UNTAPPED with Spencer Matthews
4 Mistakes People Make When Hybrid Training | Fergus Crawley
25 May 2026
Chapter 1: What are the four biggest mistakes in hybrid training?
from up north Edinburgh you're from Edinburgh yeah hence the thick Scottish accent yes do you have a thick Scottish accent that was sarcasm yeah yeah yeah so yeah there we go we've we've leveled out I'm a British accent you're an English accent yeah I should have a Scottish accent or a Scouse accent but here we are but you don't I don't know so I'm just one big disappointment so let's continue that theme
No, you're very far from disappointing, actually. I've been looking forward to talking to you because your name has been mentioned many times to us when discussing untapped athletes. So I don't know how aware you are of this, but a little while ago, just for a bit of fun, I kind of put out two parameters in order to essentially be a phenomenal hybrid athlete.
And I set the parameters just for fun at the time as a sub 250 marathon and 110 kilo for 10 bench. And I put it out there and just said, you know, ChatGPT thinks very few people can do this. You know, if you know anyone that can do this, sing out. And a lot of people were. we're banging the Fergus Crawley drum.
Okay, okay. Can you do it? Not right now, no, because I'm currently training for something else, but that's how training and fitness should operate, I believe. Should someone be able to do that at all times? Is that part of the parameters that you're working towards? No, no, just you would need to be able to do both things at the same time.
So the simple answer is I haven't been able to not bench 110 for 10 since 2015. So that's fine. That's covered. Can you bench 110 for 10?
Sometimes. Not really. No, not at the moment. So I can do 135 for like one nice clean rep, maybe a scrappy second rep. And I can bench 100 for 10 easy. Okay. I could probably do 110 for eight clean easy, but sticks on like the last two kind of depends. Like if I took my running volume down for one week and eight... Yeah. Like, you know, it's kind of, I'm there or thereabouts.
Well, that's the beauty of the challenge. And I mean, yeah, welcome to the party. You're six years late because I've been doing this for a long time.
So 2020, 500 pound back squat on sub five minute mile in the same day for the exact same principles of far end of endurance, sorry, far end of strength balanced with far end of something opposing, which is essentially the premise of hybrid training in the first place. So Alex Viarda wrote the book in 2014, if you've heard of it. The Hybrid Athlete, the book is called. Is it good?
It's a very good book. So it's a methodology and it's sort of the whole reason that the phrase was coined as a methodology in the first place was to solve a very specific problem, which was how can you make progress in opposing athletic disciplines concurrently?
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Chapter 2: How can you balance strength and endurance training effectively?
How do you balance those two things together? So I've got a couple of questions for you on it. Okay. Which is, why did you choose those specific parameters?
Um... Selfish reasons, I suppose. I was trying to find things that don't affect each other at all. So for me, a fast mile and a back squat are both, in a way, leg exercises. They're very different, obviously. But when I train my legs, if I'm doing lots of back squatting like I used to do... my running would really suffer because my legs wouldn't be good to go as they are now, say.
So I wanted to... And also, at a very basic level, I was looking at it as we bench press when we go to the gym, right? Not everyone, but it's one of the main compounds. It's something that... you know, how much do you bench is a fairly regular question. It's like a normal blokey thing to do in the gym. It's lots of people's favorite exercise. And it really has no material impact on your running.
Although it is very unusual to find somebody who's an incredibly, you know, good, fast runner who can also bench press a lot. It's something that there appears to be like very little crossover. It's kind of why I thought it was interesting. Okay. And also I'm, you know, as a kind of, you know, ratio to my size, I'm quite effective on the bench and I'm not a bad runner. Yeah.
So I like those two disciplines, basically.
No, no, no, it makes sense. There's a few things that have been interesting to me since I've seen the concept, because one, I assumed it would have been kind of personal goals that you've then said, okay, who else is coming to the party on this one? But the exact concept of those specific sort of balanced numbers is a fun game I've always liked to play.
So it's 505, was the 500-pound back squat sub five-minute mile. One year later, I did a 1,200-pound powerlifting total the same day as a sub-12 Ironman, so 1,212. Six months later, 600 kilo powerlifting total, same day as a sub-six hour, 60 kilometer ultramarathon, 660. And then I think I deadlifted 250 kilos the same day as a 250 kilometer single stage ultra.
