Austin Founder Nick Bare Built a Free Training Plan for Runners Who Lift

• Austin, Texas supplement founder Nick Bare built his hybrid training split around a simple refusal: keep the size and strength he earned in the Army while also running fast marathons.
• His free 16-week plan pairs roughly five lifting sessions with four runs each week, spacing heavy leg days away from hard running so neither quality drags the other down.
• Bare now runs sub-2:40 marathons, has pulled a 700-pound deadlift, and raced in the Pro field at HYROX Dallas against athletes who specialize in one discipline.

He refused to pick between being strong and being fast

“I wanted to run, and I wanted to do these races, without really losing my size and strength,” Nick Bare has said of the moment he decided against choosing a single lane. “I didn’t want to sacrifice anything, which I know is a really stubborn thought process.” That stubbornness turned into a training method, then a company, then a small movement of gym members who now call themselves hybrid athletes.

Bare, who lives and runs his business outside Austin, built his reputation the hard way. He commissioned into the Army as an infantry officer after graduating from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2013, made it through Ranger School, and spent four years leading an infantry platoon out of Texas. Long before anyone was marketing hybrid fitness classes, the Army had already put him through its own version: ruck marches, sprint work, calisthenics and heavy lifting, often stacked into the same week whether his body wanted it or not.

A business built from a college apartment, a plan built from military habit

Bare started Bare Performance Nutrition out of a small apartment in western Pennsylvania while he was still a nutrition student, then kept running it while on active duty. The supplement company has grown into a business generating tens of millions of dollars a year, and it now funds the free training content that has made Bare one of the more recognized names in hybrid fitness. He still trains the way he did as a platoon leader: run in the morning, lift in the evening, rest on Sunday.

That rhythm forms the backbone of his 16-week hybrid plan, published free through Bare Performance Nutrition and mirrored across training databases used by thousands of recreational lifters and runners. The structure is not complicated. Most weeks carry five lifting sessions and four runs, with Sunday left open for recovery. When a heavy lower-body lifting day and a hard interval run land close together, the plan pushes them six to eight hours apart, or onto separate days entirely, so neither session steals from the other.

What a week actually looks like

A typical week under the plan pairs an easy morning run with an evening strength session built around squats, presses and pulls, four or five days in a row, with one or two dedicated speed or tempo runs mixed in and a long run on the weekend. The lifting stays heavy enough to hold onto muscle rather than drifting into pure endurance work, while the running volume builds gradually toward whatever race sits at the end of the block, whether that is a marathon or a HYROX start line.

Bare has been blunt about pushing back on a piece of conventional fitness wisdom that says lifting heavy and running fast cannot coexist in the same body. “There were people who said that you can’t really be a runner while lifting big, and that you can’t lift heavy and then run fast in an endurance arena,” he has said. “Sure, there’s a small truth there, but it isn’t an absolute truth.” His own results have become the argument: a marathon time under 2 hours 40 minutes alongside a 700-pound deadlift, numbers that would each be notable on their own and become unusual together.

Testing the split against specialists

Bare put the approach to a public test by entering the Pro division at HYROX Dallas, racing against athletes who train specifically for the sport’s eight-station format rather than splitting their week between a barbell and the road. He finished ninth out of 207 in the Pro field, a result that placed him among the fastest Pro times HYROX has recorded. He stayed within striking distance of the leaders through the sled pull before losing ground on the burpees and rowing, two of the more technical stations that reward athletes who drill them specifically rather than build general fitness around them.

The placement itself was almost beside the point compared with what it demonstrated about the training underneath it. A decade of alternating hard running and heavy lifting had given Bare enough of an aerobic and muscular base to hang with athletes who specialize, though the most technical movements still separated him from the winner. For a training method built on refusing to specialize, finishing top ten against a field of specialists is close to proof of concept.

Why the split appeals to people who have never raced anything

Most of the people following Bare’s plan will never stand on a HYROX start line or run a sub-2:40 marathon, and that is somewhat the point. The hybrid athlete movement he helped popularize has less to do with elite performance and more to do with a simple complaint a lot of gym members share: marathon training alone tends to shrink muscle, and a pure lifting block alone tends to erase cardio fitness built over months. Splitting the week between both, done carefully, lets someone keep both.

Bare has described the appeal in plain terms. “Hybrid athlete training is the best way to train,” he has said. “The reason it’s the best lies directly in the results. Improved body composition, longevity.” For a 35-year-old parent squeezing in workouts around a job and kids, the pitch is less about chasing a Pro Hyrox card and more about a body that can run a 5K on Saturday and still deadlift respectably on Monday, built by a plan anyone can download for free and run at their own pace.

The bigger shift is cultural. A decade ago, a running coach and a strength coach would have told a client to pick one goal per training block. Bare’s following, and the wider hybrid movement now visible at Hyrox, DEKA and CrossFit events across the country, has made splitting the difference look less like a compromise and more like its own discipline.