HYROX burpee broad jumps: the rules and the engine cost

HYROX burpee broad jumps are 80 m of burpees, each followed by a two-footed broad jump. Your chest has to touch the floor, both feet take off and land together, and on every burpee after the first one in a section your hands can land no more than 30 cm in front of your front foot.¹ Get any of it wrong and you get one warning, then 15 seconds per infringement.

It's station four, after the sled pull. And for most people it's far more of a lung test than a strength test.

The rules, line by line#

All of this is section 8.4 of the 2026/27 Singles rulebook.¹ The movement doesn't change between divisions: Women, Men and both Pro divisions do the same 80 m.

The first burpee of every section starts with both hands on the floor behind the white start line and your chest on the ground. The rulebook defines "chest on the ground" as your nipple line making clear contact. Same thing after every turn: each new section starts from behind the line, chest down.

You can jump or step your feet in, and you're allowed to put a knee down coming out of the bottom. When you bring your feet in, they can't go past your fingertips.

Both feet take off at the same time and land at the same time. The rulebook allows a stagger of up to 5 cm between the fronts of your feet, measured on take-off and landing. More than that, or any extra step or shuffle, is an infringement. How far you jump is up to you.

Your hands go down no more than 30 cm in front of the toes of your front foot, and once they're down you can't shuffle them forward. Then you jump or step back, and your chest has to clearly touch the floor at the bottom of every rep.

Grid lanes, where a venue has them, are a guide only, so you can cross into another lane to overtake. You don't have to burpee around the turning points, but both feet have to fully cross every white line before you turn.

You're done when you jump over the finish line. If either foot lands on it, you owe one more burpee broad jump.

The 30 cm rule, in practice#

This is the one people argue about online. The rule exists to stop you reaching your hands far forward and stretching each rep into a lunge plus a jump. The rulebook says the 30 cm is measured from the base of your palms, where your hands meet your wrists.¹

In practice: land your jump, then drop your hands close to your toes. If you have to think about it, your hands are probably too far out. A useful drill is to tape a line 30 cm in front of a mark and do a few sets where your palms land on your side of it, so the distance stops being a guess on race day.

Penalties#

The first infringement at this station is a formal warning. Each one after that is a 15-second penalty, with no more warnings.¹ Fifteen seconds is about five metres of burpees at my race pace, so a sloppy rep is never worth it.

Doubles#

In Doubles you split the 80 m however you like. The resting partner walks behind the working one, and at each changeover the incoming partner puts their hands where the other partner's feet landed, toes and fingers in line.²

Why this is an engine station#

Nothing at this station is heavy. You're moving your own bodyweight, continuously, for three to five minutes, and the limit is usually your breathing, not your legs giving out on one rep.

The lab data points the same way, with a caveat. In a study of 12 active men doing 30-second all-out bouts of four bodyweight drills, burpees had the highest oxygen uptake of the four and averaged about 95% of age-predicted maximum heart rate.³ Those were plain burpees, not burpee broad jumps, and short bouts, not 80 m. But it fits what the station feels like.

In the only HYROX race simulation published so far, the run straight after the burpee broad jumps (run 5) was the slowest of the eight runs.⁴ That's 11 athletes, so I wouldn't build a theory on it, but it tells you what the station leaves in your legs and lungs.

A 2026 review lists aerobic capacity, anaerobic power, local muscular endurance and maximal strength as the things HYROX taxes, and says HYROX-specific research is still thin.⁵ So "engine station" is a fair reading of the evidence, not a measured fact.

My own race backs it up. In Bangkok my burpee broad jumps took 3:55, ranked 249th of 3,254 men, about the top 8% of that field. HYRESULT, which compares against its own data from every season, puts that time in the best 18.5%.⁶ It was one of my two best stations, alongside the row, and it moved me from 252nd overall to 220th. For contrast, my sled push ranked 966th.

My take on it after the race was simple: "Anything that was mostly engine, I was fine." My runs ranked 127th in the same field.⁶ Good running and a good burpee split going together is one race, not proof, but it's the pattern you'd expect if this station rewards the engine.

At the very top, times dropped early and then levelled off. The top 100 Pro men averaged 3:26 for this station in season 1, 2:34 in season 5 and 2:44 in season 7, and the top 100 Pro women went from 4:23 to 3:27.⁷ The authors group the burpee broad jumps with the SkiErg and the row as stations that showed little or no improvement, while the running got much faster.

Pacing 80 m#

The time on this station comes down to two things: how many reps you need, and how long each one takes. You control the first with your jump length, and it adds up faster than you'd think.

Burpee broad jumps needed to cover 80 m

	Value (reps)
1.4 m	58
1.6 m	50
1.8 m	45
2.0 m	40
2.2 m	37

Arithmetic: 80 m divided by the distance gained per rep, rounded up. Distance per rep is an example range, not measured data. Distance from HYROX Singles rulebook 26/27, section 8.4.

Going from 1.6 m to 2.0 m per rep saves ten burpees. That's the biggest lever on this station. The catch is that a max-effort broad jump every rep is expensive, and a long jump that lands you off balance costs you a second getting set. The jump you want is the longest one you can land balanced and repeat 40-odd times while breathing hard.

The second number is rest. Pausing standing up between reps feels like recovery but adds straight to the clock. Steady and unbroken usually beats fast reps with stops.

My numbers for scale: in training on 14 July I did 33 m in 95 seconds straight after a 1 km run and 25 wall balls, which is about 2.9 seconds per metre. On race day, 80 m took 3:55, which is also about 2.9 seconds per metre. So the race pace matched what I'd done tired in training, and that's the point of practising it tired.

To work out your own: time 20 m after a hard run, divide by 20, multiply by 80. That's your realistic race number, and it's usually slower than you'd guess from a fresh set.

Training it#

Do it after running. Station-into-run is the HYROX problem, and the burpees are the station that most often sits right before a slow run. A simple format: 1 km at race pace, then 20 to 30 m of burpee broad jumps, then straight into another 1 km. Rest and repeat three or four times. The compromised running guide has more formats like that.

Practise the standard too. Chest to the floor every rep, feet together on the jump, hands close to your toes. Doing it right in training is cheaper than finding out from a judge.

And if you're a strong lifter who's slow here, that's useful information. It probably isn't a strength problem. The strength-limited or engine-limited guide goes through how to tell which half is holding you back, and you can put your own splits into the HYROX splits analyzer to see which stations cost you places.

For every division's loads, see HYROX divisions and weights. My full race is in my first HYROX breakdown, and the rest of the series is on the HYROX hub. hybridAF is not affiliated with HYROX.