The next big thing in fitness sponsorships: Hyrox

People do some pretty crazy things in the gym. But none feels quite as crazy as competing in a Hyrox race.

Some fitness enthusiasts might already be familiar with the format: Competitors run one kilometer, then complete a workout station including sled pushes and pulls, burpee broad jumps, and wall balls. Then they run another kilometer, then complete another workout station, for a total of eight repetitions in the race.

Sound hard? It’s actually designed to be achievable for people of all fitness levels, according to Enno Eller, global sales director at Hyrox—the course just might take some competitors longer than others to complete.

“It’s a sport for everybody, and every body, and every body composition,” Eller told Marketing Brew. “People used to go to the gym saying, ‘Fitness is my sport,’ but they never really had a chance to compete…Our sport became very famous and is so accessible because it’s basically relying on the seven basic movements of the body.”

Hyrox got its start in Germany in 2017 and started spreading out around Europe in subsequent years, Eller said, but it didn’t truly find a toehold in the US until around this year, after being named to the Time100 Most Influential Companies of 2024. The organization, he said, forecasts that about 1.5 million participants will compete during the 2025–26 season, which will cap off with the World Championships in June.

The fitness industry, both physical and mental, is booming, and consumers are increasingly participating in amateur sporting events, whether that’s Hyrox or lacing up their running shoes to compete in marathons or even Ironmans. Amid the growth, brand marketers are looking for ways to cash in, and some are turning to Hyrox as the next frontier in fitness marketing.

Heavyweights

Hyrox has already inked several major global sports brand sponsors, including Puma and Red Bull, with the latter releasing a docuseries about Hyrox earlier this year.

Eller said it wasn’t always easy selling Hyrox sponsorships in the early days of the competition, but that’s changed; by the time he joined the sales team last year, there was significant interest among endemic fitness brands. Hyrox’s current sponsor lineup includes MyProtein, fitness app Centr, and exercise equipment company Concept2.

This year, Eller and his team have emphasized signing non-endemic brands from sectors like insurance and auto. Some of this season’s race title sponsors worldwide include AirAsia, health insurance company Cigna, Chinese automaker BYD, and financial services company USAA.

“Interest is growing,” he said. “We have insurance, we have banks that we signed for the next season, so for them, it’s more and more interesting to work with us.”

Eller is hoping to get more travel brands on board next, as well as a credit card company, which he considers to be something of a badge of honor: “You’re a true sport if you have a car partner, or if you have a credit card partner,” he said. At least one CPG marketer, Clif Bar’s director of partnerships and activation, expressed interest in Hyrox as a new way to target runners.

Gym community

For sponsors, a big selling point of Hyrox is the supportive community surrounding the competition. Laura Propp, director of advocacy at USAA, said attending a Hyrox race in person sealed the deal for the company to sponsor the Dallas event that took place last month.

“One of our partners and I went up to the World Championships in Chicago this past June, and we were like, ‘Yeah, this is it,’” Propp said. “You could feel everyone there is all about community. They’re about cheering one another on.”

The Hyrox community tends to be valuable to brands for other reasons, too: The average participant is around 33, spends about four and a half hours onsite at Hyrox events, and shells out hundreds of dollars every year on purchases tied to their health, Eller said. There’s a generally even gender split across Hyrox events, and adaptive athletes also compete in Hyrox events. To build brand love early, the organization recently rolled out a program called Youngstars meant for young athletes ages eight to 15.

But Hyrox’s sponsorship pitch isn’t based purely on psychographics. “They had the metrics and the data to prove that they’ve continued to grow,” Propp said. At Hyrox Dallas, where about 17,000 athletes were expected to compete, more than 6,000 came through USAA’s dedicated space, she said.

Eller said that most Hyrox events, some of which serve more than 40,000 athletes over the course of eight or nine days, sell out in minutes.

“It’s like a Taylor Swift concert,” Propp said. “We could see that these were really sought-after events that people wanted to participate in.”

Social-worthy

As with almost any sport, there’s not only an appetite for participating in Hyrox events, but for watching them, too. Hyrox’s four biggest competitions, called majors, are livestreamed on YouTube, and each tends to get more than 100,000 views, Eller said. And while the sport may not be fully ready for prime time TV, it is already primed for social, which could serve as another perk for sponsors.

In addition to tracking engagement with its in-person activation at the Dallas event, Propp said the team at USAA was looking to drive brand awareness on social. The company posted several collab posts with Hyrox, and altogether, its Hyrox social content surpassed its engagement rate benchmarks by almost 40%, according to USAA.

Even though Hyrox isn’t yet fully mainstream in the US, Propp said she liked the momentum behind the sport, and that it represented “something different” for USAA’s sports sponsorship portfolio, which includes a longstanding relationship with the NFL. If concerns do come up with sponsors, Eller said his team is honest about what Hyrox can and can’t offer.

“If you want to have your brand plastered somewhere, and you want to be seen on [TV] , then that’s totally fine,” he said. “That’s a different approach. But if you want to truly connect to a global community that nobody else can give you access to, then probably working with us is your best option if you don’t want to do traditional sponsorships.”