HYROX sled push

Grouped by finish time rather than by labels like "competitive" or "intermediate". Find the row for the finish you are chasing and read across — that is what athletes who actually finish in that time push.

Doubles medians are faster because partners split the 50 m between them. A doubles sled time is a team result and cannot be read against a solo one. Note how little the solo column moves between sub-60 and 80–90 — the sled barely notices how fast you finish, right up until the last bracket.

Rank the eight stations by how much they separate fast finishers from slow ones and the sled push comes 6th, in the same territory as the ergs. Rank them instead by how often they go catastrophically wrong and it comes 4th. Those two facts are usually the same fact. Here they are not, and the gap is the most useful thing on this page.

Rowing makes the point cleanly, because it has almost the same swing: 1.34× against the sled push's 1.37×. By that measure they are equally irrelevant. But 1.75% of solo athletes take more than double the median on the sled, against 0.03% on rowing — roughly 58× as often. The slowest recorded sled push is 49:39; the slowest rowing is 17:06.

The practical reading: train the sled push to be competent, not fast. Competence is worth minutes to the athletes who lack it and almost nothing to everyone else. Where the ergs punish you gently and predictably, this station is closer to a gate — you either move it efficiently or you stand behind it, and the difference is mostly position, not strength.

Total load including the sled itself, not plates added on top. Identical at every venue — only the floor changes.

Women Pro and Men Open push the same sled. Full loads for all eight stations, with kg/lb conversions, 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 sled push arrives second, off run 2, while you still feel good — which is exactly the problem. It is a leg and lung station, and the bill for emptying yourself on it is not paid here. It is paid on run 3, which starts within seconds of you letting go of the posts, and on the sled pull that follows.

The useful frame is four lengths, not one effort. Athletes who go hardest on length one tend to stall on lengths three and four, and stalling is expensive twice over: the sled stops, and restarting it costs more than never having stopped. A push that gets slightly faster each length almost always beats one that starts fast and dies, even when the first ten metres look slower.

If the sled genuinely will not move, the fix on the day is position before power — drop the hips, lengthen the body line, shorten the steps. Grinding harder from a bad angle is how a 3:05 station becomes a 6:50 one.

Want the sled push inside a whole-race plan rather than on its own? The pace calculator splits a goal finish into per-station and per-run budgets, so you can see what this station is actually allowed to cost you.

Mistakes and takeaways

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

Common questions

What is a good HYROX sled push time?

Solo median is 3:05 for the 50 m, with the middle half of the field between 2:37 and 3:43 across 39,247 results. Athletes finishing in sub-60 minutes post a median of 2:29; athletes finishing 90+ post 3:24. That is a narrow band by HYROX standards — if you are near 3:05, the sled push is not what is costing you a finish time.

How heavy is the HYROX sled push?

The sled including its own weight is 102 kg for Women Open, 152 kg for Men Open, 152 kg for Women Pro, 202 kg for Men Pro. Women Pro and Men Open push the same 152 kg. Those are total loads, not added plates, and they are the same at every venue — the full set for all eight stations is in the weights guide.

Does the sled push matter much in HYROX?

Two answers, and the data supports both. For the middle of the field it matters less than almost anything: it is 3.3% of a solo race and separates the fastest and slowest finish brackets by only 1.37×, ranking 6 of 8. But it has a tail the ergs do not — 1.75% of solo athletes take more than double the median here, against 0.03% on rowing, which has almost exactly the same 1.34× spread. The sled push rarely decides a race and occasionally ends one.

Why is the sled so much harder at some races than others?

Friction. The load is fixed by the rules but the surface is not, and the same sled behaves differently on carpet, turf and coated concrete, and differently again once a few hundred athletes have polished a lane. This is the main reason sled times are the least comparable between venues of any station, and why judging your push by effort rather than by a target split is the safer race-day approach.

What is the fastest way to push the sled?

Keep it moving. Static friction is higher than sliding friction, so a sled that never fully stops is meaningfully cheaper to move than one restarted three times — which is also why the turnaround, not the straight, is where most avoidable seconds go. Beyond that: low body angle, locked arms, short steps directly under the hips.

Should I train the sled push?

Enough to be competent, then stop. For most athletes the ceiling is low — the whole field sits inside 2:37 to 3:43 — and burpee broad jumps separates finishers 2.65× against this station's 1.37×. The exception is if you are in the tail: if your sled push is closer to 4:30 than to 3:05, the problem is usually position and step length rather than leg strength, and it is worth fixing because it is costing you minutes rather than seconds.