So I've always liked that neat number pairing. So I very much got the concept of 250,
So 250 kilo deadlift just for one rep. Yeah, that was on the Monday. That was the same week.
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Chapter 3: What is the science behind cardio and muscle loss?
If you don't account for those on a daily basis, or you add up your weekly total and divide it by seven, so it would be 500 additional divided by seven. That would be too quick mass for me right now. But essentially, people can inadvertently...
put themselves in a deficit when they're training hard, high intensity and start to feel fatigue set in, which makes them think, oh, I can't balance strength and endurance training. This is too hard. Whereas in fact, they're actually just under fueling or not fueling for the adaptation that they're looking for. So making sure that you're balancing the books is sort of the first thing to consider.
Second thing to consider is arbitrarily taking 100% of a strength training program and 100% of an endurance training program and just putting them on top of each other. So example, Wendler's 5-3-1 and one of Daniel's marathon programs. Those were both very intelligently designed without accounting for the fatigue from either or. So as soon as they're spliced together,
the programming principles that underpin both programs kind of become irrelevant because it's not in the context that it was designed for. So programming then has to be adjusted for the individual based on strengths and weaknesses and accounting for that. Third thing is kind of just...
going am pm lift endurance lift run something like that without any clear intention so it makes sense because all you're doing is you've got a clear daily routine if i'm going to lift in the morning i'm going to run in the evening or vice versa and that means that your systemic fatigue is going to be increasing like this at a rate that you wouldn't achieve were you just training for a
Because if you add in five more sessions a week, that's a huge percentage increase in terms of the overall demand and volume required. So if you were building long runs per week, you'd typically not add any more than 10% per week.
If you want to get into hybrid training tomorrow from a strength background and you add in three runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday, five lifts Monday through Friday, that's suddenly whatever three more sessions above that is. It's a big, big spike.
So what you're trying to do is make sustainable progress so that you can keep training and making progress before you hit a wall and go, oh, I can't do this. This isn't working. These two things conflict. because that's what I think a lot of people did for a while, was start doing cardio. Oh, cardio kills my gains. It's not possible. And that cycle was repeated for a long time.
And the fourth thing, I think, is having realistic expectations. And that's becoming more and more the case now where... people want to do everything all at once. And I think we probably contribute to that in a way. But I think the beauty of training this way, I'm very enjoyment driven. I'm not competitive really at all. Haven't been for a long time.
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Chapter 4: How important is nutrition in hybrid training?
If you're currently able to bench 100 kilos and you want to get to 120 kilos, give yourself a realistic timeline. But what would ordinarily happen is, let's say you want to get from 100 to 120 in 12 weeks. if the only thing you were doing is bench pressing. If you're also trying to improve your 5K simultaneously, you need to allow for additional time, and that is the compromise.
You cannot just do more and expect more results because the human body can only adapt at a certain rate. And I think that's where a lot of people are getting a bit carried away with the term these days, where they think it's about doing everything all the time, where it's actually doing the right amount of the right stuff at the right time.
In your opinion, just quickly, is it better to lift and then run or run and then lift if you're going to stack sessions?
So I've got a hierarchy for this, which is the hierarchy of idealness I've coined. It's work entitled, but essentially ideal world, if you're lifting and running in the same day, lift AM, endurance training PM with six hours or more between them. Next best option is endurance training AM, strength training PM with six hours or more between them.
Next best option is strength training followed by endurance training. Next best option, if you have to do it for time constraints and to make it work but try not to make a habit out of it, is endurance training into strength training. Because what you're trying to manage there is... Hybrid training is about managing the potential for interference.
So the interference effect is essentially what we are trying to work against here. And... Breaking it down, if I've got time, essentially, a key context on it. So there was a guy called Robert Hickson, who in the 1980s was trying to become a research professor at his university. And Professor Helosi was his research manager. Hickson was a powerlifter. Helosi was a runner.
