How to Pace HYROX Sandbag Lunges

Sandbag Lunges are the seventh station: 100m of walking lunges with a sandbag on your shoulders. By this point in the race, you’ve run 7km and done six other stations. Your quads are compromised, your lower back is working hard, and 100m feels much longer than it sounds.

This is the station where mental management matters as much as physical preparation. Plenty of athletes with the fitness to complete it well end up stopping frequently because they went too hard early, or lost the ability to enforce their own pacing under fatigue.

The standard

Know this before race day and train to it exactly.

• Carry the sandbag on your back and shoulders for the full 100m.
• Your back knee must touch the ground on every rep. Front shin roughly vertical.
• Stand fully at the top before stepping into the next lunge.

The depth standard is enforced. Shallow lunges where the back knee doesn’t reach the floor are no-reps, and at Station 7, repeating reps is expensive. Athletes who practise shallow lunges in training to go faster often spend more time on the station through repeated no-reps than they saved.

Technique: what actually helps

Bag position is where most athletes go wrong. Carry the sandbag high, sitting on your traps and upper shoulders, not resting low on your back. A low bag shifts your centre of mass backward, makes you fight for balance on every rep, and loads your lower back in a position that fatigues quickly over 100m.

Hug the bag tight to stop it moving. A sliding sandbag drains energy on every step as you try to rebalance. Squeeze it against your traps, hold it firmly, and it becomes a more stable load to carry.

Core braced, torso upright. The instinct under fatigue is to lean forward as the quads tire. Leaning forward increases the load on your lower back and makes each rep harder, not easier. Think tall chest, not hunched forward.

Step size: slightly shorter than your natural lunge stride. Long steps are impressive but unstable. A controlled, medium-length step lands with the front foot in a position where you can drive through it cleanly and stand without wobbling. Bring your feet together at the top to reset balance before each step. It adds a fraction of time per rep and saves much more than that by keeping your gait clean.

Pacing: the grind is the goal

This is the station where tempo judgement matters most. The gap between a good Sandbag Lunge effort and a bad one is not speed. It’s how many times you stop.

Every stop costs you: the seconds of rest, the energy and time of re-loading the bag to your shoulders, and the psychological difficulty of making yourself start again when you’re at the edge. Carrying the bag to a standstill and then starting back up is harder than it sounds at Station 7.

Settle into a steady, unbroken rhythm before 20m. Not fast. Not impressive. Just continuous. A pace you can hold for 100m with no pause. If that pace is slower than you expected, it’s still faster than stopping twice.

If you need to rest, do it standing with the bag still on your shoulders. Put the bag down only if you genuinely can’t hold it. Re-loading costs time and grip.

How fatigue changes the movement

At 60m, most athletes hit the hard part. The quads are filling up, balance gets harder, and the bag starts to feel much heavier. This is when step size shrinks, knee depth shortens, and the torso starts to fold forward.

Three cues to hold when you feel it: bag high, chest tall, step through. If you can hold those three things, the movement stays legal and efficient even when it hurts.

The other thing fatigue does is slow the decision to start again after a stop. Athletes who weren’t planning to stop at all often stop at 60m and then find themselves standing there for 20 seconds instead of five. If you’re going to stop, commit to a specific rest duration before you do it. Three breaths. Then go.

Common mistakes

Going too fast in the first 30m is the most common error. The station feels manageable early, the bag is heavy but not impossible, and athletes push the pace. By 50m they’re stopping. The total time is almost always worse than a steady, consistent grind from the start.

Bag carried too low is the second most common problem and causes a cascade: balance deteriorates, the lower back loads up, each rep becomes harder, and the urge to stop increases. Get the bag high and keep it there.

Short, shallow lunges that don’t meet the standard are a quiet race killer. A no-rep on a walking lunge that you then have to redo, on tired legs, at Station 7, is a significant blow to both time and morale. Train to full depth. Race to full depth.

What comes before and after

The Farmers Carry comes immediately before the Sandbag Lunges. Your shoulders and traps will already be loaded. This matters for bag position: a fatigued upper back struggles to hold the bag high. Practising the carry position after Farmers Carry-style training, and building upper back endurance specifically, builds the tolerance you need.

After the Sandbag Lunges: Run 8, and then Wall Balls to finish. Both are manageable if you’ve paced the lunges correctly. If you’ve emptied yourself before Run 8, the Wall Balls become very difficult.

Build loaded lunge intervals into your training with the app and plan your race effort with PaceMe.

See all 8 HYROX stations · Ultimate Race Day Guide