Hyrox: How It Started, and How Hybrid Training Became a Trend

Hyrox didn't exist a decade ago, now it's 65 races and 175,000 competitors a year. The exact eight-station format, how it split from CrossFit and obstacle racing, and why it's really the highest-profile face of the wider hybrid-training movement.

By Miles Ashworth · 3 Sept 2026 · 3 min read · United Kingdom edition

The elite field at the start of the 2021 Hyrox World Championships. Photo: HybridFitty, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

Hyrox didn't exist a decade ago. It's now one of the fastest-growing fitness formats in the world, and it's built almost entirely around a single, simple idea: stop separating cardio from strength, and race both at once.

The event launched in November 2017, founded by Christian Toetzke alongside Moritz Fürste, an Olympic gold medallist in field hockey, with the first competition held in Hamburg in April 2018. That first race drew 650 participants. By 2023, Hyrox was running 65 races worldwide with roughly 175,000 total competitors across the year, and London alone hosted 24,000 racers. By the end of 2024, more than 5,000 gyms worldwide had become official Hyrox training affiliates, a reported 260% jump in a single year.

How the Format Actually Works

Every Hyrox race follows the exact same structure, everywhere in the world, which is a real part of the appeal: a 1 kilometre run, followed by a functional exercise station, repeated eight times, for a combined 8 kilometres of running woven through eight different stations. In order: a SkiErg, a 50 metre sled push, a 50 metre sled pull, 80 metres of burpee broad jumps, 1 kilometre on the rowing machine, a 200 metre kettlebell farmer's carry, 100 metres of sandbag walking lunges, and finally 100 wall balls to finish. Because the course is standardised down to the exact distances and equipment, a finishing time in Birmingham means exactly the same thing as one in Sydney, and Hyrox leans hard into that: global leaderboards let any two competitors, anywhere, compare results directly.

Lauren Weeks competing in the wall balls station at the Hyrox EU Championships, 2023. Photo: HybridFitty, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

That standardisation is also what separates Hyrox from the two formats it most often gets compared to. CrossFit is built around variable, unpredictable workouts and heavy strength work; Hyrox is fixed and endurance-led. Obstacle races like Tough Mudder are about terrain and improvised challenges; Hyrox is run indoors, on a flat, controlled course, with the same eight stations every time.

A Real Competitive Ladder, Not Just a Mass-Participation Race

Beneath the recreational field, Hyrox runs a genuine elite structure: regional European and North American Championships feed into a World Championship each season, with an "Elite 15" system where the fastest 15 Pro-division times qualify for championship heats. Prize money reached $150,000 total across the 2023-24 season, with $25,000 to the winner, real money for a sport barely seven years old at that point. Dylan Scott and Alyssa McElhany hold the current men's and women's world titles.

The Bigger Trend Behind It

Hyrox is really the highest-profile face of a much broader shift in fitness culture: hybrid training, the deliberate mixing of endurance work (running, rowing) with strength and functional movement in the same session, rather than treating "cardio day" and "leg day" as separate worlds. A typical hybrid training session mirrors the format's own logic: a cardio "buy-in," then three or four strength movements repeated across several rounds, building exactly the kind of engine Hyrox racing demands. Whether that's driving Hyrox's growth or the other way around is genuinely hard to untangle at this point, they're feeding each other, and gyms built specifically around that hybrid model are opening at a pace regular strength gyms haven't matched in years.