So by trying to cozy up to Helosi, he went on a couple of runs around the campus with him to schmooze. After six or seven weeks, he realized that his strength outputs in the gym were starting to dip a little bit. So he submitted a research paper on, I would like to explore this. So he had three groups, strength only, endurance only, and both.
and he had them doing, it was quite high intensity work. So strength only was two sessions a week of heavy sets of five squats, and then three sessions a week of heavy sets of five leg press with sets of 20 assistants on both days, so six days a week of lifting.
The endurance only group was three days of hard effort running, three days of hard effort cycling, and the both group was both of those things together. what they saw was after all three groups were making progress up the way until week seven, where the strength output in the both groups started to drop.
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Chapter 5: What recovery strategies should hybrid athletes prioritize?
you know, standard running, you know, like I wouldn't push myself really hard at the track and lift really heavy same day only because it throws such an imbalance into your calorific intake. You find yourself like really hungry at 10 p.m. in bed and like, you know, wanting snacks and, you know, chocolate and sugar because you just feel like you're completely off.
Like I feel like I can feel quite exhausted. It's a big spike, yeah.
I think the key there though is as somebody gets to a point where they're trying to, really push the two opposing disciplines hard, almost to like an elite within this context level, that's where you can actually start leveraging that fatigue and do your heavy lifting and your hard effort running in the same day so that you can become more competent.
There's no one size fits all for people, which I think is the key, but the overarching principle is whatever is most practical for you is the best way to work towards those goals.
Do you have a recovery habit that our listeners could take away that they could incorporate into their training immediately that might help?
Don't do too much training in the first place is generally my recommendation. I think, and I'll quantify that rather than just sounding flippant, I think a lot of people have shiny object syndrome at the moment with their training where they want to accelerate their road to their first half marathon or the first 70.3 or whatever it might be.
And the reason these events are intimidating and attractive is because of the delayed gratification mechanism. And doing more will not get you there faster necessarily, unless you're a genetic phenom that can just take volume after volume.
So respecting the distance and respecting the work required to get there and knowing that you cannot recovery, compression boot, or massage gun your way out of doing too much training in the first place I think is the key. Focus on sleep, focus on nutrition, and try and make sure that your training in and of itself is not the thing that's forcing you to require additional recovery.
I think it's important as well to understand that each person is different, right? Massively, yeah. It's funny as well that, you know, all conversations here talking about performance come back always to kind of calorie intake and sleep and recovery. Do you suppose that being an excellent hybrid athlete becomes more complicated if you're also living a full life?
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Chapter 6: How can mental health be supported through training?
Put it out to my personal Facebook at the time. Just said, this is what I'm raising money for men's mental well-being and suicide prevention. That's what I said. I said, I'm doing this for that. And what really, really changed my perspective, and this is at the core of why I was in such a bad place in the first place.
was that friends from primary school, my dad's friends, people I'd lost connection with from school, uni, playing rugby growing up, whatever it might have been, reached out to me on Facebook Messenger at the time and just said, oh, it's really good that you're doing this, really appreciate it. It's had an impact on my life or whatever it was.
And there were enough people in there that gave me confidence that the reason I'd suppressed the fact that I was suffering with my mental health as a young man and that I'd attempted suicide in 2016, not something I'd shared with anyone at that point, it gave me the confidence to realize, oh, hang on, you are not the only person in the world that feels this way.
There was a big part of guilt as well, because I've had a great upbringing, parents still together, brother, friends, family that I got on with. There was a big, big element of guilt where I felt pathetic for having had that great upbringing and all of these wonderful things, roof over my head. People have got it much worse than me, but you feel this way.
And just having those messages from people when I first announced it on social media gave me the confidence to actually share I am the survivor of a suicide attempt with the world.
And that's where 2018, 2019, 2020, three big endurance challenges for November raised over a hundred thousand pounds, still working full time until 2021 when I sort of, the social media had grown as a result and we built from there. But that's how I got into this world. So it's quite nice to full circle eight years later and,
go back to a big charity, Men's Mental Wellbeing and Suicide Prevention focused project that's built on all of the previous six, seven years of experience that have come along the way where the focus has been a little bit more performance, content output, YouTube development rather than that specific focus mental well-being narrative. It's always been a part of it.
But what I'm really excited about with this project is every pool in each city is private. Other than in Liverpool, we're in open water. We've got private cycle circuits and we've got private athletics tracks. So anyone and everyone can come along for one length, one lap, whatever suits them at whatever pace and show up for the cause effectively because it's... Yeah, it's a big day.
