We Asked What You’d Change About Hyrox. Here Are the Top 5 Answers.
Ask Hyrox athletes what they’d change about the sport and you’d expect chaos. Shorter runs, longer runs, more stations, fewer stations, scrap the burpees, add pull ups. And sure, all of that showed up.
But underneath the wishlist, the answers kept collapsing into the same five themes. Not format tweaks. Fairness problems. Here they are, ranked by how often they came up.
1. The Judging
Nothing else came close.
Not complaints about individual judges, mostly. Complaints about a system that hands a volunteer a station, gives them a quick walkthrough on the morning, and then asks them to make hundreds of split second calls in a loud hall for hours. One athlete reported watching 100 no reps go down at a single event. Others described the same rep getting waved through in one lane and killed in the next.
The deeper problem is that some stations were never built to be judged cleanly. Burpee broad jumps and wall balls took nearly all the heat, and HYROX knows it. They’ve rewritten the burpee broad jump rule two seasons in a row now, and the latest version allows up to a 5cm stagger between your feet. Which sounds like progress until you picture the reality: a volunteer, mid-race, eyeballing 5 centimetres through a wall of moving bodies. You can’t clarify your way out of a station built on judgment calls.
That’s why the same fix kept coming up from athletes who’d never met each other. Replace gray zones with binary standards. A burpee box jump over instead of a broad jump, because you’re either over the box or you’re not. A line instead of a wall ball target. Pay and certify the judges, or take away the calls that force them to guess.
2. Getting a Ticket at All
Not the price. The process.
Carts emptying at checkout while you’re mid purchase. Resellers grabbing two or three entries and flipping them at a profit within hours. Start times released days before the event, after flights and hotels are booked blind. One athlete called it insane to sit in a waiting room across multiple devices and still lose the race to checkout.
The asks were consistent: a full 12 month calendar, more races per city, permanent venues running monthly events, and a real anti resale system. When finding a ticket becomes a sport in itself, something in the pipeline is broken.
3. The Fast Lane
The most relatable answer on the list. Walkers drifting into the fast lane. Doubles teams running side by side and blocking the track. Getting clipped by an overtaker exactly as you cut in for your station.
Athletes didn’t just vent, they proposed rules. Run left, overtake right. A dedicated walking lane. Penalties for blocking. The running track is the one part of the event with no enforced standard at all, and everyone who has raced feels it.
4. The Wall Ball Target
Separate from the judging issue, the target itself. One height for every athlete in a division, whether you’re 5’0″ or 6’4″. For shorter athletes, especially women under about 5’5″, the throw becomes a different movement entirely. More explosive, less rhythm, higher failure rate at the exact point in the race when you have nothing left.
Proposed fixes ranged from height adjusted targets to the line idea from the judging debate. Either way, the current setup asks two very different bodies to do two different exercises for the same score.
5. The Price
It made the list, but lower than you’d think. Entry fees drew a handful of blunt comments, including one memorable description of an overpriced fee for an hour in a gym hall.
But the ranking tells the real story. Athletes will pay. What they won’t accept is paying premium money for inconsistent judging, a broken ticket queue, and a lawless running track. Fix the top four and the price complaints mostly go quiet.
The Bottom Line
Nobody asked to make Hyrox easier. Almost every answer was about making it fairer. Clean standards, a ticket system that works, rules on the track, and a target that tests the same thing for every body. The format isn’t the problem. The infrastructure around it is what athletes want rebuilt.
