This is by far the longest and most detailed program for hybrid athletes I’ve written. As the title states, you’ll be able to download all 108 workouts. This final six week installment is designed to take the functional strength and aerobic base you’ve built, and convert it into pure performance. The goal here is to set strength and conditioning personal records. Keep reading for more.
Readers of this website will know that I’ve written a lot of hybrid athlete programs over the years. This program is by far the longest, and most detailed training plan to date. There are a few reasons for that. The primary reason is to give intermediate and advanced athletes a program that is long enough, with sufficient difficulty, to build real fitness.
Because this is the third installment of this program, I would highly recommend starting with the first six weeks, in part one. You can then proceed to part two, and finish with this portion of the programming. Otherwise, you’ll find the volume is going to be way too high if you jump in now. Check out the program overview below.
18 Week Hybrid Program for Hybrid Athletes Overview
- 18 Week program duration, broken into 3 parts
- Part 3 of this 3 part series
- 6 Day workout split
- 3 Cardio workouts per week
- 5 Lifting days per week
- 4 Functional fitness WODs per week
- Appropriate for intermediate and advanced athletes
I’ll tell you a little secret. These long programs don’t actually get a lot of views. Sure, a lot of people are excited to try the first part, but fewer and fewer athletes make it to parts two and three. As a result, I’ve tried to include a little extra bonus for those that actually get here.
Below you’ll find a Dropbox link to download all 18 weeks of the program. I hope you enjoy it, because it took quite some time to write this many months of programming.
Download the 18 Week Power Program for Hybrid Athletes FREE PDF Here
Before we get to the specifics of this program for hybrid athletes, we need to review a few points, to make sure you’re achieving your fitness goals. After that, we’ll review each week of the program.
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Hybrid Athlete Training Program
The research on hybrid athlete training programs is becoming clearer and clearer as this style of training become more popular. As a result there are more and more studies being done on the best training methods. These research studies are then combined into a systematic review or meta analysis, giving us a little bit clearer information to base our hybrid training on.
Research on concurrent training consistently shows that as long as you separate your lifting from your cardiovascular endurance training by 4 or more hours, you’ll be able to mitigate the interference effect between these two disparate fitness modalities. You can’t totally eliminate this effect but you can drastically minimize it.
The other common issue with hybrid training programs is that most athletes actually lose power as they engage in both endurance work and strength training. As of yet, there haven’t been any studies to my knowledge, trying to fix this issue. However, I think there is a fairly simple solution. Program power movements!
Most hybrid training plans only incorporate heavy weight lifting, and some endurance work. I’ve yet to come across one with a lot of weighted jumps, and olympic weight training. If your training this way you can build strength, power, while meeting your endurance goals. In the next section we’re going to cover why hybrid athletes actually need to build power.
Why Do Hybrid Athletes Need to Train Power?
The simple answer is that most athletic movement requires power. Even pure endurance athletes can improve their performance when their power increases. This is normally a result of increasing the speed they can run for a given amount of output. Power output is especially useful for tactical athletes.
If you remember back to your physics days, power is simply the amount of force expressed per unit of time. An example of this is an athlete doing a deadlift. If athlete X lifts 200 pounds, 1.5 feet in the air, taking one second to do so. This equates to roughly 400 watts of power.
Let’s compare this to Athlete Y, who lifts the same 200 pounds, 1.5 feet in the air, taking a half second to do so. This takes roughly 800 watts of power.
To produce power you need a large base of strength, as well as specific training to teach your muscles to fire quickly and efficiently. It’s important to understand that to be powerful you must be strong, but to be strong, you need not be powerful.
This is why the program spends roughly two thirds of the time building strength. This last 6 week portion will convert that strength into power. Ultimately power is more useful for nearly any physical need.
Now that we have some understanding of the importance of power production, let’s get to the specifics of this program for hybrid athletes.
18 Week Power Program for Hybrid Athletes (Part 3)
If you’ve read through my other hybrid programs, you know that I will provide an overview of each day. This means you need to read through each weeks section so you know how you should execute the program. This has the added benefit of giving you an understanding how the plan progresses.
As always, make sure you spend some time warming up prior to jumping into the program. I would also recommend working up to your first work set with 3-4 warm up sets. Remember, you’re not likely to fail a workout because you were too thorough in your warm up! Let’s get to the first week of part three.
If you like this kind of program but want something with more detail including: coaches notes, specific warm ups, nutrition info, and more, then you should check out this program.
Week 13
You can see that we’ve maintained the same overall number of weekly training sessions. However, we’ve dropped some of the accessory work, in favor of more functional fitness style training. We now have 4 WODs per week and the endurance training is now skewed more towards anaerobic, high heart rate efforts. Not to worry, there is still some aerobic work as well.
If we look at session73, we can see that we are working to technical maxes on power clean, and then a few back off sets. That’s followed by hex bar weighted jumps. You can sub dumbbells or barbell if you don’t have a hex bar. This is followed by a 12 min AMRAP.
