F1 driver Alex Albon knows better than most that Formula 1 fitness is about more than simply looking sharp in the paddock.

The Thai-British driver is currently racing for Atlassian Williams in what marks his fifth season with the team.

But while the car does most of the headline-grabbing work, the driver’s body is still under constant siege. During a race, Albon says his heart rate sits between 130 and 160 beats per minute for up to two hours. Add in heat, humidity, jet lag, pressure, travel, sponsor commitments and the small matter of making split-second decisions at 200mph, and suddenly Netflix’s decision to title its F1 docuseries Drive to Survive starts to make sense.

For Albon, that means training hard, prioritising sleep and building a body capable of keeping up when the world is moving at 200mph.

Men’s Health caught up with Albon to talk training weeks, sleep struggles, race-weekend recovery and why CrossFit-style workouts might be more useful for F1 than you think.

What does a typical training week look like for you?

We have quite busy schedules, but if I take you through a winter training programme, it will be five days a week, and then maybe three of those days, twice a day.

It’s a mixture of cardio, neck and core, and obviously just general strength.

What’s the one fitness habit you never skip?

Does sleeping count as a fitness habit? Prioritising sleep. Getting myself in the right environment.

I struggle with sleep naturally, just with the pressure of performing and the jet lag that we deal with. So, eye masks, blackout blinds, making sure that if I’m staying in a hotel in the city, I’m up high where road noise is lower. So prioritising a good night’s sleep.

How do you prepare mentally for a race weekend?

It gets very busy with all the other work that we do. So actually having your own time to focus on yourself is something that I put a lot of importance on.

Forty-five minutes before I drive, I go to my driver’s room, put on some noise-cancelling headphones – they don’t even need to play anything, just cancel the noise – and focus on the objective.

Is there one specific part of your training that has the biggest impact on your driving?

When we’re in a race weekend, what do we struggle with the most? I would say it’s the heat.

So heat acclimatisation training is very important for us when we go to Qatar, Singapore, Miami – whenever there are particularly humid races.

We go to heat-chamber sessions and focus on these Zone 2 cardio sessions, where we try to acclimatise to the heat before we actually fly out for the race weekend.

What’s your favourite gym exercise?

My favourite exercise in the gym would be nothing cardio-related. I hate doing cardio in a gym, so most of my cardio is outside.

I like CrossFit and circuit training. We do a mixture of CrossFit and Hyrox. That kind of training is actually very similar to what we experience in the car.

When we’re driving, our heart rates are around 130 to 160 beats per minute for two hours. So we want to target that zone as much as we can.

What’s great about these strength-cardio sessions is the cognitive load as well. Staying focused and having to do all these different exercises while you’re tired is good practice.

What’s the one song on your workout playlist that gets you fired up?

I’m the most boring music person. I feel like music is not really in my body. I’ll listen to sad songs, deep songs.

[But] I don’t need pumping up to get me going. Just about any kind of music is good for me.

How do you prioritise recovery during a race weekend?

During a race weekend, or during a race event, we actually focus more on recovery than we do on training.

Imagine we do three races in a row, three weekends in a row. We travel on Monday. Sometimes it’s a 12-hour flight between races. You will see us maybe train three days in three weeks, so you can imagine there’s not much you can actually do in terms of physical preparation.

It’s all about recovery and keeping the body moving. It’s a real balance in our sport between what the business needs and what we need as drivers to perform.

With almost 18 years in the health and fitness space as a personal trainer, nutritionist, breath coach and writer, Andrew has spent nearly half of his life exploring how to help people improve their bodies and minds.    

As our fitness editor he prides himself on keeping Men’s Health at the forefront of reliable, relatable and credible fitness information, whether that’s through writing and testing thousands of workouts each year, taking deep dives into the science behind muscle building and fat loss or exploring the psychology of performance and recovery.   

Whilst constantly updating his knowledge base with seminars and courses, Andrew is a lover of the practical as much as the theory and regularly puts his training to the test tackling everything from Crossfit and strongman competitions, to ultra marathons, to multiple 24 hour workout stints and (extremely unofficial) world record attempts.   

 You can find Andrew on Instagram at @theandrew.tracey, or simply hold up a sign for ‘free pizza’ and wait for him to appear.