How to Run Your First HYROX Competition in Your Gym

HYROX is everywhere right now, and your gym doesn’t necessarily have to become an affiliate to cash in on the trend.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain Business CEO John Franklin breaks down the “mini sim,” a scaled-down HYROX-style competition any gym can run without paying affiliation fees or buying new equipment.

John walks through the exact blueprint: cutting the running volume, running it as a doubles event to build in referrals and setting a financial target (Two-Brain gyms have made $2,500-$6,000 from their first event).

He covers the week-by-week promotion plan, including real examples of gym posts that sold out events fast.

He also details race-day logistics (staffing, heats, avoiding bottlenecks) and how to turn one-time event revenue into new recurring members.

Tune in to get a complete playbook for running your first HYROX-style event and building an ongoing program members love.

Use the link below to access our complete HYROX toolkit for gym owners!

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HYROX Toolkit

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0:00 - Why every gym should pay attention to HYROX

1:02 - The low-risk way to test the HYROX trend

2:09 - The hidden growth opportunity most gyms miss

4:06 - Planning your first HYROX-style event

5:46 - Where your first participants will come from

7:00 - Real gym marketing examples that worked

8:40 - The promotion mistake that kills event sales

9:26 - Race day secrets for a smooth event

13:35 - The email every gym owner should send

17:02 - Turn one event into long-term members

Transcript

0:03

It's no secret high rocks is everywhere maybe you've been watching from the sidelines and wondering should your gym be a part of it or maybe you've already affiliated but you just haven't capitalized on that investment my feed is littered with high rocks content and search trends are through the roof maybe your members are actually signing up for races or asking if you're going to do anything about it but you just like don't know where to start the gyms making serious money from high rocks didn't start renting out arenas and packing out their classes they started small and simple with a little competition and built up from there. We call this the mini sim and the best part is you can run one without spending a single dollar on Hyrox affiliation fees and I'm going to show you exactly how. I'm John Franklin, the CEO of Two Brain Business, the world's largest gym mentorship company, working with over 3,500 gym owners to help them hit six figures in profit because yes, it's possible. In this video, I'm going to show you how to capitalize on the Hyrox trend starting with your very first mini simulation. Let's get into it. First, let's talk about what a Hyrox race actually is. It's one kilometer of running eight times sandwiched with station work in between. You can do it as a singles race, a doubles race, or as a relay with four different people. A mini simulation is just simulating a full Hyrox race but doing it smaller. If you're not an affiliate, you can't say you're running a Hyrox competition but you can say you're running a high rocks style competition. The thing with high rocks is it's a lot of volume, especially if you're not used to that. It's eight kilometers of running with a ton of work in between. And we want to cut that down, right? The average athlete probably trained somewhere between eight to 16 weeks to prepare for a full race. We don't have that type of time. So we recommend cutting the running from 1K to about 500 meters and doing maybe around six stations, depending on the type of equipment you have. We recommend doing the race as a doubles race, meaning everybody works with a partner. So you and your partner do the runs together, and then you split the actual station work. This is great from a logistics standpoint because you need to buy less equipment or you don't need to buy equipment at all if you got some concept two rowers already. And it's also great because there's a built-in referral mechanism. We see amongst two brain gyms that up to 75% of the participants of mini sims come from outside their gym community. Meaning that you're going to have people who like working out coming into your gym to do a long workout and have this awesome experience. And that doubles element makes it great because people from within your community can bring their spouses. They can bring friends from work, people they've been talking to about your gym already. We recommend when you get started to have a financial target. So at a minimum, the amount of work this involves, you want to generate at least $500. And we recommend charging for members and non-members a minimum price of $25 per person, which means $50 per team. So if you're gonna do $500 in revenue and it's $50 per team, that means you need to sign up 10 teams in advance. If $500 sounds like not a lot of money, here's what we've seen from actual two-brain gyms running this playbook. Lauren DeSessa made $2,500 on her first sim. Nick Flory out in Ohio generated $5,000 the first time he ran this playbook and he's consistently running these events for $5,000 to $6,000 a pop. One of the questions we get asked by two-brain gyms a lot is why would I charge my members for this event? Shouldn't it be included in their membership? And