The FitTech Club Podcast

"Competition drives retention" - Christian Toetzke, Founder & CEO Hyrox

• FitTech Club • Season 2 • Episode 9

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🔥 What's in this episode?

800,000 global participants and counting - this is how Hyrox is redefining what motivates people to train consistently. In this episode, Christian Toetzke, Founder and CEO of Hyrox, reveals why the fitness industry's traditional focus on aesthetics and calorie-burning is failing to create long-term member engagement. Discover how Hyrox's competition model is turning gyms from service providers into community clubhouses, driving both member retention and new revenue streams through a powerful combination of athletic purpose and social connection.

🎤 About our guest:

Christian Toetzke is the Founder and CEO of Hyrox, a global fitness competition operating in 36 countries with 800,000 participants worldwide and partnering with over 7,000 affiliated gyms. He leads Hyrox's strategic expansion into new markets and oversees the development of their innovative digital platform for gym operators. Under his leadership, Hyrox has pioneered a unique business model that drives fitness enthusiasts into gyms rather than away from them, transforming how people approach fitness training beyond aesthetics and creating new revenue opportunities for gym operators worldwide.

🎯 What you'll learn

01:12 Growth strategy in emerging markets

02:50 The role of technology in enhancing Hyrox experience

04:55 Business model: Affiliate gyms and community building

09:50 Future growth: B2B vs B2C dynamics

11:29 Creating athletic goals: Motivation beyond aesthetics

17:03 The gym as a community hub

18:11 Hyrox's positioning in the gym market

19:15 Events vs. Other revenue models

19:59 Innovations in technology for events

23:55 Imagining the future of gym experiences

📌 Links & resources

Hyrox: https://hyrox.com/

Connect with Christian Toetzke: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-toetzke-9825a710/

🎧 Enjoyed this episode?

Speaker 1:

Hi, I'm Natalia Karbysheva, founder and CEO of the FitTech Club, a global business club for founders and executives in the fitness and consumer health tech industries. In this episode, we explore how competition-based fitness models are revolutionizing member engagement. Christian Toczka, founder and CEO of Hyrox, reveals how his company's unique approach is turning fitness facilities from transactional service providers into vibrant community clubhouses, while driving significant business growth for gym operators worldwide.

Speaker 3:

So, without further ado, let's dive right in to welcome Christian Totske, the founder and CEO of Hyrex competition, the fitness competition for everybody, in today's FitTech Club podcast. For those who are not familiar with Hyrex, the events are held in 36 countries worldwide. The participants include 800,000 people globally. That's an amazing number and you guys also want to reach 1 million pretty quickly, probably this year already and we have over 700,000 affiliated gyms that work with Hyrex and we'll learn more about this in this conversation. In the next 20 minutes, we'll talk about the future growth areas of gyms, of fitness operators, the role of experiential fitness and, of course, about the technology. So, christian, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2:

Very nice to have me and very nice to meet you, Natalia.

Speaker 3:

Welcome, Christian. Christian, my first question what's your most important project that you're working on right now?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, my most important project is to continue to grow High Rocks into the part of the world where we have no events right now but which are very important market for the fitness industry or where fitness generally is an important sport.

Speaker 2:

So I spent most of my time in developing these last open fields of our growth strategy, which is predominantly India, brazil and China. We had our first event in China, but we have the first ones coming up in India and Brazil. Everyone can imagine these are large, very huge markets. So it's a bit of time and very, sometimes young markets with regards to fitness. So fitness is just at the beginning of becoming a global or a nationwide trend. So Brazil is different, but India, of course, a nationwide trend. So Brazil is different, but India, of course it's a different kind of a challenge than launching a fitness competition in Europe. So that's most of my work time I spend right now and the other part is to achieve our goal to operate 150 events in the 150 biggest metropolitan areas in the world and we are at roughly 85 to 90 right now.

Speaker 3:

So there's a little bit of work to do as well amazing christian hyrax started as a let me call this olympics for fitness. You're now having a more democratic positioning let me put it this way addressing every body, and you're also working a lot with technology. You have Hyrix 360, you're partnering with Feed, so tell us a bit more about what role technology plays in enhancing Hyrix experience for participants.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, first of all, when we started this the core of us we are an offline product. It sounds pretty boring. There's no fancy technology involved. We're not using fancy, modern equipment, digitally connected equipment at the competitions. Everything is like back to the roots core fitness workouts, natural movements but of course, we are using technology to improve the experience of our participants when they come to the event, or the spectators or everyone who wants to get involved with the High Rocks movement and you're mentioning High Rocks 365, which is our digital service to gyms, which I think this is a very important part of this podcast, where we are investing a lot of time and money to create a platform that makes it as easy as possible for every gym and coach in the world to implement group class high-work training into their facility. So that's our main goal to support the gym operators in doing that and providing the best and most complex and most exciting group class training with a very clear aesthetic purpose, which sounds very simple, but that's very complicated, and I think we are probably the first ones who are offering that with that complexity, but also with a very clear athletic goal, because apparently the main purpose for most of the people that are doing this is.

