Is Hyrox A Running Race? What The Research Actually Says

Ross "Fish" Fisher, Level 1 HYROX Performance Coach — August 2026

Short answer: running decides who wins, but only among people whose stations don't break them. That conditional is doing more work than most of the arguments you'll read online, and it's the reason "just run more" and "you need to get stronger" are both half-right and both useless as advice.

I went from a 1:24:34 (my first race) to a 1:10:32 solo in about eighteen months, and a 0:59:19 in men's open doubles at Dublin with my mate Steve. I've coached over sixty athletes over finish lines and I've just spent a week reading every peer-reviewed study published on this sport, because I wanted to know whether the science backed up what I experience on a day to day basis when talking to and programming for my clients.

Here's what I found, including the part nobody selling you a plan wants to mention.

There are nine studies. That's the whole field.

Search PubMed for "hyrox" and you get seven results. Add two that aren't indexed there and the entire published scientific literature on this sport comes to nine items.

Of those nine: one is a lab study of eleven people. One is an analysis of nearly 40,000 race results. Two are descriptive papers counting participants. Two are reviews that mostly restate the eleven-person study. One is a survey of eighty athletes. One is a sleep study on eight men. One I couldn't get behind the paywall.

And the big one: there has never been a published training-intervention study in Hyrox athletes. Not one. Nobody has run a trial showing that any training approach improves a Hyrox time. Every claim of the form "this method improves your race by X%" is currently unsupported by evidence.

To be fair to HYROX365, they've built a genuine education pathway and the Academy courses are a solid foundation — I did my Hyrox Academy Level 1: Creating Athletes course and I learned so much, I can highly recommend it. But an education programme isn't the same as an evidence base, and the sport has grown far faster than the science has. That gap is why you can find a confident coach arguing for essentially any approach, and why so many of them contradict each other.

So when someone tells you the research says X, it's worth asking which of the nine they mean.

What the research does show

Two studies carry almost all the weight, and they're both worth your time.

Running is about half the race, and it's the discipline most tightly tied to finishing position. Across 39,696 PRO and ELITE results over seven seasons, running accounted for roughly 50% of total race time every single season. More importantly, running showed the lowest rank reshuffling of any discipline — under 20% in men, under 17% in women. In plain terms: where you rank on the runs tracks where you finish better than any station does.

The sport has got dramatically faster, and running is where the time came from. PRO top-100 men improved around 13 minutes across seven seasons; women around 17 minutes. Of that, roughly 8 and 10 minutes respectively came from the running alone. Elite male median finishing time went from 1:06:24 to 0:57:17.

That matches what I've watched happen in the Elite 15 over the last few seasons. The field is being taken over by runners. Not by the biggest or strongest athletes — by people who can hold a road-race pace after forty minutes of work and still move well enough on the stations not to lose it all back.

Hunter is the obvious exception, and may always be. Every sport has one athlete whose physiology and competitiveness let them break the pattern. But you shouldn't build your training around the outlier. You build it around the trend, and the trend is running.

Now here's the key

This is where the popular version of the argument falls apart, and where the research turned out to be more interesting than I expected.

In that eleven-person lab study, VO₂max correlated −0.73 with running time — a strong relationship, as you'd expect. But VO₂max correlated −0.11 with station time. Essentially nothing.

Read that again, because it's the whole point. Aerobic capacity predicted how fast people ran. It did not predict how fast they got through the stations.

Now hold it next to the race data. The 40,000-result study found that the strength-determined stations produced far bigger time penalties for slower athletes — quantile coefficients running to over 400 seconds in men and over 500 in women between the faster and slower ends of the field. Stations are where mid-pack athletes bleed minutes. Running is what sorts an already-competent field.

Put the two together and you get something more useful than either camp offers:

Running is the primary skill of Hyrox — if and only if you've built enough strength endurance, movement efficiency and mobility to get through the stations without wrecking yourself.

If you can't hold a decent position on the sled, if your lunges fall apart at 60 metres, if your grip goes on the second carry, then your engine is irrelevant. You'll be recovering in the roxzone while someone with a worse VO₂max jogs past you. Get the stations to a level where they cost you time but not your race, and then running becomes the thing that decides your result.

That's not a compromise position for the sake of sounding balanced. It's what the two best studies in the sport say when you read them together.

I should be honest about the caveats, because they matter. That lab study was eleven people — eight men, three women — running alone on a treadmill with a sled that wasn't competition standard. It measured hand-grip strength as its only strength test and did no lower-body strength testing at all. So it is weak evidence that strength doesn't matter, not strong evidence. Anyone quoting it to prove strength is irrelevant is over-reading it exactly as badly as the people selling you strength standards.

There are no published strength standards for Hyrox. In either direction. If someone hands you a table of numbers you must hit, ask them where it came from.

I would still recommend incorporating strength training as long as it's periodised and as long as you understand that Hyrox is not a strength limited sport but a fitness limited sport. Your ability to produce maximal force in a 1RM back squat has relatively little carry over to pushing a 202kg sled in a men's pro race. The 4 x 12.5 metre lengths for minutes at a time with 100's of muscle contractions specifically demands strength endurance training.

What the research can't tell you

This is the list that should shape how you treat anyone's advice, including mine.

Nobody has studied pacing strategy. The large race-data study says outright that varying Rox Zone distances between events made pacing analysis impossible until standardisation in 2024/25. Every pacing calculator and negative-split protocol out there is coaching craft, not a research finding.

Nobody has studied the roxzone. Never been an outcome measure, in any paper.

