In this episode of the TrainingPeaks CoachCast, we sit down with Fergus Crawley, the co-founder and head coach of Omnia Performance, to look into the world of hybrid athletes. Hybrid training, a blend of strength and endurance disciplines, challenges the traditional boundaries of athletic training.
Fergus draws from his rich background in rugby, powerlifting, triathlons, and concurrent training to explain how athletes can effectively balance opposing athletic goals. From his incredible achievement of squatting 500 pounds and running a sub-five-minute mile in the same day to working with military operatives, Fergus shares insights on biomechanical awareness, periodization, and the mental approach needed for such diverse training programming.
Learn how hybrid athletes can tackle the demands of multi-discipline sports and the benefits of open-mindedness in fitness. Fergus discusses several strategies he uses to coach and accomplish his many challenges that can help you pursue your athletic goals, whether you’re a seasoned triathlete or a strength enthusiast curious about endurance.
Standout Quotes
The Versatility of Training: “And, ultimately, why one of the biggest things I’ve I’ve loved about training this way is when I’ve got an injury or a niggle, I can pivot quite quickly into something else and apply I I can feel like I’m winning day to day whereas if you are a sole swimmer or a sole runner like the examples you gave, if you can’t run, you can’t swim.”
“The thread of DNA that runs through everybody that we work with is curiosity, I’d say. It’s can I do this thing that scares me a little bit?”
Curiosity in Fitness: Omnia Performance
Understanding Hybrid Athletes’ Goals: “We have people that wanna do their first Ironman that come from a lifting background, and they wanna make sure that they hold on to some of their muscle. They might speak to triathlon coaches who don’t necessarily understand that people enjoy lifting for the sake of lifting rather than just as a way of supporting the triathlon. So they put trust in us to be the people [who] understand that we are, I guess, just meat heads at heart really from years gone by.”
What Athletes Get Wrong in Concurrent Training: “A lot of people make the mistake of when getting into this is they’ll take a 100% of running program, 100% lifting program, put the two together and wonder after four weeks why their calves feel like they’re going to explode. It’s because they’re operating at 200% output. Because each of those training plans were designed with 100% of the individual’s application in mind.”
“This may irritate the endurance camp, but I think one of the biggest benefits of strength training progressively over years and committing to it from a compound movement point of view, is the biomechanical awareness that that gives you that can then translate to other things is more valuable at source than the other way around.”
The Difference Between Starting as a Weightlifter Versus Endurance Athlete
Programming Weekly Workouts for Hybrid Athletes: “Tthe foundation for everything is individuality and what an individual starting point is. Because, as you said, the rate at which those things will adapt — if you get somebody that’s never squatted before versus spent the whole life squatting — the rate of adaptation will be very different. But the core principles of how we approach any goal or any demand that somebody comes to us with or any of the training plans in the marketplace that’s sort of off the shelf, they all follow a similar structure.
Which is, intensity peaks at the start of the week, volume peaks at the end of the week, and they invert as the week goes on. So, the heaviest squatting, hardest effort running comes earlier in the week, and longer, slower stuff comes at the end of the week. Higher reps assistance work comes at the end, the middle is tempo, strength endurance, sets of eight, sets of 10, that sort of stuff. And we do that because within the context of training, a training week or a micro cycle in this context, a seven-day period, consolidating stressors is an effective way of trying to manage the recovery from a high-intensity dosage of work in an area.
So the energy systems aren’t the same, but as uncomfortable as it is, heavy squats and track intervals in the same day is what we found to be the most effective way of getting the most bang for your buck in adaptation over a period of time. Because if you would daily angelic periodization, for example, easy day, hard day, easy day, hard day, you would not be able to recover from a hard day on the lower body to develop top-end strength at the rate at which you wanted to, to then go into a fully recovered hard effort lower body to then recover again sorry, track session to then recover again to go into hard effort lower body. So by consolidating stresses and grouping intensities into similar sort of packages like lower body hard effort, track efforts, track intervals, hard effort, or, heavy upper body and hard effort swimming, 10 by 100, something like that.”
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