Category: Hybrid

Hybrid AF

Are you Hybrid athlete?

Recently this phrase has become a full on trend on social media. So what is a Hybrid Athlete? Well officially someone who excels simultaneously in both strength and endurance activities, but essentially someone who trains for multiple disciplines or in multiple ways.

Is it really a new thing? Honestly, no. Lots of people have always done a mixture of heavy lifting and cardio, things like Crossfit where multi functional fitness is the aim, lifted and ran. It is however getting more attention now and with this new (not new but trending i guess) name gaining more recognition.

People who maybe once almost exclusively lifted might now consider running as a bigger part of their training or add in other types of exercise rather than being of the mindset ‘I do this and this is the best form of training and all other types of training are inferior’ mindset.

In this sense the growth of the Hybrid Athlete is a good thing. Multi functional programmes with variety and a mixture of cardio and resistance fitness can help people become more robust overall, not just leaner or stronger, but generally better equiped to live a healthy every day lfe.

When we talk about functional fitness or say a workout contains functional moves, we are essentially saying it will help up in every day life (carrying things, picking up kids and so on). Not focusing on one form of movement can help benefit you in the same sort of functional way as you are working on being more robust and fit overall rather than excelling in one particular way.

The other benefit i see from this type of training is the mindset benefits, in terms of confidence as you try new things, get used to stepping out of your comfort zone and expand you skill set. It also takes the idea of training away from being a means to an end to lose weight or achieve a certain physique and makes it a more feel good about yourself thing

The chances are you do already train Hybrid without really thinking about it, but you can use the new buzz word as a reminder to try new exercise trends, train outside the box, give new things a go and see where they take you.

Training in 2023 will be Hybrid

Pre Covid not many gym goers seriously thought about training at home.

Things like Les Mills on Demand and Peloton existed of course, but by and large people had physical gym memberships and went to gyms and classes week on week. The home based apps were considered by many an ‘added’ extra to a workout routine.

Lockdown changed that. We had little choice during that time to embrace online classes, training at home or outdoors and many people invested in fitness equipment.

For some of us it was only really a means to an end. I found training at home (beyond running which I did anyway) hard in terms of space and also in terms of maintaining focus. Some people found it liberating though. Saving time on travelling, finding it easier to fit in around work and child care, many people found they didn’t see the point in going back once gyms re opened.

Beyond that, whilst many people did still want to return to actual gyms, they found that new working patterns where they still worked from home, or did for at least half their week, it wasn’t necessarily practical to return to the gym (or at least not every day) especially when their gym was closer to their place of work.

So where do we stand coming into 2023, the year where we can probably say that habits, which at the start of 2022 were sill a bit up in the air, have settled?

Hybrid membership options need to be where gyms start to focus I think in order to retain memberships. Memberships where there are online offerings for days people want to train at home, or flexible memberships where people not planning to use the gym all week could opt to pay less for a reduced access (there’s already student memberships at university gyms and off peak memberships available in many places so it would just be tweaks in access required), maybe even more reasonable PAYG options.

Currently workouts are a bit like streaming platforms – depending on what you want to watch you might need Sky, Netflix, Disney and more to watch everything- if you want to train at home and in the gym you need a gym membership and in most cases also an online app for home workouts. If more gyms started to provide a more robust hybrid option where the online wasn’t an after thought (I’m sure there are some out there already on this wave length) they could look to solidify their membership base and overcome the shifts that are occurring in where and when and how people train.

What trends do you see coming in relation to training in 2023?