A sled scraping across a concrete floor. Wall balls against a wall, until your arms give out. A time on a big clock, with #hyrox underneath. It's turning up in the feeds of people who a year ago just went running or spent an hour in the gym. Now they train for it for months. They sign up for a race in a hall in Mechelen, Amsterdam or Hamburg. And they post every step of the way there. Three years ago you still had to explain what Hyrox was.
From niche to mass sport
Hyrox has only existed since 2017. In a few years it's broken out of the margins. The format is the same everywhere: eight one-kilometre runs, each one split by a strength station. Sled push, rowing, lunges, wall balls. For 2026, more than 2.5 million participants are expected worldwide — more than all the world's marathons combined. The official Hyrox account sits above 900,000 followers. Below it sits a thick layer of amateurs who share every training session and every race. From London to New York, the races are sold out.
Why this concerns us
It was amateurs who filled our feeds with Hyrox, not pros. People with a job, a family and a race on the horizon. A runner from Hasselt preparing for his first Doubles race. A crossfitter making the switch. They train it and share it because they're right in the middle of it. That's exactly the profile of a sportfluencer. How athletes like that share their build-up, we covered earlier behind the scenes with fitfluencers. At Sunday Squad we work with athletes who share their own sport, not with people who play a sport for the camera. For a while Hyrox sat under fitness with us. At some point that catch-all stops covering it.
What we did
So Hyrox is now on the list of sports on your profile. And from now on you can set a main sport: the sport that says what you're really about. For a collab, that makes the difference. A brand looking for Hyrox athletes finds them right away now. They used to be buried in a big pile of fitness.
A sport that put itself on the list
Do you do Hyrox? Set it as your main sport. Then your profile says what you actually train, and the right collab can find you. For brands, there's now a community standing ready that names itself: athletes who see Hyrox as their sport. We didn't add Hyrox because it looked good in the market. The sport put itself on our list.