the answer is no. You wanna charge for it like you would any other special event. It requires coaching, staff, planning, sponsors. You gotta work on a Saturday. And if it goes well, it allows you to pay staff to keep doing more of them and do them better. And by the way, if you're already convinced that Hyrox is right for your gym, I want you to check out this free resource we put together. It includes our guide on how to build a thriving High Rocks program, and we also do deep dives with some of the most successful High Rocks gyms within Two Brain. You're not going to want to miss it. To get it, just scan the QR code or check out the link in the description. So now that we have a decent idea of the format we want to run, the price we want to charge, and the financial targets that we have to make this viable for our gym, we want to get into the nitty gritty. The first thing you want to do is set the actual race date. If you're aiming to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 12 teams signed up, you want to cut out a block of your schedule that's going to be between two to four hours long, depending on how much extra activity you want to have before the race and after the race. We recommend doing it on a weekend and setting a date at least five weeks in advance because five weeks gives you enough time to plan, market it properly, go find sponsors and vendors to make the event feel really special, and also give your clients enough time to train for the race and get excited about it. So now that we have the details locked down, it's time to start selling some tickets. And the best place to start is with your existing member base. And depending on where you are and what type of gym you offer, there's going to be a different awareness level of High Rocks. So I'm not going to get into a ton of detail about how to get people excited about High. Rocks, but I will say the easiest way to do it is with a pre-session explanation. Why it's going to be fun, why it's going to be special, why they want to invite their friends and give you $25 of their hard-earned money. Face-to-face is easiest because you can answer questions in real time. Once you get some feedback and understand where your membership base is and some of the objections they have, you can use that information to create an email that you'll send out to all of your clients, asking them to sign up and be sure to drive the point home that this is going to be something fun, not like a super hardcore fitness competition and encourage them to do it with people. Once you've explained it to your membership base and they understand the concept, you've likely sold some tickets already. Now it's time to move to the next phase. You want to do just like your standard social media posts, explaining that you're doing a mini simulation, the date and the cost. And you probably have a large list of prospects. These are people who've signed up for information about your gym or maybe that they were previous members and they canceled. You should shoot an email out to them promoting the event as well. And the beauty of High Rocks right now is that there is a huge, warm, receptive audience that wants to do events just like this. We call these fishing holes. We need to go out and find where these people are hanging out on the internet and we need to speak to them. There are High Rocks specific groups for regions all over the world and you have local Facebook groups that you're probably a member of. This is a great place to put out a post explaining you're doing this type of event and to attract people who are ready into High Rocks in your local market. All this happens throughout the course of a week. So again, first step is getting your members bought in. The second step is getting your prospects bought in. And the third step is going out and throwing a line in the fishing holes, seeing what you can get. The goal in this first week of promotion is to sell 50% of the capacity. So let's say the goal you set for yourself was to sell 10 teams at $50 a pop. By the end of that first week, you wanna have five sold. Now I know I just threw a lot at you. So what we're gonna do now is we're gonna pull up real examples of Two Brain Gyms promoting mini sims out in their community. So let's start with this post from CrossFit1808. They really knocked it out of the park with this imagery. It is them finishing a High Rocks race. They're saying it's a partner competition with limited spots to register now and then they give the date and that it's a double. So you could do a male-male pair, a female-female pair, or mixed doubles which just means one man, one woman. Let's talk about the copy that they used. They said, 1808 Rocks, a pop-up partner competition for those interested in an endurance-based event with low skill. So they're pitching it towards beginners but then the next sentence is that it's a great prep race for High Rocks NYC. So if someone is a little more advanced, that is gonna call it to them. So people within the High Rocks community. It explains the divisions and the teams and then it just asks people to go to this link for the workout and to sign up. That's it. Really simple. Here's an even simpler variant if you don't want to set up fancy registration pages. This is Kevin Parker of Geelong Fitness and his post just says, we have 40 athletes registered for our simulation next Saturday, way