Speaker 2:

I signed up for the event. Now I have to train for it. What's the best training for me? And we want to help everyone on that journey until race day. So you are working with affiliate gyms.

Speaker 3:

Yes, you're working with affiliate gyms 7,000 worldwide and you also started as a B2C event. Now you've moved into B2B, included gyms as part of your ecosystem. So tell us maybe first a bit about this business model. What does a gym need to do to become your affiliate? How does this model work?

Speaker 2:

That's very simple. You think there's a point in joining the High Rocks movement, meaning you want to become an High Rocks affiliated gym. The simplest way is you just go online to highrocks365.com or you go to our website where we are linking you to the gym affiliation program and you can basically sign up online. You can subscribe like you subscribe for Netflix or whatever you do in your private life. Then you will get an invitation. Thank you very much. You're now part of the hyrox gym community and then you get an automatic access to our digital platform, which is what we call our hyrox performance hub, and only affiliate gym members and their coaches have access to this platform. And then that platform has a has different parts. One are tutorial parts, where we explain the gym how to do it, why you can benefit from the partnership, how it helps you to with retention of your members or how it helps you to win new members, which is evenly important because, in the end, how does this help?

Speaker 3:

how does this help specifically? Let's let's say I'm a gym. What do I get out of that if I am an affiliate gym of hyrax?

Speaker 2:

yeah, that's very, very simple. We have this very, very growing demand of people that want to do the events and we are now in almost every city where your members have gyms and operating gyms, so there are now thousands of people that have your members have gyms and operating gyms, so there are now thousands of people that have signed up for the event. Now they need to train for it. So you look around and this is what people have to understand. We are the only existing mass participation event in the world, and this is not only specifically fitness, but which drives people into the gyms and not out of the gyms. I'll give you an example. If you sign up for a marathon you probably don't the first thing you do is not to sign up for gym membership. Actually, I would not recommend it to you to do it because you need to run 20 kilometers or 10 kilometers every day. This is probably not the most exciting thing to do this every day on a treadmill. So you run outside, right, and this is almost the same thing with every product that's existing or was existing before IROX. Now, irox is a competition that's indoor and, as you know, you do all the movements which most of the people do in the gym and it's like circular training. So you do, maybe, a four-meter run, you go on the rower, you do a dumbbell workout, you go back on the runner. This is all stuff you can basically not do outside. You have to do it in a gym. So it brings people into the gyms automatically.

Speaker 2:

And now this is the business you you have as a gym. If you offer the right product, people will choose your gym to get ready for the high-risk competition, and that's how you win new members. And that's the second part of the business. You have existing members that have signed up for the competition and now they want to also train for it, and you create a package for them. It can be a three-month program where maybe a couple of individual coaching elements are included. You also create a community that will then, on race day, will go together to the competition, and this is something you can upsell. So maybe they pay you more money than their normal membership fees. Or you create this community inside of your gym, which creates a fully different kind of loyalty and therefore retention. So either way. So what's the ROI? Yeah, go ahead. Your gym, which?

Speaker 3:

creates a fully different kind of loyalty and therefore retention. So either way. So what's the ROI? Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 2:

I said, either way, it's a benefit for the gyms and when you compare the very, very small fee per month, you pay for the services.

Speaker 3:

Which is how much?

Speaker 2:

50 USD per month, so it's a little less in euros. So if you win one member, it already pays off. If you win one new member to do it and we have all the evidence and proof from now, thousands of gyms around the world that created significant business out of that. Yeah, so it's very simple, it's not very complex. You don't need to invest massive amounts of money because you invest into very, very fancy digital training equipment, which there's nothing wrong with these other trends. But I think, from the business standpoint, what we offer here is probably one of the best business opportunities for gyms to integrate this into your offerings and into your class programs and into training, your offering, including open gym as well seems like a pretty flexible model.

Speaker 3:

So if we do some basic maths, that means that having 7 000 affiliated gyms that pay you 150 bucks per month makes around 12 million revenue per year. So where where's the future growth for hyrax is. Is this rather B2B or B2C as the major revenue driver?

