HYROX Burpee Broad Jumps: Technique, Rules & Pacing

Burpee broad jumps are station 4, 80 m long, and the second-longest station on the course. Rep by rep it feels survivable, which is the trap. It drives your heart rate higher than running does, it rewards explosive power that endurance training never builds, and the repeated landings quietly wreck the quads you still need for four more kilometres of running.

Spec: 80 m · bodyweight · identical for every division — Open, Pro, doubles and relay · (HYROX Singles Rulebook 26/27, §8.4) · first-timer median ~5:46 (third-party aggregate, not an official figure). This is the single-station deep dive; the full station-by-station breakdown puts it in race order alongside the other seven.

Nothing here scales with your division

The five loaded stations all get heavier when you move up: sleds, farmers carry, sandbag lunges and wall balls each have their own Open and Pro numbers. The burpee broad jumps have none. It is 80 m at bodyweight for everyone — Open women, Pro men, doubles pairs and relay teams cover an identical station. There is no Pro version to look up and nothing to convert. Every station that does change is laid out in the HYROX weights table.

That has a practical consequence people miss. With no load to hide behind, this is the purest comparison on the course: the gap between you and the athlete next to you is entirely technique, pacing and power-to-weight. Moving up to Pro changes nothing here — the same is true of the SkiErg and the row — and since the 26/27 rulebook leaves every distance, load and rep count unchanged from 25/26, that has now held for two seasons running.

The no-reps that catch most people

These are the criteria that catch the most people — and every one of them is something fatigue takes away from you:

• Chest clearly on the ground on the burpee — the rulebook defines this as the nipple line making clear contact (§8.4). Half a rep down, deep into the station, is the classic late no-rep.
• Both feet take off and land together on the jump — a stagger of up to 5 cm is permitted. Under fatigue the jump degrades into a stepped landing, and that is not a rep.
• Jump forward from where you landed. No creeping the line — shuffling your feet forward before the next burpee to steal distance is not allowed.
• Hands no more than 30 cm in front of your toes at the bottom, and your feet may not land beyond your fingertips when you come out of the burpee (§8.4).

The penalty structure is in the rulebook itself (§8.4): a first infringement brings a formal warning, a second costs 15 seconds, and every one after that adds another 15 seconds, with no further warnings. Six of the eight stations use the same three-step protocol; the wall balls give no warnings at all — every throw is simply a rep or a no-rep. Third-party guides are shakier ground here — of the three most visible English guides to this station, one still describes a 5 m distance penalty that appears nowhere in the current rulebook.

Distance is not speed: why bigger jumps lose

The instinct is to cover 80 m in as few jumps as possible, and it is the wrong instinct. A maximal broad jump is a near-maximal effort of the legs, and it is followed immediately by another one, and another. The athlete who jumps big finishes each rep further down the lane but deeper in oxygen debt, and lands harder every time.

HYROX measures this station in metres, not reps, so your rep count is only ever a consequence of your jump length. There is no bonus for a low count. Small, repeatable, rhythmic jumps — the same distance each time, landing soft by bending at the hip and knee — get you through the 80 m faster and with more leg left, because this station is won on continuity rather than on any single jump.

The other half of the economy is the burpee itself: step back rather than jump back, and step up rather than snapping to your feet. It feels slower and is not, because it takes the number of jump-and-land impacts per rep from two down to one.

Around six minutes, and a bill that arrives later

The median split is roughly 5:46, which makes this the second-longest station on the course and nearly twice the sled push. The split still understates it, because the burpee broad jumps are the station whose cost shows up somewhere else. Every landing loads the quads eccentrically, which is the specific kind of muscle damage that strips running economy — and four runs remain after it.

That is also why your heart rate misleads you here. The movement spikes it higher than running does, so an effort that feels like a controlled ground pace sits closer to your ceiling than it feels. Deliberately keep it below the effort you would run at, check where this split lands in your projected finish with the HYROX time calculator, and if you train to heart rate, know which of your heart-rate zones you are actually living in.

How to arrive at it, and what to do in the last stretch

Come into the station already slowed down. The run before it should finish at a controlled effort rather than a sprint, because the first ten reps set the rhythm for the whole 80 m and a rhythm chosen while gasping is always too fast. Pick a cadence you could hold for the full distance on your worst day, then hold it — a steady rate with no stops beats fast reps punctuated by hands-on-knees pauses, every single time.

Count in lengths, not in reps. The distance stations are marked out in lengths, and losing count is a routine way to give away time or, worse, leave a station short. And do not empty the tank over the final stretch: the next thing that happens is a kilometre of running on legs this station has just spent several minutes damaging.

Station 2 is the other one that trades on fresh legs — the sled push guide covers the loads and the four-length line rule. If HYROX itself is still new to you, start with the intro guide for runners. To see the station in a real race, HYROX Boston and HYROX Dallas are two of the bigger US events, and the HYROX event calendar has every city and date.