What keeps people training is competition, not encouragement

In a University of Pennsylvania study comparing what keeps people exercising, competition beat other forms of social interaction as a motivator — direct community support and social media accolades included. Mental performance consultant Luis Torres explains the stacking: on top of the dopamine from exercise itself come the community, the energy of the event, and the feeling of having completed something.

The numbers follow. Hyrox went from an estimated 550,000 participants in 2025 to around 1.8 million this year, with 2.5 million projected for next year. The CrossFit Open, launched in 2011, had become the largest single participatory sporting event in the world by 2018, drawing close to half a million competitors.

Why did this wave survive when the last one did not?

This field has collapsed before. Tough Mudder went bankrupt in 2020, Spartan Race failed as a television sport, CrossFit became mired in controversy. Hyrox filled the gap not by inventing new movements but through standardisation: sled push and pull, farmer's carry, rower, SkiErg, burpee broad jump, sandbag lunges, wall balls — eight stations with a one-kilometre run between each. The event is the same wherever you race it.

Why does standardisation matter so much?

Keith Barlow of media agency Fittest PR puts it plainly: every great sport has a scoring system people immediately understand. A marathon has sub-three hours. Hyrox has sub-60 minutes. Once a single benchmark exists, a first-timer knows where they stand. In a sport where the yardstick keeps moving, no amount of effort tells you your position — and without that, competition never gets off the ground.

What about someone training alone in a gym?

The mechanism works without an entry fee. It needs three things: fixed movements, one shared ruler, and something to measure against. The Big 3 already delivers the first — squat, bench and deadlift are the same lifts in every gym on earth. The second is the problem. A 500 kg total means something entirely different to a 60 kg lifter than to a 100 kg one, and compared raw, the heavier lifter always wins.

That gap is exactly what a relative strength score fills. Normalise a Big 3 total against bodyweight, sex, age and height and you get one number that measures different bodies with the same ruler — doing in a gym what sub-60 does at Hyrox. The calculator runs without an account.

What if competing puts you off?

The thing you compete against does not have to be another person. What the research points at is that motivation strengthens when there is a measured target, and that target can be your own number from three months ago. Physical culture historian Conor Heffernan reads the spread of these events positively: more people take up strength training, and the motivational pull of competition makes them likelier to stay.

Competition is an ignition, though, not a programme. Getting training down to the level of a habit is covered separately in exercise as a hygiene habit.