Speaker 2:

No, the first thing is we and this is very important for me to say what we want to create here is one of the largest general sports movements for the general population, for the general public, which means it's from every fitness level. The only comparable product that we have seen, with that demand and success around the world, was the running movement, say, all the marathon events around the world. But that was running, a very, very specific movement, and we touched on this earlier. That doesn't really help the gym industry very much, the popularity of running and run clubs, etc. Because they are all not in gyms. We are doing the same thing now for the fitness community and for the fitness industry, basically Because if we continue our path of success and the majority of the people understand how great it is to sign up for these events and how great the training is of the people, understand how great it is to sign up for these events and how great the training is, it will automatically drive and will have growing the gym membership and and that's my bottom line the gym business. So we're doing this.

Speaker 2:

Are you still there? Sorry, yes, oh sorry, I'm. My phone is saying reconnecting. I was was reconnecting. So our primary goal is to create something and this is very important to understand, where we believe it's probably the healthiest way of training. So when you sign up for a HIROX event the journey to your event day, which is, you spend much more time training for something than the one day when you do the competition, which is, you spend much more time training for something than the one day when you do the competition. So the whole idea of HIROX is to motivate people to get active in the first place to live a healthier life. To live a healthier lifestyle which impacts your longevity and everything. Question question.

Speaker 3:

Question what can fitness operators learn from the rise of competition-based models Like one, two, three? What do you think they're missing and what could they learn from you?

Speaker 2:

the germ operators or german operators yes, yeah, look, it's very simple.

Speaker 2:

The whole germ industry was an amazing success story but was only built. The purpose to do it was burning calories and aesthetics. There's no other sport in the world where this is the primary motivation. I would say 80% of the sports wouldn't even exist if there wouldn't be the benchmarking, competition element to it, because that drives people to play tennis. I don't know anyone who plays tennis just to burn calories. So they play tennis in the end also to play with someone else and maybe to have a game and maybe to beat them.

Speaker 2:

So that was a massive gap in the world of fitness, except CrossFit, which we all know. The story is a very amazing product, amazing brand, but it's a very extreme methodology of training and 98% of the gym membership is not doing that. So for these people there was nothing existing and everyone in the gym industry, when I looked at this, was always looking at what's the next, more music, more technology. So you try to find a motivation to keep the people to continue their gym membership, because I think the churn rate is like three and a half months or something of gym membership, because people sign up in January because they feel bad, they had all the Christmas time behind them and they think now I have to get in shape for summer. They do this for three, four months. They lose the weight and then they stop going to the gym because the other motivation was missing.

Speaker 2:

So what we have done is to give people another purpose and reason to train and, beyond burning calories and aesthetics, suddenly you have an athletic goal. You want to be faster, you want to beat your time and that is a fully different kind of motivation, and I call it creating athletes. So everyone suddenly is an athlete and thinks like an athlete instead of someone who's just burning calories. And that's the core of a new business opportunity for the gym industry, because when you are in that mood, you spend fully different money. Suddenly, you care about your shoe, you care about what you wear, you care about what do I really train? If you just burn calories, you can do the same stuff every day. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 3:

Right, so you kind of unlocked the buying potential for fitness consumers as well. Speaking of which, how do you see the consumer habits have changed through all these years, what you've been observing?

Speaker 2:

Well, I don't know if they have really changed. They have discovered it. So when we came around in the beginning, it was first for the very fit people, the people that, anyway, are going to events and challenges. Now the people have learned that the high rocks is a very tough test, of course, and you should train for it because otherwise it hurts a lot. And many people do it to finish it and not to win it right or to break the world record. Of course not, but it's a great reward just to have this motivation to go out on race day and do it. And I think that's what I see has changed from the elite fitness people to the medium fitness people now to the broad spectrum of people that go into gyms that say, okay, I sign up for this, this gives me a motivation to train also with a different purpose, and I love it. I do it. And suddenly we have a different kind of motivation and what we try to say. So we call it the Affiliation High Rocks Training Club, and that sounds like just a very cool marketing design name. We have a big reason why we're calling it this.

Speaker 2:

Look, I believe that gyms in the next 20 years will become the new clubhouse, the new training, the new look. Where you're at a football club, you're at a tennis club, you're at a golf club, you're a member in a golf club, it's more than just playing golf. You're part of a community. It was a different kind of loyalty, a different kind of retention, and gyms so far have never considered themselves as being a club. They consider themselves as a service provider. It's all about my price point.

