12 Week Apex Hybrid Performance Fitness Plan (Part 1)

If you’re looking for an awesome hybrid performance fitness plan then you’ve come to the right place. The Apex plan, as I like to call it, is designed to push you to your limit. It will increase your overall strength and cardiovascular conditioning, in only 12 short weeks. It’s designed for experienced athletes who are serious about their fitness gains. Keep reading to see if this program is right for you.

The Apex program is designed to increase the most predictive performance metric for average Joes and elite athletes, power to weight ratio. This metric is key for any athlete from power lifters, to marathon runners. In order to become fitter you need to increase your power output, relative to your bodyweight, across your desired time domains.

If you’re a strength athlete you need to increase you power and strength in very short durations. Endurance athletes need to increase their aerobic and anaerobic power for longer events. The Apex workout program is designed for a hybrid athlete who wants to increase their endurance performance as well as their strength performance, taking their fitness to the next level. Here’s a quick overview of the program.

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12 Week Apex Hybrid Performance Fitness Plan: Overview

• Designed to increase upper body and lower body strength and muscle growth
• For intermediate and advanced athletes with safe form on all movements
• 6 day per week split
• 3 Pure cardio workouts per week
• 5 Strength training sessions per week
• 3+ functional fitness WODs per week

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Before we move on to the details of this program, I think it’s important to highlight one method of increasing your power to weight ratio is by losing body fat. In fact, I plan on using this program to maintain my current muscle mass, while losing about 15-20 pounds of fat.

If you recall, I completed a similar hybrid athlete program last year, losing over 25 pounds in the process. While that program was very successful, I did lose a little more upper body strength than I would have liked. The Apex program was written to address that deficit.

I’ve tried to write this program to allow for fat loss, and strength gain. I would expect that athletes who maintain a caloric surplus on this plan, can build a good deal of muscle mass, provided they’re consistent with their nutrition. Don’t worry, I’ll give you some great tools later on to help with that. Now let’s cover the ground rules of the program. Don’t forget to join the email list below!

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12 Week Apex Hybrid Performance Fitness Plan: Ground Rules

There are some basic ground rules that you need to understand for any hybrid approach training plan. The first is that you need to use common sense, and realize that you aren’t likely to complete this program exactly as written. Hell, I wrote this program for myself, and I will still modify things from time to time, depending on my schedule and other variables.

If a certain movement is painful for you, then modify it to a similar movement that isn’t! Remember, you need to be strong, not do things that will aggravate injuries. There will also be days that you’re feeling awesome. It’s ok to do a little more weight, or extra work on those days. This should only be done occasionally, not every workout! Next we’ll cover the heart rate training rules.

Heart Rate Training for the Hybrid Athlete

It always amazes me that athletes will be super specific on lifting percentages, and rest periods, but they do not apply that same logic to their cardio. Well, we won’t be doing that in this hybrid training program. Much of the conditioning work is zoned on two ends of the cardiovascular training spectrum.

The bulk of training is done in Zone 2. This training is the maximum amount of power you can produce while burning fat for fuel. You should be able to carry on a conversation at this power output, or breathe purely through your nose. If you want a more precise method of measuring your power zones, check out the awesome Garmin Epix 2.

Zone 2 cardio is key for increasing your aerobic output, and is great for cardiovascular health. It does this by increasing mitochondrial density in your cells, amongst other adaptations. You’ll find that after a month of Zone 2 training, your overall performance and recovery shoots through the roof. It’s a must for achieving your fitness goals.

The other style of cardio is Zone 4/5. This is max power output. Think a 5k run, or max effort on any activity lasting less than an hour. This style of training increases your bodies ability to use oxygen effectively. It also increases your anaerobic power, which is used in resistance training, and during WODs or metcons.

It’s no accident that I’ve favored this polarize approach. Research confirms that most successful endurance athletes spend 70-80% of their training time in Zone 2. The other 20% is Zone 3-5. I’ve found that this pairs well with hybrid training, as most of the strength training and WODs fall in between Zone 3 and Zone 5. In effect, you’re training at all power outputs. Now let’s talk about scheduling

If you want to try my most popular hybrid athlete training program then check this out. It has all the details you need in an easy to follow PDF.

Scheduling your Hybrid Training

Once we get to the program you’ll see that there is a lot of heavy lifting and cardio, sometimes programed on the same day. I want you to make every effort to separate the strength training and WODs, from the cardio by at least 4 hours.

