HYROX farmers carry and sandbag lunges: rules and pacing

The HYROX sandbag lunges are 100 m with the bag on both shoulders. Every lunge, your back knee has to touch the floor, and every rep finishes standing tall. The bag is 10 kg for Women, 20 kg for Men and Women Pro, and 30 kg for Men Pro.¹ The farmers carry, the station before it, is 200 m with two kettlebells.

Both come late. The carry is station six and the lunges are seven, with only the wall balls after them. So they're where the race starts asking what your legs have left.

The weights#

That's straight from the 2026/27 Singles rulebook.¹ Picking up the right weight is your job, not the judge's. Do any part of either station with the wrong weight and you have to redo the whole station with the right one, or you're disqualified. The full list for every division is in HYROX divisions and weights.

Farmers carry rules#

The carry starts when you lift the kettlebells out of the marked box and ends when you put them back. You carry both at all times while you're moving, arms straight down by your sides. You're allowed to put them down and rest, as long as they don't move forward when you do.¹

You finish by carrying them over the line and returning them to the right box with the handles upright. Leave them in the wrong place or lying flat and it's a 30-second penalty, unless you go back and fix it before you leave the Roxzone. Depending on the venue, 200 m can be several laps, and counting them is on you. A missed lap is a disqualification.¹

Chalk is allowed here and at the sled pull, and nowhere else. It has to be the event's chalk. Chalk anywhere else is a 2-minute penalty.¹

Sandbag lunge rules#

You start standing tall with both feet behind the line, then lunge across it. On every lunge the trailing knee has to clearly touch the ground, and each rep ends standing fully upright, knees and hips extended. The lunges alternate legs. You can lunge continuously or stop between reps with both feet side by side, but no extra steps or shuffles.¹

At the end of each lane, your front foot has to fully cross the white line. You don't lunge around the turn, but each new section starts with both feet behind the line again. You're done when your leading foot crosses the finish line, and then the bag goes back where you got it.¹

The bag has to stay on both shoulders the whole time. Putting it down on the floor, a barrier or your feet to take the weight off is a 15-second penalty each time. For a missed knee or not standing tall, the first infringement is a warning and each one after is 15 seconds. Not returning the bag is 30 seconds.¹ On both stations you can overtake slower racers, and the lane markings are only a guide.

What good times look like#

These are medians from HYROX Bangkok 2026, men's Open. We took the result page of every man who finished close to 1:00, 1:15 and 1:30.²

The middle half of the 1:15 group carried in 1:43 to 2:11 and lunged in 4:10 to 4:47.² At the top, the top 100 Pro men averaged 1:25 on the carry and 3:07 on the lunges in season 7, with the heavier 32 kg bells and 30 kg bag. In season 1 it was 1:48 and 3:52. Pro women went from 2:17 to 1:44 and from 4:23 to 3:26.³

The lunges are where the levels really split. Here's how much slower the 1:30 group was than the 1:00 group on five stations.

How much slower men near 1:30 were than men near 1:00

	Value (s)
SkiErg	36
Row	39
Farmers carry	41
Sandbag lunges	151
Wall balls	207

Median station time of the 98 men within 1 minute of 1:30 minus that of the 20 men within 2 minutes of 1:00 (rounded medians, as in the table), HYROX Bangkok 2026, men's Open. HYRESULT result pages, medians computed by hybridAF.

The carry costs a 1:30 finisher about 40 seconds against a 1:00 finisher, about the same as each erg. The lunges cost two and a half minutes, which is more than any station on the chart apart from the wall balls. If you're chasing a time, 100 m of lunges is worth a lot more training than 200 m of carrying.

Do they decide the wall balls?#

The usual line is that blowing your legs on the lunges wrecks the wall balls. In the Bangkok data that link is weak.

Among the 62 men who finished near 1:15, a slow lunge split barely predicted a slow wall ball split. The rank correlation was 0.18, and for the farmers carry it was about zero.² In the 1:00 group it was 0.40, but that's 20 people. Across all 180 men the correlation looks strong (0.58), but that's probably mostly because people who finish in an hour are faster at everything.

Two other bits of evidence point the same way. In Pro results, lunge time tracked the rest of an athlete's race better than almost any other station once its own time was removed, while the carry tracked it less well.³ And in the one lab simulation of HYROX, grip strength had no significant link with station time across 11 athletes.⁴ So a strong grip on its own doesn't buy you much, and good lunges tend to come with a good race overall. Whether they directly save your wall balls, nobody's measured.

My race: 1:59 and 4:25#

In Bangkok my carry took 1:59, 728th of 3,254 men, and my lunges took 4:25, 335th.⁵ Against the median of the men who finished near 1:15, the carry was 3 seconds slower and the lunges 1 second faster.² Both were basically average for my finish time.

The run between them was one of my better ones. Run 7, straight off the carry, was 3:55, against a median of 4:15 for the 1:15 group. Run 8, after the lunges, was 4:54, but there's no timing mat before the wall balls, so that includes the walk to the target. Then the wall balls took 6:34, 54 seconds slower than the 1:15 median.⁵² Did the lunges cost me those 54 seconds? Going by the field data above, probably not much of it.

What's interesting is how the race compared with training. On 10 July I did five 75 m carries with the 24 kg bells, logged at 46 to 54 seconds each, and five 63 m sets of lunges with the 20 kg bag at 140 to 158 seconds each. Per metre, that's 0.61 to 0.72 seconds on the carry and 2.2 to 2.5 seconds on the lunges. In the race, the carry worked out at 0.60 seconds per metre, as fast as my best training rep. The lunges were 2.65 seconds per metre, slower than any of the five training sets.

That makes sense given what each one asks. The carry is short, about two minutes. The lunges are more than twice as long, they come seventh, and every rep is a full knee bend under load.

Pacing the carry#

The carry is 200 m and around two minutes for most people. The cheapest time is the time you don't spend standing still. The rules let you put the bells down, but every stop is time you don't get back. Pick a pace you can hold for the full distance without setting them down, and if you have to stop, take one planned break rather than several.

Chalk up first, since it's allowed here, and count your laps.¹

Pacing the lunges#

The lunges are mostly arithmetic. The number of reps depends on how far you travel per lunge, and the bag makes long lunges expensive.

That's 100 m divided by the distance, rounded up. At the 1:15 median of 4:26 and roughly a metre per lunge, that's about one lunge every 2.7 seconds. You save more by not stopping than by lunging longer. A short pause standing tall with both feet together is allowed, but a long one adds straight to the clock, the same as at the burpee broad jumps.

Make the knee touch obvious and finish every rep fully upright. A no-rep warning is free once. After that it's 15 seconds a time, which at my race pace is about 6 metres of lunges.

Training them#

Lunge with the bag, not just dumbbells. The bag sits on your shoulders and moves, and that's what you'll race with. Do it after running, because that's when you'll meet it: a 1 km run, then 25 to 50 m of lunges, then another run.

Carries are worth practising at race weight for the full 200 m a few times, mainly so you know whether you'll need a break. They aren't magic for general strength, though. In a 7-week study of 30 trained rugby players, strongman-style training did about as well as traditional gym lifting, and the traditional group showed small to moderate advantages in squat and deadlift 1RM and in the sled push.⁶ Heavy basic lifting still carries over. The station-specific work is for skill and pacing.

For the station that comes next, see the wall balls guide. Split targets for every station at three finish levels are in sub 90, sub 75 and sub 60 splits, and my whole race is in my first HYROX breakdown. You can paste your own splits into the HYROX splits analyzer to see where you lost time. The rest of the series is on the HYROX hub. hybridAF is not affiliated with HYROX.