Speaker 2:

What offer proximity to my gym? I think you can change that, you can create. You can be the new clubhouse of urban, of urban cities, where people meet. This is your community, this is your club, this is your training club, this is your gym. You go to the competitions together, you meet on weekends, you do group class workouts, you do physical fitness tests, small events in your gym and, when you think about it, the opportunity for the gym operators with regards to retention, loyalty loyalty will always end up also with membership fees, et cetera. It will have the business in a dramatic way and I think we're seeing a little shift of understanding to a fully new understanding of why or how you operate a gym and how this works and what you offer basically and what your competition is with all the other gyms that are in the same city or you're competing with.

Speaker 3:

Is Hyrex forever a gym, or would you say you'd rather cater towards, let's say, say, discounted models or high premium segment? What's your?

Speaker 2:

No, we have a very vast range of gyms that we think fit into Hyrox, let's say you need to be a general gym that provides the general equipment and stuff you need for basic athletic training you need to do for high roads. I'll give you a very extreme it's not an extreme example. But you're a spinning studio, let's say high cycle in Hamburg. I don't think it makes that much sense to be affiliated because you have this one movement which is not part of our competition. So it's very far away from this, which is not part of our competition. So it's very far away from this. But every gym that offers a bit of a range of equipment and the classical dumbbell and cardio areas and functional fitness areas where you can do that kind of training are fitting with us, which is, I would say we made an assumption like 50%, 60% of all the gyms are like this thing Christian, when will? Regardless of price point, right, right. I would say we made an assumption like 50-60% of all the gyms that are existing in the world Christian, when will?

Speaker 3:

Regardless of price point, right, right. So when will the time come that you will start your own Hyrex gyms?

Speaker 2:

Never For a good purpose, for a good reason. We are not competing with any gym operator. We want to be a partner to every gym operator. We want to make it very clear that we are no competition to them. It's the other way around. We want to help them to make better business. If they make better business, our business model will also work. It will make the events more popular. When the event's getting more popular, every gym will benefit because more people will go into the gyms and sign up for a gym membership and we will totally jeopardize that now to become a gym operator, which is a fully different business. As you know, we don't. We have no idea how to run gyms and we don't want to learn it, and we will never do it right.

Speaker 3:

So you have different business models within one, which is, you know, ticket sales, which is working with sponsors, which is working with affiliate gyms, which is B2C and B2B. If you only would be would have to choose one, what would be your preferred model?

Speaker 2:

If I have to choose, I always take the events, because events are what makes us so different the events organically out of the events. We have developed a training methodology because that's what happens when you create events. People say, okay, how do I train for it to be better? That automatically creates a training methodology, but that is always weaker than if you run the event and you own the event. So if I have to choose, I take the events, of course. Luckily, we don't have to do that. We have both business models and we will continue to drive both parts with the same passion.

Speaker 3:

Let's speak a bit about the technology. So you have the Hirex 365 platform. What other tech are you using and what are you planning to implement in your platform in your events?

Speaker 2:

We have an innovative lab. We created a department which is actually looking for solutions, and this always starts with our events to make the events better from the flow, from the experience. So we developed electronic mobile targets with an electronic counter, which we have started to implement at some of our events. It's pretty cool. So you can't at least cheat with accounting anymore, and now we're testing this at the events. We bring this to a standard where we know the technology works and then we are offering it to our gym partners as well. Do you want that in your gym? So when you do a group class, you can see how many wallboards they have done. You can even track this. You can see you could go into the computer and it tells you how many, what the rhythm was, how many, how many, what your break time was between the ship, between your wallboard sets, etc. It's pretty interesting we are working on.

Speaker 2:

The next thing is, of course, digitalized judging. So can you judge movements, more complex movements, with video cameras and AI and, let's say, a wall-to-wall squat? It's not depending on a human judge anymore, it's technology that's judging you. I know this is a big thing in the fitness industry right now. Are there technologies that are judging people and suddenly you can compare, you can even create virtual competitions between gyms etc. Because it's a pretty fair competition, because you can't really cheat anymore, because you have this technology that is judging. So we are looking at this very much.

Speaker 2:

We have another part is this new way of technology that at events that your friends etc can follow you in the moment you can follow you because you see the time. So when you do, when you do the high-risk event, you finish your first kilometer. They see your time of the first kilometer, then you then you get now she finished the ski arc and that's your time right now. The next thing you're working on is that you see this on a map so you basically see where you are. Your friends can see where you are on the race course. And then the second third step is it sounds a bit crazy now but it's possible with face recognition etc. If you sign up for it and you think this is cool, you have cameras in the hall and your friends can follow you the whole time live on video so you mentioned you have a digital and lab, an innovation lab.