Research confirms that this separation is key to building muscle size and strength. If you’re really pinched for time, you can do the strength first, and then the cardio, but it will be much less effective. You don’t have to separate lifting from WODs, as they’re similar enough not to interfere.

Most athletes will find that an AM and PM session works best. This gives you great recovery time, and will minimize interference. You can also do the cardio in the morning and the lifts in the afternoon. The order doesn’t matter, provided you have more than 4 hours between the sessions. You’ll find that there are only two days per week that will have you doing strength plus cardio.

Make sure you perform each session in sequential order. The program is written to build upon each session while allowing you to work each primary muscle group without excessive soreness. If you start switching days, you’ll quickly run into issues. Let’s get to the details of the program.

12 Week Apex Hybrid Performance Fitness Plan Week 1

This is the first week of the program, and it’s designed to introduce you to the challenges of this plan. While you’ll still be plenty sore, this is the easiest week. You should also expect quite a lot of cardio. Take a look at week 1 below.

In the first week you have 5 days of heavy lifting, 3 cardio sessions, and 3 WODs. For the cardio you need to stick with the same piece of equipment or movement. I really love indoor cycling with Zwift on my smart trainer. It makes cardio much easier and I never feel bored.

You can also use Zwift with any Assault bike Pro (Amazon Affiliate Link) or higher, as the monitor exports power data via bluetooth, which is what Zwift uses to interpret your speed. If you hate traditional cardio, I highly recommend it. As a bonus, there is some research that indicates that cycling has the least impact on your strength gains. On to week 2.

12 Week Apex Hybrid Performance Fitness Plan Week 2

In week 2 you can expect to see an increase in both weight, and the number of blocks. We’ve also added an extra WOD in session 11. There are still only two days that you should be doing an AM and PM session. In my testing I’ve found that most of the lifting sessions can be completed in an hour or so. Obviously, the cardio will take longer.

You’ve probably noticed that several of the lifts are labeled as RIR. This stands for reps in reserve. This is an easy to understand concept where I want you to complete a set with a given weight. You will work right up until the specified reps in reserve. If it says 10 reps at 2 RIR, then you will use a weight that would allow you to get 12 reps if you went all out.

This allows me to regulate the intensity each muscle group experiences. Remember, part of any hybrid training plan is progressive overload. It isn’t go all out all the time! Next let’s talk about the most challenging week in the first cycle, week 3.

12 Week Apex Hybrid Performance Fitness Plan Week 3

In week 3 we build to a peak in the strength work. You’ll notice I don’t have you working with super heavy weights, but the weight becomes challenging given the amount of sets and reps I need you to complete. Part of the goal in the first cycle is to build volume in these common barbell movements. Once you acclimatize to this training style, we can increase difficulty from there.

I know some of you are cursing me for almost 2 hours of Zone 2 training. That’s ok. I’m used to it. You’ll notice that I give you a range on these cardio sessions. If you you need to work on your aerobic engine, then err on the higher side. Moreover, if you’re just not feeling it, you can cut it on the shorter side. Ultimately I don’t feel sorry for you as I’ll be doing these same sessions! Now let’s talk about our first deload week.

12 Week Apex Hybrid Performance Fitness Plan Week 4

Week 4 is our first deload. This is where we cut the overall training volume on the heavy lifts by about 30%. You’ll still be lifting heavy weights, just not as much as you were in the previous week. The point of a deload is to allow your body to catch up on recovery, and remodel your muscle tissue, and tendons. You only make gains by allowing your body to rebuild and repair after your hybrid workouts.

You should also notice that some of the accessory movements, and Zone 2 cardio blocks have remained the same. This is because those portions of the program are the easiest to recover from. There’s no real need to back off on volume.

As you’ll see, next week starts the second cycle of this hybrid fitness program. It will be similar in schedule, but the movements and rep schemes will vary. Let’s look at week 5.

12 Week Apex Hybrid Performance Fitness Plan Week 5

The goal of the first cycle was to acclimatize to this training plan. The second goal was to build volume with moderately heavy loads, in preparation for heavier weights that really build strength. In this cycle we will be working with loads that will approach your rep max, even if they’re shy of your true one rep max.

One of the bigger changes is to the first session of this week. It’s primarily a bench press session, with a lot of accessory work. I’ve still included a hip hinge movement, in the form of the sumo deadlift, but that’s to help improve your neural efficiency with the movement. It won’t do anything for your upper body pressing strength.

