Not every workout needs to destroy you to work

There's something weirdly satisfying about finishing a session absolutely wrecked.

Sweaty. Legs like jelly. Heart rate through the roof. A feeling of being stuck in your own personal hell for 45 minutes.

Where — in exchange for this insanity — you get to walk out afterwards riding the waves of endorphins all day.

I get it. It feels productive. I used to live for HIIT sessions and an unwavering belief that if I'm not sweating buckets at the end of the session, then did it even happen?

But somewhere between training for my first and second HYROX, I learned something quite important:

Running every run faster doesn't necessarily make you a better runner. And burning yourself out doesn't guarantee a quicker race time.

And it was this realisation that had me rethinking the training I put my body through each week.

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Every session has its purpose

Easy. Hard. Speed. Power. Strength.

If it's an easy run, the goal isn't to beat last weeks 5km time. It's to run at a truly easy pace.

If it's a strength session, the goal is to lift well and progressively get stronger. We don't need to turn every rest period into a reason to do jump lunges (true story).

And if it was a HYROX conditioning simulation, or a hard interval run? Then that was the session to turn the dial up and embrace the personal hell.

Respect the session you have set out to do.

Because if you start making every session overly hard, eventually none of them can be done well.

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Good performance starts with recovery

Recovery is just as important as training in many ways. Whilst you might think you're well recovered after each session because you're no longer experiencing DOMS... the reality is often more complicated.

Training places stress on your muscles, joints and nervous system — and your body needs time to adapt to that stress.

Continually piling hard session on top of hard session can eventually compromise performance, technique, and your ability to recover properly.

Recovery doesn't necessarily mean doing nothing.

It might mean an easy walk, some light mobility, or simply just making your next session genuinely easy.

Because six workouts a week don't automatically make you fitter if you're doing every single one at an 8/10 effort.

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Understand the impact of your surroundings

If every session was as hard as possible, not only would you be more prone to becoming injured, but you'd be more likely to struggle to motivate yourself enough to get through that gym door.

Dedicating a few sessions a week to technique or gentler exercise means you can chop and change depending on how you're feeling on the day.

There are weeks where I need to switch up in order to get the job done. By keeping some flexibility in my week, I can look at what else is going on and choose the session that makes the most sense that day.

A tough day at the office sometimes means an easy run to decompress (or a hard session to vent in all honesty too). But on a quiet weekend, I know I can usually push harder because I actually have the time and energy to recover afterwards.

And if there was ever a session to be put into the bin when work starts ramping up — it's certainly not the "easy" runs or the full body strength sessions...it's the HYROX simulations, the interval running, the super sweaty sessions that once would have convinced me I was doing everything right.

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So when should you train hard?

None of this means I don't train hard. I absolutely do.

HYROX conditioning sessions can be grim. Intervals can humble me. And some strength sessions require me to dig deep to ensure I don't get stuck at the bottom of my squat.

But the difference now is that hard is something that I programme — not something I chase on every session.

Some sessions build the engine. Some build strength. Some build speed. And some simply allow me to recover enough to make those sessions really count.