I’m Mark, Co-Founder of HAKD Health. At the end of 2025, I was in the worst shape I’d been in for years.
I gave myself 10 weeks to turn things around and prepare for my first ever HYROX. Alongside the training, I wanted to make sleep and recovery a genuine priority, with Night Blend becoming a key part of my routine.
This is what happened when I introduced Night Blend.
THE RESULTS
+84%
Average HRV
64ms pre-Night Blend → 118ms by mid-March
2+ HOURS
Deep sleep on typical nights
Up from ~ 1.5 hours
2+ HOURS
REM sleep on typical nights
Up from ~ 1.5 hours
UP TO 99%
WHOOP Recovery
Repeated 98-99% recoveries while training harder than ever
1:22
First HYROX
Men’s Open Singles
The Starting Point
I’d never done any HYROX-specific training and, if I’m honest, didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. But that was part of the appeal.
I started training in the second week of January, giving me a couple of weeks to settle into the routine before introducing Night Blend. This also gave me a useful baseline to see how my body was responding to the increased training load.
On paper, my sleep actually looked okay. I was generally getting around 7-8.5 hours per night. The problem was the quality of that sleep.
A typical night saw me sleep for 7 hours 26 minutes, but only 1 hour 20 minutes was deep sleep and 1 hour 25 minutes was REM. Almost two-thirds of the night (64%) was spent in light sleep.
With training intensity increasing, recovery was something I wanted to improve.
Introducing Night Blend
By this point, I had a couple of weeks of WHOOP data from training without Night Blend. My training, nutrition and general evening routine were already in place.
Then, on Monday 26th January, I introduced Night Blend.
The difference in my WHOOP data was immediate.
That first night, I slept for 9 hours 7 minutes, including 2 hours 14 minutes of deep sleep and 1 hour 52 minutes of REM.
The following night was even more surprising: 8 hours 52 minutes total sleep, 1 hour 58 minutes deep sleep and 2 hours 45 minutes REM.
And it wasn’t just one or two good nights.
Later that week, after recording a relatively high 15.8 strain from an evening run, I still achieved a 93% recovery the following morning. I slept for 8 hours 17 minutes, including 2 hours 2 minutes of deep sleep and 2 hours 10 minutes of REM.
For me, that consistency was the biggest thing. I wasn’t simply spending longer in bed, I was seeing considerably more restorative sleep while continuing to train.
The HRV Change
Then there was the stat that really caught my attention: HRV.
HRV, or heart rate variability, is one of the metrics WHOOP uses when assessing recovery. It’s highly individual, but generally, a higher HRV relative to your own baseline can be associated with better recovery.
Before Night Blend, my seven-day average HRV was 64ms.
64ms → 85ms → 86ms → 118ms.
During the week I introduced Night Blend, my average HRV climbed to 85ms, before reaching 86ms the following week - around 34% higher than my pre-Night Blend average.
And the upward trend continued. By mid-March, as I approached race day and my training was at its hardest, my seven-day average HRV had reached 118ms - around 84% higher than before I introduced Night Blend.
This was probably the part that surprised me most.
The rest of my routine hadn’t suddenly changed. I was already training, getting my nutrition right and following the basic habits I knew supported my sleep - keeping the room cool, limiting my phone before bed and avoiding eating too late.
Night Blend was the new addition.
Of course, wearable data can’t prove that one change caused everything I was seeing. But personally, the timing was difficult to ignore.
More importantly, I could feel it.
I was waking up feeling more refreshed, my recovery scores were improving and I had the energy to get back out and train again.
The Road to HYROX
Those improvements weren’t just a good couple of weeks. My sleep and recovery remained strong as I ramped up towards race day.
HYROX training was some of the hardest training I’d ever experienced.
There were some pretty grim sessions along the way. Hard runs, strength sessions, HYROX-specific workouts and days where the last thing I wanted to think about was doing it all again the next day.
That’s where recovery became so important.
Night Blend had become a consistent part of my evening routine, and I felt like I was recovering well enough to keep turning up and hitting the next session. With only 10 weeks to prepare, being able to train consistently was massive.
We documented plenty of the more gruelling sessions along the way too - so there’s video evidence of the suffering!
Race Day
Ten weeks earlier, I’d been out of shape, inconsistent and had never done any form of HYROX training.
I crossed the finish line of my first Men’s Open Singles HYROX in 1 hour 22 minutes.
I was genuinely really happy with my time, but even more so with how far I’d come.
I felt great on the day and came away thinking there was definitely more I could achieve with a longer training block and the same consistency around training, nutrition, sleep and recovery.
For me, the whole experience reinforced something pretty simple: the work you do between training sessions matters just as much as the sessions themselves.
Night Blend became a key part of that routine for me. The changes I saw in my WHOOP data were significant, but ultimately the biggest thing was how I felt: more refreshed, better recovered and ready to train again.
If you want to see the less glamorous side of the journey, we documented loads of it through short-form videos and training challenges on the HAKD Health Instagram page. Go and have a watch if you want to see me suffer through some fairly grim HYROX sessions.
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