Athens CrossFit Owner Larry Reeves Added Hyrox to Keep Members From Quitting

• AJ Schrag’s first Hyrox camp at his Stamford, Connecticut gym grossed $15,000. His most recent one grossed $30,000.
• CrossFit gym owners in Georgia, Connecticut, and Michigan have added Hyrox classes over the past two years to hold onto members and reach people who never wanted to try CrossFit itself.
• Hyrox counted 1.6 million race participants in 2026, and organizers expect that number to pass 2 million in 2027.

Why gym owners built next to CrossFit instead of walking away from it

AJ Schrag coaches at Catalyst Gym in Stamford, Connecticut. He became a Level 1 Hyrox coach after competing in the sport himself in 2024, then ran his first Hyrox training camp that October. It grossed $15,000. His most recent camp brought in $30,000, double the first, without doubling the marketing spend or the square footage. “You have to build a community around it,” Schrag said. “You can’t do it as an afterthought.”

Schrag is one of a growing number of CrossFit affiliate owners who have added Hyrox programming inside gyms that used to run one style of class. The sport pairs eight one kilometer runs with eight strength stations, sled pushes, farmer carries, wall balls, a format built around movements most CrossFit members already know. What it does not require is Olympic lifting technique or gymnastics skill, which has made it an entry point for people who found CrossFit intimidating from the outside.

An Athens, Georgia box found a way to keep members from quitting

Larry Reeves owns CrossFit Liberate in Athens, Georgia. He affiliated with Hyrox in April 2025 after noticing a pattern: members were aging out of high skill CrossFit workouts, or drifting toward gyms that offered structured group training without Olympic lifts and muscle ups. Hyrox classes gave them somewhere to go inside the same gym instead of out the door. Reeves said the format has become “an opportunity to reach a segment in our city who wanted group training, but not necessarily CrossFit.” Every time a Hyrox race lands near Athens, his gym picks up five to ten new members in the weeks before it, athletes who sign up for race prep and then stick around once the event is over.

A Grand Rapids gym put real money behind the bet

Joe Cebulski runs 8th Day Gym in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He added Hyrox classes at the end of 2025, and membership climbed from a range of 500 to 550 up to a steady count over 600. Cebulski did not treat the addition as a side offering. He bought ten turf lanes and twenty SkiErgs, the same equipment used in the actual competition, so members training at 8th Day would recognize every station on race day. His simulation events, full run throughs of a Hyrox style course held inside his own gym, now gross between $7,000 and $9,000 apiece. “Don’t be cheap and cut corners,” Cebulski said. “Make it look and feel special.”

The shift did not happen overnight. Reeves spent months researching how to run Hyrox specific programming before he affiliated with the brand, pulling equipment lists and class formats from gyms that had already made the switch elsewhere in the country. Schrag competed in a Hyrox race himself before he ever coached one, which he said changed how he built his own camp. He knew firsthand which stations wrecked a first timer’s confidence and which ones built it, and he programmed around that. Cebulski leaned the opposite direction, treating the investment in equipment as the first move rather than the last, betting that members would follow once the floor looked like the real thing.

None of these three gyms dropped CrossFit to chase Hyrox. All three run both programs side by side, treating Hyrox as a second door into a building that used to have one entrance. That is a meaningful shift for an industry that spent a decade selling itself as a single identity. A member can now walk into any of these three gyms and choose barbell cycling and gymnastics one day, then sled pushes and farmer carries the next, inside the same membership.

What a newcomer actually walks into

Most gyms running both programs let a new member try a single Hyrox style class before committing to a membership or a race prep block. A typical class runs 45 to 60 minutes and moves through interval work on a rower or SkiErg, sled pushes and pulls, farmer carries, and lunges, the same eight movements that make up the actual race broken into shorter pieces. Coaches scale the load for anyone walking in off the street, which is the point. Reeves, Schrag, and Cebulski all built their Hyrox programs around people who had never done a burpee in a CrossFit class and had no plans to start, and all three said that group grew faster than the group of existing CrossFit members who simply added Hyrox on top of their normal training.

The numbers behind the bet

Hyrox counted 1.6 million participants across its global race calendar in 2026, and organizers project that figure will climb past 2 million in 2027. For a CrossFit affiliate watching membership plateau or slide after the sport’s post pandemic boom cooled off, that growth curve is hard to ignore. Adding a Hyrox class does not require tearing out a rig or retraining every coach. It requires floor space for sleds, a few SkiErgs or rowers, and a coach willing to program eight stations instead of a single complex workout.

What Reeves, Schrag, and Cebulski describe is less a rebrand and more an expansion, a way to hold onto the CrossFit members they already have while opening a side door for the ones who circled a Hyrox event on their calendar but never signed up for a CrossFit class. Newcomers who want to try either format can typically drop into a single class before committing, and most gyms running both now offer race specific prep blocks in the eight to twelve weeks before a local Hyrox event, the same stretch Schrag, Reeves, and Cebulski all point to as their busiest and most profitable window of the year.