What is a Hyrox gym? The eight stations, the metres and the floor

The quickest way to understand a Hyrox gym is to read the floor. A 25-metre track taped out down one side, two sleds at the end of it, SkiErgs lined up beside the rowers, targets painted on a wall at three metres: once you can name what each of those is for, you understand the whole place. And you'd read the same floor in Berlin, in Rotterdam or in Vienna, because a Hyrox gym isn't a brand or a style of studio. It's an ordinary gym that chose to train one race, translated that race's eight stations into metres and kit, and built the room to match.

If the race itself is new to you, start with what Hyrox is and where it parts ways with the box in Hyrox vs CrossFit. The two stations that prompt the most questions each have a page of their own: the sled push versus the sled pull and the exact distance of the farmer's walk. For the room as a whole, there's a guide to the functional training area, and the track comes down to the right sled-track turf. The rest sits in the CrossFit and HYROX blog. What follows is the concrete version: what a Hyrox gym is, what a class contains, how many metres and what equipment the eight stations ask for, and how to train for Hyrox when the gym you have is an ordinary one.

01What a Hyrox gym is (and what it isn't)

Everything below rests on one fact about the race. Hyrox is eight 1 km runs, each followed by a work station — the same eight stations, the same order, the same distances, the same weights by category, every time it is held. Because nothing about the event shifts, you can train for precisely what the day holds, and a gym can lay out a zone that reproduces the race station by station.

That makes a Hyrox gym nothing more mysterious than a gym equipped to train for that race: the kit for eight stations, somewhere to run or a stand-in for running, and a timetable of classes built on the format. Equally, it is not a chain of gyms, not a studio floored differently from wall to wall, and not a reason to take on new premises. Across Europe, most of them are long-standing gyms, CrossFit boxes or functional training centres that added one zone and a few class slots.

Affiliated gym, training club and "the Hyrox class"

One phrase, three distinct things — worth separating before anything else:

• Affiliated gym. The race organisation operates an affiliation programme for gyms (currently under the HYROX365 umbrella). A centre licences the methodology, follows it, and is listed in the official gym finder. This is what an entrant who wants to train "as per the event" goes looking for.
• Training club, or Hyrox zone. A gym that holds the kit and the floor space for all eight stations and schedules these sessions without affiliating. The training is identical; only the official badge is off-limits.
• The Hyrox class. A 60-minute group session pairing a run or an ergometer with stations. It appears at both of the above and, more and more, at general gyms that own only part of the kit.

From the athlete's side, the deciding factor is fidelity to the format. A complete zone lets you rehearse the race end to end; a standalone class trains the conditioning the format demands, with substitutes filling the gaps.

What a typical session trains

The standard Hyrox class is 60 minutes on a predictable frame: a 10-minute warm-up, a main block of 35 to 40 minutes, then a wind-down. Across the main block, run alternates with station exactly as the event does, only scaled — runs of 400 to 800 metres on a treadmill, track or ergometer, then 2 or 3 stations at the race's distance and load, or a percentage of it. One day's block might be "3 × (600 m run + 25 m sled push + 50 wall balls)"; another's, "4 × (500 m row + 100 m farmers + 40 m burpee broad jump)".

The line between this and any functional circuit comes down to one thing: the stations are the race's own, kept at their real measurements. The sled isn't pushed 15 metres to suit the room — it's pushed 25, because 25 is the number on the day. And that number is what sets the space the gym has to find.

02The eight stations, converted into metres and kit

Here is the official sequence alongside what each station occupies inside the gym. Loads vary by category; only the figures you need in order to choose equipment appear here.

The ergometers: SkiErg and rower

Stations 1 and 5 are 1,000 m on the SkiErg and 1,000 m on the rower — the two simplest to accommodate. Each machine takes under 2 m², needs no particular floor, and stands happily against a wall. All that's left to decide is how many: for a class of 10 in which everyone rotates through an ergometer, 3 SkiErgs and 3 rowers is the minimum that keeps the queue moving.

