from this kind of training aren’t the ones smashing themselves in every session. They’re the ones who are deliberate about what they’re building this block, what they’re maintaining, and what they’re leaving alone.

How we do it at Principal Athletic

Instead of pushing everything at once, we bias our training toward different ends of the spectrum at different points in the year without ever completely dropping the other.

Right now we’re five weeks into a running block in our Athletic programme and roughly 65-70% of our training load sits on the cardio side. The rest is strength work - lower volume, intensity stays high (members will have noticed we aren’t lifting quite as many barbells as of late!). enough to maintain but not too much that the fatigue interferes with the main goal of improving our running.

The reason this matters is that strength and endurance adaptations actively compete with each other. Push both too hard at the same time and one will always undermine the other & managing that interference is the whole game.

After this block, the focus shifts back to strength and hypertrophy. Cardio is scaled back but we go into that block with a significantly better aerobic base than we came in with. & a better aerobic base doesn’t just make you fitter: it makes you more resilient, helps you recover faster between sessions, and ultimately lets you train harder when the strength focus comes back around.

Why this matters

At PA, this structure is built into every training block. Our members don’t have to think about it, they just have to show up.

Turn up > train hard > get fit

That kind of consistent, compounding training is what turns months of work into fitness and strength you can actually feel.

If you’re looking for a gym in Nottingham and want to see what structured hybrid training actually feels like, come down for a free trial session. First session is on us.