Rep The SetYour station splits are training instructions
After a race you know roughly how it went. The number that changes your training is more precise: which station cost you the most compared to people who finished near you. That number exists, and here is how to turn it into a session.
After a race, most athletes know roughly how it went.
The SkiErg took something out of them, the wall balls landed on heavy legs.
What they usually cannot answer is the question that would actually change their training: which station cost me the most, relative to athletes who finished where I finished?
A four-minute sled push is fast or slow depending entirely on the company you keep.
Without a reference population, a raw split is a diary entry, not an instruction.
That reference population exists. The free HYROX Station Analyzer at athlete.tools takes your eight station splits and scores each one as a percentile against real race results in your format and division (the men’s open benchmark set alone holds over 176,000 results), shows the median and top-ten-percent time per station, and names your biggest opportunity outright. We do not make that tool and have no stake in it; it is simply the cleanest answer we have found to the which-station question.
To make the benchmarks concrete, here is what the current season’s dataset says station by station (open singles divisions, via the analyzer’s Season 8 data: 176,547 men’s and 99,977 women’s results):
| Station | Men median | Men top 10% | Women median | Women top 10% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkiErg | 4:35 | 4:12 | 5:18 | 4:49 |
| Sled Push | 3:07 | 2:18 | 2:56 | 2:12 |
| Sled Pull | 4:59 | 3:42 | 5:48 | 4:21 |
| Burpee Broad Jumps | 5:36 | 3:52 | 6:45 | 4:45 |
| RowErg | 4:54 | 4:26 | 5:32 | 5:00 |
| Farmers Carry | 2:11 | 1:39 | 2:19 | 1:50 |
| Sandbag Lunges | 5:20 | 3:52 | 5:14 | 3:51 |
| Wall Balls | 7:11 | 4:55 | 6:51 | 4:49 |
The column worth staring at is the gap between median and top ten percent, because that spread is where recoverable time lives.
Wall balls carry the widest gap of any station.
2:16 for the men, 2:02 for the women.
Which is why they decide so many races: rhythm and rest discipline there buy minutes, not seconds.
The sled push gap is the narrowest of the loaded stations (0:49 for men), so even a big improvement there moves the clock less.
Same training hours, very different returns depending on which station you point them at.
Read the output the blunt way: the station sitting furthest below your cohort’s median usually deserves the next block of training time more than the one you are already good at.
Improving a strength feels better; improving the outlier moves the finish time.
Knowing the station is step one.
The training question is structure, not volume: "do more SkiErg" is not a plan.
The decisions that move the number are the length of each work interval, the rest between efforts, how many rounds you can hold before form degrades, and above all whether the station arrives fresh or on legs that already ran.
In the race it arrives exactly once, after a kilometre of running.
Training it in isolation at full effort is a different stimulus from training it with prior load attached, and only one of those looks like race day.
This is a structure the app was built to hold.
Put a short run or row in the block ahead of the target station so it never arrives fresh, then repeat the block in rounds with the rest programmed on purpose.
A typical targeted session: 800 metres of running, three minutes hard on the SkiErg, two minutes of rest, four rounds.
The builder prices the session while you assemble it, and voice cues announce every transition, so the phone stays on the floor where it belongs.
The same shape points at any station the analyzer flags. Four examples, each about thirty minutes with warm-up - and all four ship in the preset library under "Station Repeats", so you can press start rather than build:
| Target station | The block | Rest | Rounds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wall Balls | 400 m run, then 30 wall balls with a no-drop goal | 90 s | 5 |
| Sled Push | 400 m run, then 50 m sled push at race weight | 2:30 | 5 |
| Burpee Broad Jumps | 600 m run, then 20 burpee broad jumps at even pace | 2:00 | 4 |
| Sandbag Lunges | 500 m run, then 50 m of sandbag lunges | 90 s | 5 |
Treat the numbers as shapes, not prescriptions: hold the structure and scale the distances and loads to your level.
The one rule that should survive any scaling is the run in front of the station.
Remove it and you are training a different sport.
The wall balls session is the one most worth stealing, given that two-minute spread above: the no-drop goal trains exactly the rhythm discipline the benchmark gap is made of.
All four presets run on the free tier.
Then close the loop with what the session recorded: per-round splits, heart rate across each round, time in zone. If round one is clearly faster than round four, the work interval is too long or the rest too short for the pace you chose. Reading session analytics walks through exactly how to make that call.
The loop, compressed: race data tells you what to target, structure decides how to train it, and session data tells you whether it is working.
Run it between races and the next set of splits stops being a surprise.
Related reading: why your race was slower than your sim, on the one part of race day no gym session can rehearse.