HYROX sandbag lunges

Grouped by finish time rather than by labels like "competitive" or "intermediate". Find the row for the finish you are chasing and read across.

Doubles medians are faster because partners split the 100 m between them. A doubles time is a team result and cannot be read against a solo one.

Stations can be ranked several ways and they usually disagree — the sled push looks trivial by one measure and alarming by another. This one does not disagree with itself. On all four of the measures we compute it lands in the same place, behind the same two stations every time.

Nothing else on the course is that consistent, and consistency is the point. A station that is alarming on one measure and harmless on another can be gambled with. This one is meaningfully hard whichever way you look at it, and it is the third worst on each. The tail behaves accordingly: the median is 5:32, the 99th percentile is 14:48 — 2.7× the median — and the slowest set we hold is 74:49, roughly 14× the median, for 100 m of walking.

What it lacks is a reputation. Athletes arrive braced for wall balls and for the burpees, and treat this as the thing between the farmers carry and the finish. It is 5.9% of a solo race and it swings the field 2.16×.

Fast athletes are fast at everything, so raw station-to-station comparison tells you nothing. Removing each athlete's finish-time trend first leaves the real question: does being relatively good at one station predict being relatively good at another? For this station the answer arrives with unusual tidiness.

Every floor station sits on the positive side. Both machines sit on the negative side — Rowing at -0.104 and SkiErg at -0.132 — and the larger of those, -0.132 against SkiErg, is the biggest number in the row in either direction. Of the 6 non-erg stations, this is the only one where the split is clean in both directions at once.

Worth stating carefully. "Ergs versus floor work" is a tempting way to describe this whole course, and it is mostly wrong — on the rowing machine, for instance, two floor stations are among its strongest positive relationships, which breaks the story completely. The split is clean here and effectively nowhere else. Treat it as a fact about the sandbag lunges, not as a theory about HYROX.

The practical reading is narrow but useful. Erg numbers are the easiest fitness you can measure and the ones athletes quote most, and they tell you nothing encouraging about this station. If you want to know what 100 m under a loaded bag costs you at station 7, the only informative test is that one, done with a bag, on tired legs. Best positive link it has anywhere is wall balls at +0.1, which is still close to nothing.

100 m in every division. The distance never changes — only the bag does. The bag is carried on the shoulders, and hugged to the chest is also permitted.

For women this is the biggest Open-to-Pro step anywhere on the course, and it is not close: the bag doubles, from 10 kg to 20 kg — +100% — where no other loaded station rises by more than half that. The men's step is +50%, which is joint-largest with wall balls rather than outright biggest. If you are weighing an Open-to-Pro move and you are racing Women Pro, this is the station to test first: it is where the decision is most likely to be made for you.

Full loads for all eight stations are in the weights, reps and distances guide.

Accepted practice rather than something we have measured. We separate the two on every page so you can weigh them differently.

The position on the course is most of the problem. Two sleds have already taxed exactly the muscles this station asks for, six kilometres are behind you, and what follows is wall balls — the biggest station of the eight and another hundred squats. A station that would be manageable fresh is being asked of you at the worst possible moment, and it is the last chance to protect the one that decides most races.

That argues for the same conservative bias as the burpees, for a different reason. Here you are not protecting four more runs — you are protecting the single most expensive station on the course, which is thirty seconds away. Arriving at wall balls with destroyed quads is a far more expensive mistake than spending an extra twenty seconds on the lunges.

Plan the breaks by distance rather than by feel. Decide before you start where on the 100 m the bag comes down — a marker on the floor, a lane line, a halfway point — and hold to it. Deciding in the moment means deciding while your quads are the ones making the argument, and they are not a reliable narrator at station 7.

Want to see what this station is allowed to cost inside a goal finish? The pace calculator splits a target time into per-station and per-run budgets.

Mistakes and takeaways

The short version, if you skim nothing else on this page.

Common questions

What is a good HYROX sandbag lunge time?

Solo median is 5:32 for 100 m, with the middle half of the field between 4:35 and 6:50 across 39,247 results. Athletes finishing in sub-60 minutes post a median of 3:01; those finishing 90+ post 6:31 — a 2.2× difference over the same 100 m.

How heavy is the HYROX sandbag and how far do you lunge?

100 m, with the load changing by division: 10 kg for Women Open, 20 kg for Men Open, 20 kg for Women Pro, 30 kg for Men Pro. Women Pro and Men Open carry the same 20 kg bag. The Open-to-Pro step is bigger here than at any other station — the women's load doubles (+100%) and the men's rises 50%, against roughly 50% or less everywhere else.

Why are the sandbag lunges so hard?

Because they are quietly among the worst stations on the course and arrive when you are least able to absorb them. On our four difficulty measures — share of finish, spread between fast and slow finishers, blow-up rate and absolute fast-to-slow gap — it ranks third on all four, behind Wall Balls and Burpee Broad Jumps each time. 3.33% of athletes take more than double the median, and the slowest recorded set is 74:49. It is also station 7, so it lands on legs already emptied by two sleds and six kilometres of running, and it is immediately followed by wall balls.

Does erg fitness help with sandbag lunges?

On our numbers it does not, and this is the clearest example of that on the course. Removing each athlete's finish-time trend across 39,247 solo results, both machines correlate negatively with this station — Rowing at -0.104 and SkiErg at -0.132 — while every floor station correlates positively. It is the only station where that split is clean in both directions. Being a strong rower or skier tells you nothing useful about how this will go, and if anything points slightly the wrong way.

Should I break up the sandbag lunges?

Most athletes should, and the useful way to plan it is by distance rather than by feel — decide in advance where on the 100 m you will set the bag down, and hold to that. Deciding in the moment means deciding while your quads are making the argument. Where exactly you break is individual, which is why practising the full distance under load and fatigued matters more than any prescribed scheme.