HYROX: Equipping Competitors with Science

In December, London’s Excel Centre hosted 40,000 competitors for the largest ever HYROX event. In welcoming ‘every participant with open arms’, the organisers had no trouble in attracting almost quadruple the number of athletes that were at the Paris Olympics. Yet, with its new science report, the sport is taking a step (or lunge) in a new direction, by providing competitors with the latest research on what it takes to be ‘a strong, fast, and more efficient HYROX athlete’.  

The question is, how useful is the science in helping all competitors to reach their best?  

In case it hasn’t reached your timeline yet, HYROX (an abbreviation of ‘Hybrid Rockstars’) is an event where participants run a total of 8km, interspersed with 8 functional training exercises.  

It’s currently the world’s largest mass participation race, and is only continuing to grow. Enthusiasts can now book a HYROX holiday and the sport may even become an event at the Brisbane 2032 Games.But with its latest venture, HYROX is engaging audiences in a new way, by inviting participants to discover the science which can ‘level up’ their training. 

The HYROX Sport Science Report is freely available for ‘anyone who trains, races or wants to understand what drives their performance’ and compiles the latest published, peer-reviewed research surrounding the sport into a series of ‘key takeaways’. 

Produced by the HYROX Sports Science Advisory Council, the report comes from industry experts, such as Dr. Gommaar D’Hulst, a lecturer and exercise physiologist who founded WOD-Science, an online platform which ‘translates complex exercise research into accessible insights for everyday athletes’. 

Fuelled by his frustration that ‘research is locked away in journals’, D’Hulst hopes that the new report will open the door for more athletes to access evidence-based training, highlighting that ‘HYROX has created a sport that people can train for at any level. Not just elite competitors. [He wants] the science to reflect that’. 

But does the report achieve this ambition? Can the science truly be accessible and beneficial to all athletes? 

Certainly, the first study offers some comprehensible conclusions for athletes of any ability, however, a question mark lingers over its reliability and unanimous applicability. 

In measuring only 3 female and 8 male recreational athletes, the study published last year at the University of Bundeswehr Munich, leaves a lot to be desired in terms of representation. Where’s the gender equality? What about professionals? It’s a disappointing depiction of the ‘world’s largest mass participation race’. 

What’s more disappointing, however, is the failure of the report to point-out this inadequacy. Instead, the report adds insult to injury by selecting the study’s ‘key takeaway’ to be a confirmation of ‘an assumed truth’, that ‘athletes should prioritise endurance training given that running is the primary component of every race’.  

Unsurprised? Probably. But if the research is only confirming common knowledge, do athletes really need the science?  

Yet with further reading, it becomes clear that the report is not merely preaching to the choir. In looking past the study’s pitfalls, readers can more interestingly discover how the report recommends that athletes should maximise their exposure to maximum intensity training, based on the evidence that the test-participants spent most of their races working at Maximum Heart Rate. 

So, despite its questionable sample and initially appearing to offer nothing new, the study does provoke curiosity in even top-level competitors.  

Alongside the physiological advice, the report also presents a tactical finding from the study, as the researchers warranted building speed through the race as a valid strategy, on account of the increasing difficulty of consecutive stations. As such, the report offers value to competitors under the impression that a constant pace is most beneficial. 

Frustratingly, that is where the report finishes with respect to that study and so consequently fails to share its most intriguing insights.  

Most notably, the researchers highlighted that the standardised HYROX format meant that the strongest athletes aren’t always faster, and suggested that ‘once strength and power exceed a certain level, benefits of further improvements in these parameters might diminish’. In omitting this pertinent insight, the report leaves power-focused athletes disillusioned in believing that they should always seek to become stronger.  

The study’s interesting metabolic findings also didn’t make it to the report, as the athletes Heart Rate and Blood Lactate measurements indicated that they had to rely on both anaerobic and aerobic pathways. From this, the researchers suggested that athletes who can optimise the transition between metabolic pathways will be the most successful in HYROX.  

Despite being a seemingly pragmatic observation, the council chose not to include this finding as a key takeaway. Perhaps because optimising metabolic transitions is not so simple? Or potentially the method doesn’t yet exist? Whatever the reason, its omission means that only the most curious athletes would discover this information. 

Such readers might also delve deep enough into the report to discover how it recovers from the first study’s failure to represent all participants. In ‘Understanding the female athlete’, Dr Samantha Rowland, lecturer and exercise physiologist from Loughborough University, explains how ‘for decades, we’ve based exercise science on men and applied [the findings] to women’, importantly calling attention to the gender inequality in physiology research. 

With this section, the report identifies a significant knowledge deficit but frustratingly fails to offer any research which necessarily ‘fills it’. As such, female athletes and coaches are left none the wiser on how to optimise their training and performance by responding to aspects such as menstrual cycles, pregnancy and contraception.  

Instead, the report highlights how HYROX’s 50-50 gender split presents an exciting opportunity for research to answer unresolved questions, and so with more reports expected, it’s hopeful that future editions will prove more fruitful for female participants.  

Continuing further, the rest of the report discusses other aspects relevant to performance and provides athletes with the science in an invariably uncomplicated format. But the question remains, will they use it?   

Image on the left: @suziroyds.

In conversation with Suzi, she reveals that she has read the report in full, as she’s interested in the science and would be willing to adapt her training if the evidence suggested she did so.  

‘I already do a lot of my own research with YouTube, friends and coaches… I’m constantly experimenting with different balances of training’.  

With her experience, Suzi found the takeaways ‘clear to understand’ but adds that she’d like further clarification on the section which states that ‘workout duration drives adaptation’ and compares the effects of short, high-intensity workouts with longer, endurance sessions.  

‘This [section] makes me wonder – are both approaches equally important, or is the report suggesting one should be prioritised over the other?’  

Alongside this lack of clarity, Suzi also feels the report misses some important considerations, commenting that,  

‘Someone coming from a CrossFit or strength or power background will likely need to train very differently’ and that the report would benefit from, ‘more insight into common injuries [and] detail on where time is truly won or lost in a race.’  

Evidently, though readers can be taken by the science, it seems that the report isn’t entirely satisfying for experienced, competitive athletes. 

With his work largely involving scientific papers, Ben also added that he’s ‘always dubious when organisations release their own science reports’ alluding to their potential bias. On the other hand, Suzi finds trust in the findings as they match her personal experiences, commenting that they ‘align with what [she has] discovered or come to believe so far about HYROX’.  

Overall, it seems that the usefulness of the report depends on the individual; Suzi and Ben remind us that every athlete is different, yet the report doesn’t distinguish between the two. The lifestyles, personal goals, anatomies, and backgrounds of different athletes are not acknowledged by the report, even though each of these factors will impact their training. So arguably, by trying to produce a report that is useful to every participant, they’ve made one that isn’t useful to any. 

That being said, HYROX should be commended for educating participants and ‘levelling the playing field’ by providing all competitors with the same access to scientific evidence. The report exemplifies how more people can become involved with research but also stands testament to the fact that evidence is never ‘one-size-fits-all’. 

Written by Pip Andrews, February 9, 2026.

Edited by Jack Hooper.