Tom Coppens

Pull-ups are a full body exercise

When performed correctly everything from your grip, arms, shoulders, lats, core, glutes and quads should be active

There’s no reason to rush them

Focus on full control throughout the whole movement to maximise your results

I regret to inform you that tracking your food will improve your performance

Since a couple of weeks I started doing more Hyrox work and while I thought my increased aerobic capacity from running would have a great carry over

It didn’t…

Or at least I thought so

I started gassing out after 15-20minutes and just felt a loss of power output after that timeframe

I was doing 4-8 minute intervals that require a higher (full body) power output compared to running

First I thought it was the lack of muscular endurance training

I believed I was eating enough because my running performance was still as good as ever

My gf told me to actually track my food - just to see

Calorie wise I was eating enough but the macro split wasn’t good

I’ve been tracking for close to a week now and my Hyrox workouts have been substantially better

Do I believe everyone should track their kcals? No

But if performance is important to you - you should. At least for a period of time

My training became much simpler by removing 2 zones and just focus on LT1 and LT2

I’m glad that the pacing for my 800m repeats was 10x better than my video skills for the 1 clip I recorded completely out of focus

Anyone would benefit from more aerobic work

Z1, z2, easy work, under LT1, whatever you want to call it

And not per se from a pure performance POV to run faster

But from a recovery perspective

I spent a decade doing CrossFit, only doing high intensity work and was able to run a 1h29 marathon

BUT when I did a lactate test, it took almost 10 minutes between intervals to actually recover from a physiological aspect - the test took almost 2 hours

I did an aerobic base training block and did the same test, that recovery window dropped to 5 minutes or less. The same took me less than an hour.

So improving your aerobic base allows you to speed up intraset recovery which allows you to have better quality sessions overall

This isn’t just for cardiovascular workouts but also benefits strength and hypertrophy workouts