Does adding running to your lifting program make it hybrid?

Hybrid training is having its moment. With Hyrox exploding in popularity, more and more people are chasing not just strength, but strength and conditioning. Let’s be honest: strong is good - but strong, jacked, and fit enough to run, carry, and sprint? That’s next-level. That’s seen as functional.

But what actually is hybrid training? Is it just “being decent at lots of things”? Not quite.

At its core, hybrid training started as training for two or more sports that don’t naturally go together - think a powerlifter prepping for a marathon. It’s not a sport, a workout trend, or a mash-up of random movements. It’s a framework for managing stress. Hybrid training is about asking: how do I push my body without overloading it? How do I recover smarter so I can keep progressing on multiple disparate qualities.

This is where it shines. Every exercise gets questioned: Does this move actually make me better? If it doesn’t, why waste energy on it? The idea is to maximise the stimulus of every session while minimising stress. We need to care not only about the current session, but also about our ability to perform the next one. Every rep you do carries an opportunity cost. Leg press, or intervals that improve your run? Heavy deadlifts before or after a long run? Hybrid thinking forces you to rank what matters most, so you can program intelligently and not randomly.

When you line up your stressors in the right order, something powerful happens: every session feels purposeful, every recovery day works in your favour, and progress compounds instead of stalling.

So, does simply adding running to your lifting program make it “hybrid”? Not exactly. Hybrid training isn’t just stacking cardio on top of strength. It’s about organising your training so every stressor has a purpose, every session builds on the last, and recovery is built in. Running can be part of it, but only if it’s integrated intelligently.