Burpee Broad Jumps: HYROX Standards, No-Reps, and Efficiency

Updated 2026-07-19 · 6 min read · Composite Athlete coaching team

Burpee broad jumps are the fourth station: 80 m of chest-to-floor, jump, stand, repeat, arriving one kilometre after the sled pull. For most athletes these are among the slowest metres of the entire race, and the movement standards are specific enough that improvising costs reps — every no-rep is a full extra burpee performed on a heart rate that is already at its ceiling. The station rewards exactly two things: knowing the rules cold, and owning a rhythm you can hold for the full 80 m.

The standard

Every division covers the same 80 m — no loads, no scaling, just rules. Four of them do all the damage:

Two of these catch tired athletes over and over. The 5 cm rule turns a sloppy, staggered landing into a repeated rep, and the no-steps rule means you cannot creep forward between jumps — every centimetre of the 80 m has to be earned airborne. Walking the hands out well past the toes to soften the descent is the third habit judges are briefed on: keep the hands inside 30 cm. And no-reps compound: the repeat costs energy, the broken rhythm costs more, and a judge who has called one fault watches your next ten reps more closely. The full station-by-station rule set is collected in the free HYROX Station Standards tool.

Technique

Pick a jump length you can repeat 50 times

The best jump here is not your longest jump — it is the longest jump whose landing looks identical on rep 5 and rep 45. Test it in training: find the distance you can land balanced, feet together, no stumble, when you are breathing hard. Then race exactly that distance. An extra step on landing is precisely what the no-steps rule exists to catch, and a fault is a whole extra burpee.

Step down, don't dive

Get to the floor in a controlled step-down: hands placed just in front of the toes — inside the 30 cm limit — feet or knees back, chest lowered with intent until it clearly touches. Diving flat looks fast, and it costs you breathing rhythm, skin, and eventually chest-contact scrutiny. The standard is binary: clear contact, every rep. Give the judge nothing to think about.

Stand and jump in one motion

The efficiency gap between athletes lives in the seam between the burpee and the jump. Snap the feet up close to the hands, stand, and let the stand-up flow straight into the arm swing of the jump — one motion, not three decisions. An athlete who pauses, gathers, then jumps is doing two exercises 50-plus times each; an athlete who blends them is doing one.

Land soft, feet together, already leaning in

Land with both feet level — 5 cm is the entire tolerance — knees soft, weight slightly forward so the landing rolls into the next descent. Landing tall and rocking backward throws away momentum you just paid for; landing staggered hands the rep back to the judge. Jumping slightly shorter than your maximum is what keeps the landing clean for all 80 m.

Breathe at the top, not in the hole

Fix one full breath into the top of every rep — stand, breathe, swing, jump. It caps your rep speed, and under a heart-rate ceiling that is a feature, not a bug: the breath is the governor that keeps the same rhythm available at metre 70 that you had at metre 10. Athletes who breathe wherever it happens to fit end up gasping in the bottom position — the one place on this station where nothing productive can happen.

Pacing: the arithmetic of not blowing up

This station has no monitor. Unlike the SkiErg, there is no split on a screen telling you the truth — the only pacing instruments are jump length and rhythm, so choose both deliberately. The arithmetic is blunt:

Somewhere in that table is your number, and training — not race-day optimism — is what finds it. Then hold a metronome: same descent, same jump, one breath at the top, from the first metre to the last. Break the 80 m into four 20 m segments in your head and forbid yourself from counting reps; count segments. The only reward for surging the final segment is a slower fifth run — hold the rhythm to the line and bank the reset at the row one kilometre later.

The mistake to refuse: opening hot because the floor feels fast after the sled pull's kilometre. This is the station where the gap between how fast you can go and how fast you should go is widest. If you train with a heart-rate monitor, expect this station to post numbers as high as anything in the race — that is normal, and it is exactly why the rhythm, not the feeling, has to run the show. Spend the difference here and the row stops being a reset and becomes triage.

How to train it

Standards practice, fresh

Weekly, early in a session while you are sharp: 3 × 20 m at race rhythm with full recovery, judged hard against the standard — film it, or have a partner call faults in real time. Chest contact every rep, hands inside 30 cm, feet inside 5 cm, zero extra steps. You are greasing a pattern so specific that race-day fatigue cannot take it away from you.

Density work

Once a week, build the capacity to hold the rhythm: start with 5 × 20 m on 60 seconds rest, progress across a six-week block to 3 × 40 m on 90 seconds, then 2 × 40 m with minimal rest. Hold the same jump length throughout — if the jumps shorten, that was rhythm collapse, not progression, and the dose was too big.

The station-4 sandwich

Every 2-3 weeks, rehearse the real context: 800 m run at race effort, straight into 20-40 m of burpee broad jumps, straight onto the erg for 500-1,000 m at a controlled split. That is a compressed stations-4-and-5 rehearsal — the race grants you a kilometre between them; training without it makes race day feel generous. The run in teaches your legs to jump off a run; the row out teaches you to convert the reset instead of squandering it. And running well off a station like this one is a separate, trainable skill — compromised running covers it in full.

Burpee broad jumps punish improvisation, not a lack of fitness — the standards are strict, public, and completely learnable, which makes this one of the cheapest stations in the race to improve. Rehearse the rules until they are reflexes and let everyone else donate reps to the judge. For where station work sits inside a complete race build, start with the complete HYROX training guide.