Sled push and pull: the track

Stations 2 and 3 are 50 m of sled push and 50 m of sled pull, run on the course along a marked track, out and back, behind a loaded sled that in the Open category passes 100 kg on the push and 75 on the pull with the sled counted in. No station shapes the gym's floor plan more, because none asks for as many metres in a straight line: a track 25 m long and 1.5 to 2 m wide, clear of pillars, over a surface that returns the same slide on every repetition.

That surface is where most of the thinking goes. On rubber, a 100 kg sled snags, prises the covering apart at the seams and wears the tiles through within two seasons. On short-pile, high-density turf it travels on a steady, repeatable friction — the only condition under which today's time can be set beside next week's and mean anything. Which is why the sled track is laid on artificial turf rather than the floor serving the rest of the room: it is the surface on which push and pull are trained as the race presents them.

Burpee broad jump, farmers carry and lunges: the runway

Three stations call for the same two things: distance in a straight line, and barely any equipment.

• 80 m of burpee broad jump (station 4): a burpee into a two-footed jump, repeated. It wants only flat floor and a 20-to-25 m stretch to run in sections.
• 200 m of farmers carry (station 6): a kettlebell in each hand, the distance banked in laps around any 20-to-50 m loop.
• 100 m of sandbag lunges (station 7): lunges beneath a 10, 20 or 30 kg bag, by category, along the same loop.

Inside a gym, a single runway absorbs all three: a 20-to-25 m corridor that becomes the sled track when the track is idle, or a parallel strip once a group is on. The equipment list is short — kettlebell pairs at 16, 24 and 32 kg, and bags at 10, 20 and 30 kg.

Wall balls: the wall and the target

The eighth and final station is 100 wall balls — a squat into a throw of a medicine ball at a wall target. It requires a smooth wall, targets marked to each category's height, and balls at 4, 6 and 9 kg. It is the loudest station and the hungriest for "vertical" space, so site it on a wall without windows or mirrors and allow 1.5 m per athlete.

The run: where the 8 km go indoors

Of everything, the 8 km of running sit worst inside a building. Three solutions exist, and most gyms run two in combination: treadmills (one per two members in a class, in short legs), a perimeter track where the room permits (a 25 × 10 m rectangle yields 70 m a lap), and stepping outside at centres with direct street access. A bike ergometer or the SkiErg stands in when the weather turns, though neither recreates the switch from running to pushing — which is the very thing being trained.

03How many metres a Hyrox zone needs in a gym

The answer splits in two: one of each station, or a full class.

Minimum zone: one of each station

A 25 × 2 m track, a SkiErg, a rower, a 3 m wall and a corner for kettlebells and bags is enough to train all eight stations — call it 80 to 100 m² once it's laid out properly. This is the proportionate option for a general gym adding the class without reworking the room, or a box folding the format into its programme.

Zone for classes of 8 to 12 people

For a class to flow rather than queue, every station needs places. The figure that holds up at the centres running it well:

• 2 sled tracks at 25 m (or one at 25 m and one at 12.5 m for the pull, run in shorter lengths).
• 3 SkiErgs and 3 rowers.
• A 20-to-25 m runway for farmers, lunges and burpee broad jump, set apart from the track.
• A 6 m wall-ball wall with four places.
• Treadmills or a track: 4 to 6 treadmills, or a perimeter track.

Totalled, that is 200 to 250 m² of dedicated or shared floor. A separate room isn't required: the common arrangement runs the track and the runway along the long wall of the functional room and sets the ergometers against the short one.

04The floor: what each station asks for

The eight stations don't ask for one floor, and treating them as if they did is among the most frequent errors in building the zone — a single surface laid throughout, then a sled that won't slide or rubber that keeps lifting.

• Sled track: short-pile, high-density artificial turf, glued or tensioned against wrinkling, with friction held constant over the full 25 m. It is the one stretch where the floor is itself part of the exercise.
• Runway for farmers, lunges and burpees: the track's turf serves, or any firm floor — the single requirement being that it doesn't shift, since a floor that yields under a loaded lunge costs you your balance.
• Wall balls: a 15-to-20 mm rubber zone to take the impact of the ball and of a squat performed 100 times over.
• Ergometers: any floor; the sole condition is that they sit level.
• Treadmill running: the floor beneath the treadmills is immaterial; where a perimeter track exists, keep it continuous and free of level changes.