Similarly, we’ve also kept a large portion of the Zone 2 training, but we’ve added in more Zone 4/5 work. You should note that I don’t specify intervals or any other details on this Zone 4/5 work because it isn’t needed for the adaptation we’re looking for.

If you want to be an extremely good runner, you do need to worry about those details, however, if you just need to build overall endurance you don’t require that kind of minutia. On these days I normally do a Zwift race, which puts me at 80% or above in my heart rate zone 4/5, for the duration of the time. Continue with your same cardio method, and go hard for the specified time domain.

12 Week Apex Hybrid Performance Fitness Plan Week 6

This is the last week of the first part of the 12 Week Apex Hybrid Performance Fitness Plan. It happens to be the second week of cycle two, which means you’ll have to stay tuned for part two to see the rest of the program. See what I did there? A little programming cliff hanger as it were!

By now you’ve probably noticed that some of the accessory work looks a little different than a standard sets x reps format. You’ll notice things like a certain number of biceps curls for time, or a few supersets thrown in there. This is designed help increase muscular hypertrophy, as well as local muscular endurance.

Large extended sets are better at building muscular endurance than the standard 8-15 rep range you’ll find in other parts of this program. In reality, you need to increase your power output across a wide variety of rep ranges. You can expect to see more of this in the last cycle of the program.

Now that we’ve covered the first 6 weeks of this hybrid performance fitness plan, we need to move on to an even more important topic, nutrition and recovery.

Nutrition on a Hybrid Program

If you want to maximize the benefit of this hybrid performance fitness plan, then you will need to pay close attention to your nutrition. Like many things fitness related, it isn’t complicated to do, it just requires diligence on your part.

In this section I’m going to list a few tools that I use to track my overall caloric expenditure and macros. You’re overall caloric intake is the most important factor for your success either gaining muscle mass, or losing body fat. The next most important aspect is your macronutrient split.

I recommend downloading this calculator I made. It will help you figure out a good starting point for your nutrition program. You will have to tweak its recommendations based on your individual preferences.

I have also found that using the My Fitness Pal App to be of great use. It’s so good many researchers use it to track food intake for their research participants. Lastly, I recommend getting a cheap food scale, like this one (Amazon Affiliate Link). You’ll find that your ability to estimate portion sizes is likely very poor. Next let’s talk about recovery practices that actually work.

If you like this kind of program, but want to focus on building more muscle mass as well as WOD conditioning then you’ll like this program.

Recovery Methods

Hybrid athletes cannot afford to neglect their recovery. By definition you’re asking your body to do a lot of work, and you cannot benefit from this unless your body is tolerating the workload. In reality, there really is no such thing as over training, there is just under recovering.

Make sure you are doing the basics correctly. Sleep 8 or so hours a night, and make sure you’re getting proper nutrition. Drink reasonable amounts of fluids. You don’t have to go crazy, and carry around a gallon of water everywhere you go.

After that, there are a few methods that I use to improve my recovery during a workout and afterwards. During a workout I regularly engage in hyperventilation breathing. Research shows that it increases your power output up to 35%, in bigger sets, especially on full body movements. Check this article out for details on this technique.

I also recommend wearing exercise tights either during or after a workout. Compression tights can drastically reduce your feelings of muscle soreness. It’s the difference between making dad noises when getting up from a chair and only being a little sore! Check this article out for more. Now let’s finish this article up.

Final Thoughts on Part 1

I want to highlight that the best way to be successful on this Apex Hybrid Performance Fitness Plan, is to be consistent. You need to fit this plan into your schedule in way that allows you to work hard over time.

For some of you, that means you might have to drop the load, or change some reps, to make sure you’re using correct form. Similarly, you might have to cut your cardio short every now and again to fit it in to your schedule. This happens to me as well, and I would rather you do something in the weight room, then just say screw it, I can’t do it perfectly so why bother. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

This program will be 12 weeks in length, and this is only the first half. Consistent work inside and outside of the gym will put you miles ahead of where you can be with half assed planning, with the occasional great session.

If you have any comments or question on this hybrid performance fitness plan, then put them in the comments section below, and I’ll get you an answer. Now get out there and get training.

If you’re ready for the Part Two of the Apex program then click here. Don’t forget to join the email list below.

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