150 events in the 150 biggest cities, and HYROX is at 85. Co-founder Christian Toetzke on why a race fills gyms instead of emptying them.

Recorded in 2025.

The fitness industry built itself on burning calories and aesthetics. Christian Toetzke's argument is that no other sport in the world runs on that motivation, and that this is the reason the average gym membership does not survive the spring. His alternative is a dated external goal that a member trains toward, which changes both how long they stay and what they will pay for.

Toetzke co-founded HYROX in Hamburg in 2017 with Moritz Fürste. It runs a standardised indoor fitness race, the same format in every city it enters, and licenses the training programme behind it to affiliated gyms through HYROX 365 for a monthly fee. Before HYROX he built and sold a mass-participation cycling event business, so he has taken the same thesis into two categories.

In this conversation:

- Why HYROX is the only mass-participation format that sends people into gyms rather than out of them

- What a gym has to package and sell before the affiliate licence pays for itself

- Why Toetzke will never open a HYROX gym, and what that decision protects

- What the gym industry gets wrong about the motivation it has been selling for forty years

- Why he thinks the profitable gym of the next decade owns less equipment, not more

Chapters:

00:00 Why an athlete spends differently

00:28 Christian Toetzke and the HYROX model

01:23 The three markets still missing

02:39 Why the product is deliberately offline

04:08 How a gym becomes an affiliate

04:40 The only race that sends people into the gym

08:35 The motivation the gym industry never sold

10:44 From elite to everyone

11:50 Which gyms the format actually fits

12:29 Why HYROX will never open its own gyms

14:00 Electronic targets and machine judging

16:09 The gym as the place your week is built around

18:12 Why the profitable gym owns less equipment

Links:

• Christian Toetzke on LinkedIn
• Hyrox
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Apply to join FitTech Club