Limited to one stretch of flooring, change the track's. That is where the surface separates training the race's movement from training something that merely resembles it.

05How to train for Hyrox in an ordinary gym

A centre with a track within reach is a luxury many don't have, and most first-time entrants prepare in a conventional gym. It is entirely workable, provided each substitute preserves what its station trains:

• No SkiErg: arm rowing or an assault bike; failing any ergometer, 3 minutes of battle ropes to cover the arm-and-trunk pull.
• No sled to push: drive a plate on a towel, or a slider, across the gym floor for 25 m out and back — the position without the load, with leg press or paused squats supplying the load.
• No sled to pull: a rope tied to a sliding plate, or a standing low-cable row, at 8 to 10 pulls per set.
• No wall-ball wall: thrusters with a medicine ball or kettlebell, the same 100 reps broken into sets of 20 to 25.
• No track: a treadmill at 1% incline over 1 km legs at target pace, stepping off into the station without pause — that handover is itself the session.
• Farmers and lunges: no substitute needed; two dumbbells and a 15 m corridor suffice, the distance banked in laps.

The one element beyond substitution is the transition — running at a high heart rate, then pushing the instant you stop. For that reason, even a plan built around an ordinary gym should route through a centre with a track once every two or three weeks before the race, so that the sled and its real friction arrive as something rehearsed rather than a shock.

06How to turn your gym into a place where Hyrox is trained

For an operator, the order of the build counts for more than the total outlay. The gyms that have put the zone together well have broadly followed one sequence:

1. The track before anything. It is the part that can't be improvised and the part that makes a class a real Hyrox class. 25 m of turf and two sleds, and the programming can begin.
2. The ergometers next. One SkiErg and one rower per 3 or 4 class places, added as demand rises.
3. The wall-ball wall and the loads. Painted targets, balls, kettlebells and bags — the cheapest layer, and the first to run short in a full class.
4. The run. Treadmills or a perimeter track, or a measured 1 km route from the door outward.
5. Programming and affiliation. A fixed class timetable, an 8-to-12-week build ahead of each race, and, for a place in the official finder, the organisation's affiliation programme.

A centre with a track, a weekly class and a build block tends to fill its places inside the first quarter of announcing it. The demand is already present; what most cities lack is anywhere to train the sled station the way the race runs it.

07Frequently asked questions

Is affiliation required to run Hyrox classes? No. A class in the race format can be programmed without affiliating. What affiliation alone permits is use of the name as an official badge and a listing in the organisation's gym finder.

How long is the sled track? The station measures 50 m, out and back along a marked track. A gym typically runs a 25 m track; where space is tighter, a 12.5 m one covered in four lengths.

How heavy is the sled? By category. In Open the push exceeds 100 kg with the sled and the pull 75; Pro sits well above. The floor is the constant — at those loads, the track's friction is what sets the time.

Can Hyrox be trained in an ordinary gym? Yes, substituting for the ergometers, the sled and the wall. The single element worth rehearsing at a centre with a track beforehand is the transition from the run to the sled.

How many metres does a Hyrox zone need? Between 80 and 100 m² for one of each station; between 200 and 250 m² for classes of 8 to 12 with two tracks.

08In short

A Hyrox gym is a gym that has built the race's eight stations and trains them week to week in classes alternating run and station. What defines it is not the licence but the space: a 25 m track over a floor that lets the sled slide, a runway for the loads, ergometers against the wall and a target at three metres. 80 to 100 m² trains the lot; 200 to 250 m² carries a full class.

In an ordinary gym almost every station has a substitute; the transition from running to pushing has none. And for an operator looking to offer it, the track is the first thing to settle, because it is the only part that can't be improvised.

If you're sizing that track, or the zone around it, get in touch and we'll work from your real metres. The rest of the training is in the CrossFit and HYROX blog.