HYROX sandbag lunges and the farmers carry, station by station

HYROX sandbag lunges are 100m of walking lunges with the bag on your shoulders, and your back knee has to touch the floor on every rep. They're station seven, one 1km run after the 200m farmers carry. Together those two stations decide how much leg you have left for wall balls.

Stations six and seven are one problem

By the time you pick up the kettlebells you've already finished a sled pull and a 1000m row, so your forearms arrive pre-fatigued. By the time you shoulder the bag you've covered seven kilometers of running alone. The two loaded carries sit back to back in the station order with one 1km run between them, and one more run before 100 wall balls.

Whatever you spend here comes out of the wall ball account. Most people race them as two separate emergencies: the carry becomes a grip crisis at 150m, the lunges become a crawl, and wall balls fall apart into sets of five.

HYROX farmers carry distance and sandbag lunge weight

The HYROX farmers carry distance is 200m with a kettlebell in each hand. The HYROX lunge distance is 100m with a sandbag across your shoulders. Both are run as shuttles inside a marked lane, so you're making turns rather than walking a straight line, and the turns are where technique quietly falls apart. Loads change by division, and HYROX revises standards between seasons, so confirm the current rulebook and your athlete briefing.

Station	Distance	Open (men / women)	Pro (men / women)	Solid age-group split
Farmers carry	200 m	2 × 24 kg / 2 × 16 kg	2 × 32 kg / 2 × 24 kg	1:15–1:40
Sandbag lunges	100 m	20 kg / 10 kg	30 kg / 20 kg	3:15–4:30

Doubles and relay teams use the Open loads and split the distance between partners. Every station's numbers are in the station weights breakdown.

Farmers carry technique: grip, planned drops, turns

Don't crush the handles. A death grip torches your forearms inside the first 50m. Let the handle sit toward the fingers, hang off it, and keep your shoulders down instead of shrugged around your ears. Some athletes hook-grip the handle — thumb against it, index and middle fingers clamped over the thumb — which shifts load off the forearm flexors. Test that in training, never for the first time on race day.

Walk tall and keep the bells quiet. A swinging kettlebell drags your torso side to side and turns every step into a correction. Short quick steps, arms pinned to your sides, and breathe: you just ran a kilometer, and plenty of people hold their breath through the whole carry.

Plan your drop points before you start. You're allowed to set the bells down, and you resume from the spot where you put them, so a set-down costs time but not position. A deliberate three-second reset at a turn is cheap. An emergency drop at 170m because your hands opened is not — you've lost the rhythm as well as the seconds. One planned reset at halfway is a sane default for most age-groupers. Place the bells down under control; don't throw them.

At the turn, arc wide instead of pivoting hard. A tight pivot swings the bells out and you spend the next five steps fighting them back into line.

HYROX sandbag lunges: bag position and the back-knee standard

The bag rides on your shoulders and upper back — a front rack or bear hug isn't the race position, so don't train it that way. The real choice is how high. Sitting high on the traps and snug against the neck keeps the load over your hips and lets you stay upright. Let it slide down onto the mid-back and every rep turns into a good morning: torso pitched forward, longer lever on the quads, lower back complaining by 60m. Grip the bag ends or clamp your forearms over it, and use each turn to hoist it back up.

Then there's the standard that catches people: the back knee has to make contact with the floor on every lunge. It isn't hard fresh. At 70m, fatigued and rushing, the touch quietly becomes a hover, and a judge calling a no-rep costs you the lunge again plus the reset — far more than the tempo you were trying to protect.

Step length is worth deciding in advance. A long stride covers the HYROX lunges in fewer reps but demands more from each one and makes the knee touch harder to hit once your legs are gone. A moderate step with a light, deliberate tap holds up better across the full 100m. Tap the knee, don't slam it — you'll feel a slammed knee for the rest of the race.

Lunge slower than feels right

Racing the lunges is close to a pure loss. Pushing them might buy you twenty or thirty seconds. Arriving at 100 wall balls with blown quads costs minutes, because a set you should hit unbroken breaks into fives, and every break adds a re-rack and a stand-around. There's also a full kilometer of running between the two, which you'll jog if your legs are cooked.

So pick a cadence you could hold for 120m, not 100m. Fix your breathing to the rep — one breath per lunge — and treat the run out of the lunge lane as active recovery rather than a place to make up time.

Practicing both carries

Train them fatigued, at race distance, in sequence: 1km run, 200m carry, 1km run, 100m lunges. Fresh carries tell you almost nothing, because the failure you're rehearsing is grip and posture at a heart rate you can't fake. Add heavy holds for time and short carries slightly above race weight, and do your lunge volume with an actual sandbag — the shifting load is half the problem.

Time each piece separately instead of going by feel. Hyrox Workout is a HYROX workout timer app for iPhone and Apple Watch, and splitting the carry stations out on their own shows you where your grip actually fails instead of guessing.

FAQ

How far are the HYROX sandbag lunges?

100m, done as a shuttle in a marked lane with the sandbag on your shoulders. It's station seven of eight, sandwiched between the farmers carry and the wall balls, with a 1km run either side.

What weight are the HYROX sandbag lunges?

In the Open division it's 20kg for men and 10kg for women; Pro is 30kg for men and 20kg for women. Doubles and relay use the Open loads. Divisional loads have shifted between seasons, so check the current rulebook before you set your training weight.

How far is the farmers carry in HYROX?

200m, carrying a kettlebell in each hand — 2 × 24kg for Open men and 2 × 16kg for Open women, 2 × 32kg and 2 × 24kg in Pro. It's station six, right after the 1000m row.

Can you put the kettlebells down during the farmers carry?

Yes. Set them down under control and start again from that exact spot — you don't lose ground, only time. Throwing or dropping them from height is not acceptable, and a planned reset beats an unplanned one every time.

What happens if your back knee doesn't touch on a HYROX lunge?

The judge no-reps it and you repeat the lunge from where you are. It's the most common way to lose time at the station, and it almost always happens in the second half when people start rushing.