Olympic BMX star Kieran Reilly reveals the simple changes that transformed his performance and energy levels

One tweak in particular ‘went hand in hand with the best results I’ve ever had’, the athlete tells Harry Bullmore. When he was nine years old, a persistent Kieran Reilly persuaded his parents to buy him a BMX bike. It wound up being one of the best-used gifts ever given. Growing up, the now 23-year-old, would get home from school, grab his BMX and go straight to the skatepark opposite his parents’ house in Gateshead.

“My parents loved it,” he laughs. “There weren’t many lads at the skatepark who wore a helmet, and if they did they wore black, so if my parents could look outside and see my white helmet then they knew I was fine.”. In the years since he’s been crowned BMX freestyle European champion, world champion and earned silver at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, crediting much of his success to a series of changes he made to his workouts and lifestyle in 2022. Below, he reveals the nature of these tweaks, and how they took him from a talented athlete to the top of his sport.

One thing has remained constant in Reilly’s training: time on the bike, and lots of it. “I usually ride five times a week,” he says. “If you get in [to the skatepark] and there aren’t many people there, you usually get your stuff done quickly, so that could be an hour and a half. If there’s a bigger crew and you have a really good session that day, it could end up being three or four hours.

“It’s a social thing too. You’ll get into a session together where you take turns going in. There’s no specific programme or anything like that, it’s whatever you want to do that day, but if you want to be consistent for competition then a lot of it is repetition of tricks.”. In BMX freestyle (park) competitions, riders have a couple of minute-long “runs” to impress judges. Each run is scored out of 100 based on factors such as variety of tricks, number of tricks, height, creativity and originality.

“In the lead-up to a competition, I do a lot of 60-second competition runs; for fitness, but also for building confidence in doing certain tricks under fatigue,” says Reilly. “Primarily, it’s just repetition of tricks. You’re trying to learn new things.”. Read more: I tried Alex Yee’s running workout and it humbled me in just 40 minutes. In 2022, Reilly introduced something new to his training, which he says transformed his performance.

“I decided I needed to start going to the gym,” he says. “I wasn’t working on that side of my performance before. I thought just spending an extra hour on the bike was the same as going to the gym, but it’s very much not.”. His training method of choice was CrossFit – a class-based training method blending high-intensity workouts, conditioning, strength training, gymnastics and Olympic weightlifting. A quick search of his name on the CrossFit website shows he’s incredibly good at it too, finishing in the top three per cent of entrants to the CrossFit Open (an annual, online global fitness competition with more than 340,000 participants last year).

“Joining the gym and starting to train went hand in hand with the best results I’ve ever had [in BMX competitions]. I work a lot on grip and quad endurance. It meant that in the final 30 seconds of a competition run, I wasn’t fading out. I was still able to do big tricks.”. He also found that packing on muscle protected his body from the falls he inevitably faced in his line of work. “There have been a lot of crashes, and there will be a lot more, but my body is now better prepared for them,” he says. “I now have quite a lot of muscle mass, and that definitely takes impact better than if I didn’t. My body is created for impact at this point.”.

Read more: Why going sober was one of the best things I’ve ever done. In 12 minutes, complete as many repetitions as possible (AMRAP) of the sequence below:. Exercise. Repetitions. SkiErg. 20 calories. Toes-to-bar. Power clean (60kg). Ideally, you would perform this workout as written to achieve the desired stimulus – testing and developing your grip endurance. However, there are tweaks you can use to make it more accessible.

For example, you can scale the weight of the power clean if 60kg feels too heavy, or use dumbbells instead of a barbell. If you don’t have access to some of the equipment, the SkiErg can be substituted for any exercise machine or a 200m run. The toes-to-bar (a CrossFit staple which involves hanging from a pull-up bar and repeatedly bringing your toes up to touch it) can be swapped for V-ups. These changes won’t work your grip, but they will serve up a 12-minute workout that tests your heart, lungs and core.

Read more: ‘This will change your life’ – An expert strength coach shares the training method missing from your workouts. If you do hard things, they become easier. I always like asking elite athletes for their favourite workout, and I loved Reilly’s response. He immediately whipped out his phone and started scrolling. “I have a bunch in my notes that I always retest,” he says. “You know what they say; if you do hard things, they become easier. I love the feeling of finishing a really hard workout for the first time, compared with retesting it for the 10th time. My score will have changed, but I can also recognise improvements I’ve made physically and mentally. That translates into life, and into riding. If I reach a hard spot with a trick, I know I have the ability to push past it.”.