more than I expected. This is going to be epic. We still have tickets left, so hit me up to get one. Then somebody sends him a DM and he just sells them the ticket via DM. Really simple, no tech experience required. And the idea is just like not to get hung up on making the most beautiful registration page ever. It's just to get people signed up as quickly as possible. You can figure out some of these other details later. So now that we let the world know about our race, we just sit back, relax, and count our dollars rolling in. Just kidding. So one of the things that we see with gym owners, especially when it comes to marketing their gym, is they'll make a post, they'll get some traction, and then they'll stop because they'll say, I already said that. Everyone obviously knows about my High Rocks event because I posted on the internet once. That is not the case. If you have something that's working, let's say you sent an email out to your list, you sold two or three teams from that, do it again. So literally the next week, you're just gonna repeat that exact same process over again until you've sold out all your teams. So you'll talk to your members, you'll send them an email, you'll post on social media, you'll talk to your prospect list, and then you'll go out into those fishing holes, your Facebook groups, your run clubs, your local High Rocks groups, and you're just gonna continue to promote the event until your tickets are sold. So once you've sold out all your tickets and your teams, panic sets in because you actually have to throw this race now and there's a million logistics running through your head and you gotta figure out what to do and how to make the event run smoothly. This is key for setting yourself up for a second event that people wanna pay you for. So you gotta knock this out of the park. So let's talk about exactly what to do step-by-step. The most important thing to consider for having a great race day experience is removing any potential bottlenecks. High Rocks races are run in heats. So if you've ever done an official one, uh, racers leave every 20 minutes. And what you want to do is you want to build the race about around your equipment constraints, right? So if you only have three ski ergs, you can only run three pairs simultaneously because you don't want a situation where there's people waiting behind other people to finish, to go and do the work. Um, because this is a time to race and people take it very seriously. Um, you can adjust based off of the equipment you have, because again, this is a mini simulation. People aren't expecting to do a full high rocks race. So let's say you don't have a lot of sleds or a great place to do them. Just remove them from your mini sim. If you don't have skis or a ton of concept two rowers, again, you can just remove them or maybe swap them out for something else. The priority is making sure people can move smoothly through the race and not have to stop and be backed up. The other consideration, the other obvious is you want to have a general understanding of, how fast people are going to move through it. And the earlier heats should be your faster athletes with the later heats being the slower athletes. So the fast athletes can move through it while the slower athletes who are going to take longer at each station, um, can go after the fast athletes have passed them. You also want to have your runs and stations mapped out ahead of time. So people are flowing through the space that you have pretty effortlessly. You don't want to have all the people working out in the front of the gym and then have a bunch of empty space in the back. Now that you have the general outline, the logistics, the heats thought out loosely in your head, let's talk about staffing because that is a huge element of having a wonderful race. At a minimum, you're going to want to have an emcee. So this is someone who's calling all the shots, doing the pre-athlete briefing, showing people where the course is, just like the conductor, the, the, the guy in the center of the circus. Additionally, this is going to be a huge media opportunity for your gym. You're going to have a bunch of people coming in to do this special race, smiling, feeling good about themselves. We want to have somebody there who is capturing photo and video. And here's a little pro tip from some of the most successful high rocks gyms in two brain at the finish line, they have a full blown media wall and it has their gym name and their Instagram handle. And people stand there and take a photo and they'll hold a whiteboard with their finishing time. And someone's just taking photos and videos of the team. So that creates some great opportunities for post event promotion that we're going to talk about shortly here. Now that we have the core to the MC and the photo person, let's talk about our nice to haves. One of the really nice to haves is a DJ. So we see people get DJs for these events all the time. It just makes it feel a lot more special than just playing a Spotify playlist like you would any other class, because it is that elevated experience. They are paying in addition. You can do nice stuff like that. And that's what makes it feel premium and worth it and different than just showing up for a class to your members who are paying to be there. In addition, if you're someone from the CrossFit world, you're used to running