Speaker 3:

Is this is it? Is it busy with scouting existing solutions and looking for partnerships, also developing own tech?

Speaker 2:

yeah, it's a bit both, I have to say, just to be fast, etc. We, we often we look around, look around. What are the people already developing? What has already reached a certain level where it will not take three years before it's ready to use, whether at our events or in our gyms. At the same time, we're looking for our own solution because they are so specific that we know no one else is working on it. There's no other way than investing our own money into this, because it's pretty specific for high rocks and for the competition, so why should anyone do it? And that's it's a mix of this, but the priority right in the moment is to find the smart people that already working on smart solutions. That would be a very good fit for us.

Speaker 3:

So, for all founders out there, I think that, christian, you'll get a couple of emails after this podcast, and I hope so as well.

Speaker 2:

No, we love to do that. Everyone should hit us up. When you have a good idea, send us an email.

Speaker 3:

Amazing, look. One of the last questions would be if you're thinking about imagining the gym experience of the future. You already mentioned that it's kind of the third space, you know. It's kind of the clubhouse. What else comes to your mind when you're thinking of a gym in, let's say, five years from now?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm pretty old school in that regard. When you mean, ok, this is super fancy. When you mean, okay, this is super fancy, and let's say it this way, I believe the gyms will be the active clubhouses for the next 20, 30 years. So in five, 10 years, you have decided to go to a certain gym because this is your team, this is your club, this is your community. Some people will choose a very expensive one, let's say, an Equinox-style gym, because they have the money and they want more of the luxury version of it, and other people choose different offerings, which probably will depend on pricing.

Speaker 2:

In the end, I think what we see is there is a massive trend back to group class training and training with other people in the community. Like you train when you're in a football team, you meet. You don't do this alone, right, you meet at certain times a week because that's when your team is training. I really believe that we go back more and more and more to this kind of a trend, away from and it's a mix of this. So people will have three, four times a week their group class training at their clubhouse, which is their preferred gym, and then you mix, you're mixing in at home gym training or some alone open gym sessions, just because of timings and you have to be flexible on this day and you can't do the group class training at 6 pm but your focus, your week, you schedule your week around your training with your other, with your other mates, you know, in the gym.

Speaker 2:

I think absolutely. That will be a dramatic change. If I go still into almost every gym today. In general larger membership gyms, people walk in with their headphones on and they're doing stuff. They're fully alone, they speak to no one, they do their training, whatever their training is, and then they take a shower and walk back home especially in discounters.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely it's not. It's not a social experience. So far, the high level gyms are more of that, but again, it's a different market niche and addressing different people I think the other.

Speaker 2:

I think we will see a massive demand from the market that the gyms will change their thinking and how they're configurating their space more into that direction, because the demand is there and the people are asking for it. And then everyone adapts to the market needs, right, and that's a great tool because gyms don't need to be crazy expensive, expensive and you have an amazing second home where you can spend a lot of your time and you, you meet great people and you socialize and you live a healthier lifestyle. So let's say, maybe 30 years ago people were, you had your your, you had your bar around the corner right where everyone was meeting on weekends or after work and then it was about drinking and smoking. Now they stopped smoking. No one smokes anymore, it's not allowed anymore and now we have this trend that people also drink no one's drinking, no one's socializing, so gym could absolutely be that one, that place and that's a massive opportunity.

Speaker 2:

Think about it, what that means for the gym industry.

Speaker 2:

If, if this is suddenly a meeting place, not only a place to go for this one hour of training, and you see that the big gyms, the new concepts are they have a coffee bar, they have an area where you can meet after your training. It goes already in that direction right, and now we are creating the event culture you need for that new kind of movement. And then we have what every other sport had in football in our world. You have all these kinds of leagues from older guys playing soccer on a very low level, but in the end it's all about doing something together and then having fun afterwards. I think we can create that in fitness and with gyms, especially with the competition culture. I think we can create that in fitness and with gyms, especially with the competition culture, and, voila, you will have a fully different business model, which I think is also it's important. I think the business model will be also very, very efficient and very profitable, because you don't need to invest into crazy expensive machines to be a really very cool training club Suddenly.

Speaker 2:

Other elements are much more important how you create a community Right, which is social connection accountability meeting new people hanging out Correct Right, Instead of buying another 20,000 euro machine where one person at a time can train on.

Speaker 3:

Right Christian. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciated your input. Thank you a lot.

Speaker 2:

Thank you very much.