I recommend waiting to do the conditioning session later in the day. At a minimum, you should separate these sessions by 4 hours. Now let’s take a look at week 14.
Week 14
The next session can be done all at once, in the weight room. It’s another power production session, with a lot of accessory work on the low back muscles. You’ll notice, in this portion of the program, I am really emphasizing lower body power.
In Session 80, we start with some heavy squat snatches, and then move to Romanian deadlifts. Feel free to use straps, to assist your grip. RDLs are included in the program to build your back, not your grip.
The WOD continues to add some volume to your posterior chain muscles with the DB snatches. You’ll end this session with banded kettlebell swings. In this exercise you will run a band through the KB handle and stand on it during the swing. This is a great exercise, as it allows you to put a lot of power into the movement. Now let’s talk about week 15.
Week 15
In this week we start to move away from the back off sets in our strength and power movements. Here we are working almost exclusively with technical maxes and heavy weights . As a reminder, this is the heaviest load you can move, that day, with no form break down.
In Session 87 we are back with some muscle growth movements for the shoulders and the back. However, make sure that you’re moving the barbell as fast as possible, on the upwards portion of the Pendlay row. Try not to use your lower back to move the weight. Ideally your torso doesn’t move.
You’ll then perform a fairly high power output WOD. If you can’t do that many strict dips you can kip them, or move to something like a push up. In the last portion of this workout you’ll do five sets of strict pull ups to 1RIR. If you can’t get at least 3-5 pulls ups per set I would rather you sub something like a lat pull down. Now, onto week 16.
Week 16
This is a very challenging week. You have a lot of TM sets. I’m counting on you to be smart about them. Remember that sometimes you’ll feel well, and you can increase weight from the previous week. That isn’t always the case, as strength gains aren’t always linear. If you just aren’t moving well then stick with a load that moves with good form. Practicing under heavy load, with good form is what we are doing here.
If we look at Session 94 we see that the first move is weighted DB box jumps. This is a dangerous movement. If you only have access to a wooden or metal plyometric box I would not use them. You should just jump for max height, with no box. If you have a soft box that is stable, then you can do this movement.
This is another move that you might need to scale down. It should still be fast and powerful. If you can barely make the jump, then drop the weight or height.
You’ll then move to a high power output WOD, finishing up with GHD sit ups. If you don’t have a GHD machine, you can always anchor your feet, and do them off of a standard weightlifting bench. Now let’s get to the second to last week.
Week 17
There’s no getting around it, this is a very challenging week. I would expect that most days you’ll be in the gym for 75 minutes or so. The volume isn’t incredibly high, but there are a lot of very heavy sets that you’ll want a long break between.
It’s crazy to say, but let’s look at session 101. I’ve never had that many sessions in a program before! This is an upper body pressing session, built around the bench press. I’ve also added some back accessory work. These sessions shouldn’t feel too bad, as the cable work is lower volume than you’ve traditionally been doing.
Remember to do that Zone 5 session well away from the lifting. These intervals are hard, but not exactly max effort. Think 90-95% effort. If you’re cycling, or using Zwift, you should know exactly where your Zone 5 power output is! For the rest intervals, just keep moving easy. Don’t stop completely. Next, the final week.
Week 18
This is a deload week. I expect that after 18 long weeks you’re ready for a change of pace. It’s up to you how you want to transition after this. We’ll talk about your next program further on, but for now I recommend finishing this week, and then taking 2-3 days of rest.
You can then go for new one rep max numbers. You can also test some of your endurance metrics. Go for a new FTP test, or 5k run.
Looking at Session 108, we see the last session of the week is Zone 2, at low intensity. This is a bit of a recovery session that helps to work on your aerobic capacity, as well as build some mitochondrial density! Feel free to pick any duration you like within the range. It doesn’t have to get longer each week.
Now that you’ve finished this program for hybrid athletes, let’s review some great options to keep building your fitness.
Finding Your Next Program
Given the long duration of this hybrid fitness program, I think it makes sense to transition to a lower volume program, that builds muscle. Check out my 8 Week Hybrid Bodybuilding program below. I normally run this program after high volume programs to build mass.
You can then transition to another hybrid athlete program after this. I recommend checking out this 36 Week Hybrid Programming Series, for some great hybrid workout programs. Now let’s finish this article up.
Final Thoughts
Remember that even though this program has a lot of detail, that doesn’t mean you can’t change or scale it. I can tell you that I always do this. That’s one benefit of understanding the why behind the program. There are just some days that life gets in the way and you can’t do the whole shebang.
It’s always preferable to get some useful work done, in these situations, than it is to not do anything because you feel like there is no point. Consistency is king!
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We are not affiliated with any other company . Each workout plan is entirely owned by Tier Three Tactical and we recommend that you exercise under the supervision of a professional coach. It’s also recommended that you seek medical clearance from a licensed medical doctor before starting any fitness program or physical training.