Nobody has studied running economy in Hyrox athletes, or how it degrades across a race — despite running being half the race and the discipline most tied to finishing position. That's the most conspicuous gap in the field.

Nobody has studied the biomechanics or technique of any station. No sled friction study, no wall ball economy analysis. Zero. Given how much sled technique content exists online, that's worth sitting with.

Nobody has studied female Hyrox physiology. Three women in the lab study. The survey couldn't do sex-stratified analysis because the female sample was too small. The sleep study was male-only. We have good data on what fast women do in races and almost none on why.

And nobody has studied injury rates, nutrition, doubles strategy, masters athletes, or grip fatigue. If there are any student's reading this then you have some strong ideas for future studies.

So who should you actually listen to?

Not, I'd argue, whoever has read the most recent study. I've just read all nine and I can tell you they don't add up to a training programme. They give you a direction of travel and a lot of honest uncertainty.

The best coaches I know aren't the ones with the most knowledge. Knowledge is cheap now — it's a search away, and half of it is wrong anyway. The best coaches are the ones who've spent years working out how to apply it to an actual person.

That means understanding the energy demands of the sport, yes. But mostly it means understanding behaviour. How to get someone to train consistently for sixteen weeks around shift work and a toddler. How to spot that the reason their sessions have gone flat is a sleep problem, not a programming problem. When to push and when to say the honest thing — that this week, turning up at 70% beats not turning up.

That only comes from volume and variety. Coaching a lot of people, and coaching different people. The 24-year-old ex-rugby player and the 48-year-old who's never run 5km both want to race Hyrox, and almost nothing you do with one applies to the other. You learn that by doing it repeatedly and getting it wrong a few times, not by reading a paper.

It also comes from contact time. I check in at week 1, week 3, and we do a full call at 6 weeks — because a plan written in week zero is a hypothesis, and the coaching is what happens when reality disagrees with it.

Why cookie-cutter plans struggle

A downloadable plan is a reasonable product. It's cheap, it's structured, and for a self-aware athlete with a stable schedule and no significant weaknesses, it can be enough. I'll say that plainly, because it's true and because you should be suspicious of anyone who won't admit it.

But it has one unavoidable limitation: it was written before it met you.

It doesn't know your stations are the thing holding you back, or that your engine is fine and your mobility isn't. It doesn't know you travel for work three weeks in four. It can't tell that the reason you're not adapting is that you're accumulating fatigue faster than you're recovering from it — and it won't back off when it should. That's how people end up injured or burned out with four weeks to go, having done everything the plan told them.

Given the research shows how level-dependent the priorities are — stations costing slower athletes whole minutes while running sorts the sharp end — a single programme sold to everyone is applying one answer to a question that demonstrably has different answers depending on who's asking.

The honest summary of the science is that we don't yet know much, and what we do know says the right emphasis depends on the individual. Which is an argument for coaching, not against it.

Those looking for quick fixes can walk on by. But if you want a plan built around your race date, your equipment, your weaknesses and your actual week — and someone paying attention when it needs to change — that's what I do.

So, is Hyrox a running race?

Yes — but the order matters. Running is where the race is decided, and it's the discipline the evidence ties most closely to finishing position. That only applies once your stations are good enough not to cost you the race. Build the strength endurance, movement efficiency and mobility to get through the eight stations without wrecking yourself, and the running is what separates you. Skip that part and your engine won't save you.

The nine papers

If you want to read them yourself, most are open access:

1. Brandt T, Ebel C, Lebahn C, Schmidt A (2025). Acute physiological responses and performance determinants in Hyrox. Frontiers in Physiology 16:1519240. n = 11.

2. Rappelt L, Wiedenmann T, Held S, Heinke L, Micke F, Wicker P, Donath L (2026). Longitudinal performance development in PRO and ELITE HYROX competitions across the first seven competitive seasons. Frontiers in Physiology 17:1847569. 39,696 results.

3. Villarroel López P, Juárez Santos-García D (2025). High Intensity Functional Training in Hybrid Competitions: A Scoping Review. J Funct Morphol Kinesiol 10(4):365. (Mostly about CrossFit.)

4. Villarroel López P, Agudo-Ortega A, Juárez Santos-García D (2025). Characterization of the Profile of Hyrox Athletes. Applied Sciences 15(21):11693. Survey, n = 80.

5. Fernández-Navarrete I, Ruiz-Alias SA, García-Pinillos F (2026). Detailed benchmarks for every workout and category in Hyrox competition. J Sports Med Phys Fitness. 186,411 results.

6. Fernández-Navarrete I et al. (2026). Hyrox: A Descriptive Analysis of Participation Trends Among Over 275,000 Athletes. Res Q Exerc Sport 97(2):266–272.

7. Rios M, Pyne DB (2025). Integrative Physiological Strategies for Monitoring Demands in Functional Fitness. Sports 13(11):381.

8. Buoite Stella A et al. (2026). Strengthening recovery, enduring sleep. Eur J Appl Physiol 126(6):3473–3480. n = 8, male only.

9. Davids et al. (2026). A Performance Analysis of HYROX. Strength & Conditioning Journal. DOI 10.1519/SSC.0000000000000913.

I coach athletes online across the UK, and in person at Hyrox Training Club Christchurch. If you've read this far and want a plan built around your actual life, drop me a WhatsApp and we'll see if we're a good fit.

Online Hyrox Coaching

Athletes I've coached at Hyrox Glasgow, Istanbul, Cardiff and London — finish times from 0:59:19 to 1:24:28. This is just a small handful of athletes I've coached over the last 3 seasons with over a decade of experience coaching swimming & personal training before that.