Ten years, it's kind of surreal. And I think what's funny is I think back now with a rational mind to then with an irrational mind. And it's... Yeah, I've been doing a lot of thought in the training, been ruminating on it a lot over the past three months because, I mean, you'll know, big endurance projects like this require a lot of time just doing the work in your own head.
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Chapter 7: What upcoming challenge is the guest preparing for?
what was being left behind. And every, moments like this, what I'm about to take on, everything I've achieved since, wife, dogs, amazing experiences, almost never would have happened if it hadn't have been for surviving, but one decision, none of that stuff would have happened.
And I think that's where there's almost reflection embedded into every positive experience I have now, because almost 10 years ago, there was a decision that almost meant none of those experiences would have happened.
So Chris and I were talking the other day and his big concern for the project is actually when I'm in the depths of fatigue with this is how am I going to process these thoughts and that's my big concern as well because we want people to share their experiences and how suicides affected their lives, how men's mental well-being has affected them and the more and more fatigued I get, the more and more I might reflect on it and someone's personal story or family story or something, it might make me think about something that
I perhaps haven't confronted because there's a blurry period. It was a pretty lonely negative period of my life, but one that I made much worse for myself. And that's a key part of the messaging is I didn't reach out to the support that was available for me. I hid how I was feeling. I lied about how I was doing.
And that was all because I didn't want to let down other people or be a burden or all of these things. If framed incorrectly, traditionally masculine cliches, I'd say. But you are a different person now. Yeah. But it is a part of me. And it's made me the person that I am now.
But I think that's probably a good thing, though.
I agree.
Yeah, I do. I think that when you're in the depths of fatigue and exhaustion on your challenge, this will serve as fuel and a positive reminder of who you've become. I think.
I hope so. I do logically think it will. And that is the fuel. That's why I'm so excited about this and why actually it's the most connected to a training prep I've thought in a long time. Because even just selfishly, it's a forced reflective moment for me to look back on the past 10 years. And a lot's happened in the past 10 years. A lot of good, a lot of bad.
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Chapter 8: How has the guest's past influenced their current training philosophy?
It also feels like an extraordinary life experience, I think. You know, it's...
I mean it would have been unique and I suppose our experiences are are unique to us but you will live forever after your challenge with the the memory the fond memory most likely of that time that you did that thing you know and it's something that only you will have really because it's kind of personal we also did ours for James's place suicide prevention and
You know, your story resonates with me quite a lot because although I have no personal experience of suicide or an attempt on my own life, you know, the stats around suicide for men in particular, as you know, are alarmingly high in this country.
I think ironically, what I often think about is when I was struggling most at university. Because I had powerlifting as such a big focus point, it allowed me to suffer for much longer. So the point of desperation that I hit, I got to slower because I had that anchor. So whilst it was good, it also... allowed me to be miserable for longer.
But it's just a throwaway point that training has always been a big anchor for me. And I think, like I said, that's because it's black and white. What is on the barbell today? Does it move? Yes or no? That's a win. Whatever else has happened today, that's a gray area of life. And I think more and more people are yearning for a bit of black and white in their life so that they can measure a win.
I have had a successful day Because it can be quite chaotic. There's a lot of inputs these days. And I think that's why so many people are turning to recreational activity as a way of measuring themselves against themselves, which I think is great.
competing with yourself is almost always better than competing with others. Agreed. Especially as rubbish pros. Yeah. I take the rubbish pro all day long, mate. Like when he said that, I was like, I think I'm a shit amateur. You know, like an amazing amateur or a rubbish pro. I was like, both of those sound good to me. Yeah.
I think my way of looking at things is if you're not winning or you're not a pro, no one cares other than maybe your mum. And even then, does she really care or is she just happy to see you having fun?
Mate, it's unbelievable. I just had Hugo Frey in here, and he runs a 2.17 marathon. Yeah, he's quick. When I ran 2.57 in Tokyo, I kind of felt like, oh my God, I've cracked sub three. All of this kind of might feel a bit different. No one really cares. And I don't even really care. Like, literally, like, a few days later, I was kind of like, okay, well, that's happened.
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