You Don't Need an Expensive Coach to Train Like a HYROX Pro
Most athletes who reach Elite 15 level in HYROX are coached. Charlie Botterill, a former professional cyclist and Elite 15 athlete with a Men’s Pro Doubles world record, programmes his own training. That’s not a flex. It’s a practical approach that works for him, and understanding why it works is useful whether you’re self-coached or not.
What self-coaching actually requires
The version of self-coaching that doesn’t work is just doing what you feel like on a given day. Training what you enjoy, skipping sessions when motivation is low, adding volume when you’re feeling good and backing off when you’re not. That’s not a training programme. It’s just exercise.
Self-coaching that works looks more like this: a structured understanding of periodisation (build phase, peak phase, taper before key races), honest assessment of your own weaknesses rather than your preferences, and the discipline to follow the plan you’ve set even when you’d rather do something else.
Charlie’s cycling background matters here. Years of periodised training in professional cycling built the training literacy to understand what different kinds of fatigue feel like and what they mean for the following day’s session. That knowledge is earnable outside professional sport, but it takes time and attention.
The confirmation bias problem
The most common trap in self-coaching is training what you enjoy rather than what you need. Athletes who love running overweight running. Athletes who love strength work add more lifting than HYROX demands. Without an external perspective to challenge those choices, training drifts toward comfort rather than improvement.
The honest version of self-assessment is looking at your weaknesses and building a plan around them. The station you always underprepare for. The run sessions you cut short when they get uncomfortable. The recovery practices you deprioritise because they feel less like training.
No one else is going to identify those gaps if you don’t. That’s the real discipline of self-coaching.
Where the knowledge comes from
Self-coaching doesn’t mean working in isolation from good information. Coaches share their methodologies publicly, through content, podcasts, and training frameworks. The literature on periodisation, threshold training, and energy systems is accessible. Other athletes are willing to talk about how they train.
HYROX is still a young sport. The knowledge base is growing quickly, and athletes who engage seriously with what’s available can build a strong foundation without paying for one-to-one coaching. That’s increasingly true as more coaches with HYROX-specific experience publish their approaches.
The risk is applying that knowledge without the external check that a coach provides. No amount of reading removes the blind spots that come from assessing yourself from inside the effort.
What your race data tells you
This is where your own data becomes the closest thing to an external perspective. Your race splits don’t have opinions. They show you exactly where time is being lost, which stations are costing more than they should relative to your fitness, whether your run pace holds through the back half or drops off.
Charlie has done 70+ HYROX races. That’s 70+ sets of data points on what his training produces in competition. That volume of information, tracked and reviewed, is what turns self-coaching from guesswork into something systematic.
You don’t need 70 races to start drawing conclusions. But you do need to look at the data you have, across multiple events, rather than treating each race as a standalone result.
Your race data is your most honest coach. It’s in ROXFIT.
