Stamford Gym Owner Turned Hyrox Sundays Into an Extra $80,000 a Year

• Joe Baglione, who owns Catalyst Movement in Stamford, Connecticut, built a Sunday Hyrox training camp using equipment he already had and now brings in an extra $80,000 to $100,000 a year from it.
• The camps grew out of a chance conversation with a coach who was already running Hyrox sessions for 30 or more people at a nearby corporate gym but had nowhere to hold official training.
• Catalyst’s approach, built around the actual Hyrox race calendar rather than a generic bootcamp class, points to how small independent gyms are turning a sport built for racing into a steady source of local business.

A capped membership gym found its growth on the one day nobody else wanted

Joe Baglione had a problem most gym owners would take. Catalyst Movement, the strength and conditioning gym he owns on the ground floor of a nine story residential building in Stamford, Connecticut, was full. He capped membership at 150 people, charged $250 a month for unlimited classes, and kept a waitlist of eight to ten people most days. There was no obvious way to grow revenue without cramming more bodies into a room that was already busy from morning through night.

The opening came from a program that had lost its shape. Catalyst’s bootcamp track, called Burn, had drifted into what Baglione calls generic sweat sessions, cardio classes with no real identity next to the gym’s strength focused Build program. Around the same time, a coach named AJ Schrag walked in. Schrag was already deep into Hyrox, a sport that pairs eight one kilometer runs with eight functional stations such as sled pushes, wall balls and rowing. He had raced it himself multiple times, was coaching Hyrox style sessions at a corporate gym down the street and ran a local run club that regularly put close to 100 people on the road. He could not run official Hyrox programming at the corporate gym under its company policy, so he asked Baglione for a place to do it instead.

Building a season around a race calendar, not a class schedule

Baglione gave Schrag Sunday mornings. It became the gym’s most profitable day almost immediately. Hyrox moves through cities the way a touring event does, with New York drawing more than 30,000 athletes over a week at the piers each year, and Baglione built his camp calendar around that rhythm rather than running it as a standing class. His season runs from January through Hyrox New York in late May or early June, with two camps a month on Sunday mornings from 9:30 to 11:30, roughly 16 sessions a year, drawing about 75 people a session and more in the weeks before the New York race itself.

Pricing works the same way a race training group’s would. A single session runs $35, but most people buy a pack: $180 for six sessions, $220 for eight, $250 for ten. The packs sell out quickly. Baglione expects the camps alone to bring in $25,000 to $30,000 this season, on top of what the format does for the rest of the gym. As the group of committed racers grew, some athletes started asking Baglione to write them individual Hyrox programs beyond the group camps, and those clients tend to train more often and move up to higher priced memberships, bringing friends into camps and classes behind them.

Turning down the brand, then affiliating on his own terms

Becoming an official Hyrox Training Club costs about $150 a month, and Baglione did not sign up right away. He wanted proof the format worked before he attached another brand’s name to his gym. Once the Sunday camps were consistently drawing 75 people, a Hyrox representative visited, saw the room and suggested Catalyst apply for official status. Baglione waited another six months before he affiliated. Once he did, Hyrox featured Catalyst in its newsletter, the gym received early sign up codes for races, and being a Training Club became something members brought up on their own rather than a line on a membership packet.

He also upgraded his equipment to match what athletes would actually race on, buying the same sleds, wall balls, sandbags and kettlebells used at Hyrox events, so members could train, in his words, with the exact gear they would meet on race day. That detail counts for more than it might sound. A gym that already owns sleds, rowers and sandbags for a general strength program does not need to buy anything new to start; Baglione’s camps ran for months on equipment Catalyst already had before he spent a dollar on Hyrox specific gear.

What it means for gyms chasing the same opening

Catalyst’s story is a small window into a larger shift happening at independent gyms across the country as Hyrox keeps adding new race markets, including debut events in Tampa, Denver and Nashville this fall. A gym does not need a corporate partnership or a six figure equipment order to build a program around it. Baglione’s advice to other owners is blunt: find the nearest Hyrox event and work backward 12 to 16 weeks, block two Sunday mornings a month, and either develop a coach already inside the gym who loves endurance and competition or go find one training locally for the same race. Offer the first sessions free to existing members and let them bring friends before charging anyone new.

The math is simple enough for a small independent gym to copy without a marketing budget or a franchise agreement. Baglione did not need a second location, a new lease or a loan to add $80,000 to $100,000 in yearly revenue. He needed a coach who already loved the sport, two open Sunday mornings a month, and a willingness to build the schedule around an actual race weekend instead of an open ended class. That combination is available to almost any gym sitting near a growing Hyrox market, whether the nearest race is three hours away or three states over.

What started as a favor for a coach with nowhere else to run his sessions is now a real second revenue stream for a 150 member gym that had otherwise hit its ceiling. Baglione did not rebuild his business around Hyrox. He built a Sunday morning program around equipment already sitting in his gym and a coach who was already doing the work down the street, and let a growing sport do the rest.