Joe Marshall · 31 August 2026

Hyrox Searches Grew 38x. 70,000 People Chased 16,000 London Places.

Hyrox is the steepest growth curve in this series and the only one that stops: UK searches went up 38-fold, then flat for a year. That is not a sport peaking, it is one that ran out of race weekends. What a capped headline event does to everything around it.

Hyrox Searches Grew 38x. 70,000 People Chased 16,000 London Places.

This is the fourth of these I have written, and Hyrox has the steepest curve of the lot. It also has the only one that stops.

Hyrox grew 38 times over, then stopped deadUK searches per month for "hyrox", 12-month average for each year to June. 2026 is the year to April.Three years of the steepest growth in this series, and then a completely flat year. The interesting question is which kind offlat this is: a sport that peaked, or one that has run out of places to put people. The rest of this post is about that.2,900202218,100202360,5002024110,0002025110,0002026no growth for a yearSource: Semrush UK database, August 2026. Each year is a 12-month average, so this summer is not yet counted.

UK searches for "hyrox" went from 2,900 a month in the year to June 2022 to 110,000 three years later. That is a 38-fold increase, roughly double what padel managed over a comparable stretch.

Then it did nothing at all. The year to April 2026 came in at exactly the same 110,000.

A flat year after a run like that is usually where someone writes the sport off. I do not think that is what this is, and the rest of the data is fairly clear about why.

Where the demand came from

First, worth being precise about what grew. Hyrox has not floated up on a general boom in group fitness. It has taken the demand off the formats that came before it.

A changing of the guard, not a rising tideUK searches per month for the three gym formats, 12-month average for each year.In 2022 CrossFit was seventeen times the size of Hyrox. It is now a third of it. F45 has almost halved. Group fitness did notget bigger so much as it moved, which matters if you run a gym built around one of the formats going down.HyroxCrossFitF45025k50k75k100k125k20222023202420252026110,00018,1006,600Source: Semrush UK database, August 2026. Same 12-month averages as the previous chart.

In 2022, CrossFit was seventeen times the size of Hyrox in UK search. CrossFit is now on 18,100 a month and falling, F45 has gone from 12,100 to 6,600, and Hyrox is on 110,000.

If you run a gym, that is the chart to sit with. The total pool of people wanting structured group training has not tripled. What they are asking for has changed, and it has changed quickly enough that a business built around the 2019 answer is now marketing into a shrinking term.

Why the line went flat

Here is the part that makes Hyrox different from the other sectors in this series.

The calendar is not growing anything like as fast as the queueHyrox athletes and race weekends per season, worldwide. Indexed so that the 2024/25 season = 100.Athletes have more than tripled across three seasons. The number of race weekends is up by less than half. There are only somany weekends in a year and only so many arenas, which is the whole story of this sector in one chart.AthletesRace weekends1000.57m100742024/252631.5m1421052025/263512.0m1451072026/27athletes forecastSource: Hyrox published season figures via industry reporting. The 2026/27 athlete number is the organiser’s own forecast.

Across three seasons, Hyrox athletes went from 570,000 to 1.5 million, with two million forecast for 2026/27. Race weekends went from 74 to 105 to 107. Demand more than tripled. Supply is up by less than half.

And unlike the constraints in the earlier posts, this one does not have an obvious way out. Padel could build courts, and did. Matcha could plant more tencha, and is, on a five-year lag. Hyrox needs arena-sized venues on weekends, in cities people can travel to, and there are only so many of both. The organiser's answer has been to stretch single events into multi-day residencies, which tells you how hard the ceiling is.

Four and a half people for every place in LondonApplicants and available places in the Hyrox London ballot.This is the number that answers the first chart. Search demand stopped growing because the sport ran out of room, notbecause people stopped wanting in. Fifty-four thousand of these applicants did not get a place.Applied70,000+Got a place16,000Source: Hyrox London ballot figures via industry reporting. UK races typically sell out two to three months ahead.

London now runs a ballot. Sixteen thousand places, more than seventy thousand applicants. Roughly fifty-four thousand people asked to spend money on this and were told no.

That is the answer to the flat line in the first chart. Search demand stopped growing because the sport ran out of room. There is no version of "Hyrox has peaked" that also explains a four-and-a-half-times oversubscribed ballot.

Which is the opportunity

Fifty-four thousand people who wanted to race in London and cannot are not going to stop training. They will do the next race, or train through the year for the next ballot, and almost all of that happens in a gym.

The race is full. The training around it is wide open.UK monthly searches, cost per click and keyword difficulty across the Hyrox cluster.Difficulty is out of 100. The big head terms are properly competitive now. Everything a gym would actually want to be foundfor sits between 17 and 27, because these terms did not exist in any volume two years ago.General interestWhat a gym or coach can winMonthly searchesCost per clickhyrox workout22,200£0.32difficulty 56hyrox london18,100£0.99difficulty 30hyrox training3,600£0.63difficulty 52hyrox tickets2,900£1.52difficulty 59hyrox training plan2,900£0.49difficulty 52hyrox near me2,400£0.85difficulty 17hyrox gym near me1,600£0.98difficulty 20hyrox gym1,300£1.08difficulty 27hyrox classes720£0.85difficulty 24Source: Semrush, UK database, August 2026. Volumes are the 12-month average to April 2026.

The head terms have caught up with the sport: "hyrox" itself is at difficulty 62 and "hyrox workout" 56. Fine, those were never realistically yours.

Everything a gym would actually want is sitting between 17 and 27. "Hyrox near me" does 2,400 searches a month at difficulty 17. "Hyrox gym near me" does 1,600 at 20. "Hyrox gym" does 1,300 at 27. Those are local, high-intent terms attached to a recurring membership, and they are that cheap only because two years ago they had no volume worth chasing.

Two things I would do if I ran a gym:

Say the word on your website. A surprising number of gyms running Hyrox-style sessions describe them as "functional fitness" or "conditioning". People are not searching for that. They are searching for Hyrox by name, near them, and if the word is not on your site you are invisible in the only search that matters.

Sell the training, not the race. You cannot sell someone a place in a full event. You can sell the twelve weeks in front of it, and to the far larger group who did not get in at all. The demand that the ballot turned away has to land somewhere.

The wider point

Four sectors in, the pattern that keeps repeating is not "demand is growing". Demand is growing everywhere. It is that demand and supply move at different speeds, and the gap between them is where the commercial opportunity sits.

What is different here is the shape of the ceiling. Air conditioning and padel can be built out of. Matcha has to be grown out of. Hyrox is capped by the calendar, and a capped headline event pushes its demand sideways into everything around it: gyms, coaching, kit, training plans. When you find a category where the flagship product has sold out, the money is usually in whatever people do while they wait.

We will keep pulling these apart sector by sector. If you want to know what the search data says about yours, come and ask us.

Sources

  • UK search volume, cost per click and keyword difficulty: Semrush UK database, pulled 17 August 2026. Figures are 12-month averages, so this summer is not included.
  • Athletes, race weekends and the London ballot: Hyrox published season figures via industry reporting. The 2026/27 athlete figure is the organiser's forecast.