Hybrid Athlete Quadathlon (HAQ)
A standardized competition to test overall fitness
Powerlifting is good for assessing strength. Running and cycling are good for assessing endurance. Optimizing too much in either direction can limit your performance in strength and endurance together. The strongest athletes in powerlifting and strongman often lack good endurance since many forms of cardio can detract from strength training. The best endurance athletes sacrifice strength and hypertrophy so that they can be as light as possible.
No competition right now does a good job of assessing overall fitness: overall strength, anaerobic endurance (VO2), and aerobic endurance. CrossFit tried but it has many downsides. It is unstandardized and difficult to compare fitness levels and because competitions vary so significantly it is difficult to intelligently program and periodize. Hyrox has also tried and has arguably made a sport that is safer than Crossfit, but it is still unstandardized.
The beauty of the marathon time or the powerlifting total is that you easily know how much you are progressing and how well you compare to others. We need some competition that provides a standardized and objective comparison of overall fitness across both strength and endurance.
Many Hybrid Athlete innovators— people interested in developing Strength concurrently with Endurance — like Alex Viada, Fergus Crawley, and Nick Bare have done a good job of developing evidence based programming approaches for people who want to both improve their strength and endurance. Some of their achievements are incredible like Crawley’s sub 12 hour Ironman with a 1200 lb powerlifting total in the same day. The issue, again, is that there is no standardized competition for assessing how good of a hybrid athlete someone is. So I wanted to take a stab at proposing a one-day competition that could accomplish that. I call it the HAQ.
Hybrid Athlete Quadathlon (HAQ)
There are four parts to a HAQ:
- Max Bench Press — best of three and judged by new IPF rules without excessive back arch
- Max trap bar deadlift — best of three attempts and pulled from low grip
- 1 mile run
- 1 hour bike for average power— basically an FTP test for average Watts in hour
The competition is done without weight classes and with 30 minutes of rest between events. Each event counts for 25 points maximum and points are determined based on the percentile of your score for your gender. 25 points in an exercise would require a 99th percentile score for your gender in that event. 100 points for the whole competition would require 99th percentile scores in each event. For a male this is roughly a 405 lb bench press, 550 lb deadlift, a 5 minute mile run, and 390 Watts of average power in 1 hour bike. In other words a score of 100 is very tough and going well over 99th percentile in a discipline does not help you. Proposed Scoring is in appendix below.
I wanted to propose a competition that could do the following things:
- Create an easy way to compare overall fitness between individuals and to assess progress overtime
- Be completed in a day and in a gym without excessive equipment or facilities — reason why swimming did not make the cut and why 1 hour bike is assessed by average power so there is less advantage to conditions and equipment
- Be relatively safe — reason why squat did not make the cut, reason why endurance comes after strength, and reason why trap bar deadlift chosen over regular deadlift (this also usefully gets rid of any sumo vs conventional deadlift arguments)
- Assess upper body strength — bench press
- Assess lower body and total strength — low grip trap bar deadlift
- Assess anaerobic endurance and VO2 max — 1 mile run
- Assess aerobic endurance and mental endurance — 1 hour bike for average power in Watts
- Not require weight classes — the heavier you are the better your strength numbers but the more your endurance will struggle and v.v., this makes it relatively easy to compare across weight and will likely push people who are optimizing for their HAQ score to be ~170–190 lb
Male Scoring
The following is based on rough estimates and the percentiles are estimated for genders as a whole based on best performing age group. 50th percentile translates to score of ~13 and 99th percentile translates to score of 25 in each event. The methodologies for scoring estimation are a bit wonky and serve only as rough estimates for now since there is some conflicting data and questions regarding methodology. If people think this is all interesting I will do a deeper dive with clearer sources. Bench press. Trap bar deadlift (estimated from conventional deadlift since it is a low bar deadlift). 1 mile run. 1 hour bike for average Watts.
Example: If I benched 275 lb, deadlifted 515, ran 5:30, and had 300 average watts on bike my score would be 19 + 23 + 21 + 19 = 82 (round down to nearest score if you are in-between).
Female Scoring