competitions in your gym, especially during the CrossFit Open. With High Rocks, you wanna have a series of volunteers for each station to make sure that the work is being completed to the standard that you set for the gym. We recommend having one volunteer for each station. So let's say your sim is a 500 meter run with six stations in between. You want to have six volunteers at each station, making sure the movements are done to standard and helping guide athletes on the next part of the course. Some gym owners ask, should I pay my staff? And that is completely up to you. The most common thing that we see is that all the volunteers and staff members get fed, they get coffee, and they get some type of discount to run in the next race if they would like it. Now that we have a general idea of our course and the staff we need to make the event run smoothly, let's talk about what happens pre-race. One to five days before the race, we're going to send what's called a pre-event email. And we have a great one from within the Two Brain community that we're going to share with all of y'all. Let's pull it up and look at it. So let's go through it. And feel free to rip this word for word. Dear athlete, we're excited to welcome you to our High Rock Simulation event on whatever the date is. Please read the following information carefully. So then it's the scheduling and then the start time. So you want to make sure that you are sending this to the heats. So if you have a 9 a.m. Heat, a 9.30 heat, a 10 a.m. Heat, a 10.30 heat, you send a different email to each one so they know exactly when they are starting. The results and splits will be published and emailed to you within 48 hours of the race. Make sure that anyone who is a non-gym member signs a waiver. You talk about spectators and support. That's going to be dependent on you. Same thing, have some type of warning for weather, especially if the event is going to be happening outdoors. I think for most people here, you don't have five true form runners in your gym, so you're probably going to be running outside. And then events, standards, and attitude. So if you're going to have judges, you say judges will be present to ensure the standards are met. And you just want to make sure that if it's going to be a super competitive race, you say that, if it's going to be fun, like, you know, we're, we're here to have fun, have a good time, just mention it, just set the vibe and the tone. So people know what they're getting into showing up for the facilities, explain if you have water, if there's bathrooms, all the stuff that people who've never been to your gym before would want to know, and then put in your location and parking. And then this is important. And it got cut off a little bit. You want to explain that there will be a photographer on site. And by showing up, you are consenting to be photographed because you're going to be taking photos of the event. You're going to use it on your social media. Like it's just a great media opportunity. And you want to just make people aware of that fact ahead of time. Race day is finally here. All these people are in your gym, the volunteers, the MC, the DJ, the athletes. And you're like, well, now what? The first thing you're going to do is get everybody together for a pre event briefing. So that's your athletes. Your volunteer is like, this is the lay of the land. You want to explain how the course works, what the movement standards are and demonstrate the movements if necessary, what the penalties are for not completing movement to the standard and the pre and post race expectations. So if you want them to do something before the race, like take a photo or something, it's like, Hey, we're all going to line up, take a photo and then show up to the start line, uh, five minutes before your start. If you want to warm up before the race, this area over here is designated for warmup. Just that's where you say all that. When you finish the race, we're going to give you a time, go over to our media wall. Steve, our photographer is going to be there. He's going to write your time on a white board and you guys just get a picture together and we'll send it to you. Um, one day after the event, whatever, whatever it may be. So then it's off to the races. And because you watch this video, your race is going to go swimmingly. One thing we recommend is that at the finish line, you give them something to remember the race by. So here's a good example. Lisa Palmer of gas station fitness gives every one of her finishers a patch. And if you've done an actual high rocks, you know that the finishing gift for a high rocks race is a patch as well. So if you're someone from within the community, you're going to absolutely love that. If you don't have time, or don't want to make patches, it doesn't have to be that it could be a sticker. It could be anything, but just something. So they have something physical that they can wear or display to show that they completed the race at your gym and it's branded with your logo on it. So when people see it, they can ask questions. Now that was all a lot of work and it did generate one-time revenue, but now we're going to talk about what happens after the race and how we turn some of that one-time revenue into recurring revenue, because a lot of the spectators and a lot of the participants were likely not members of your gym. The first thing you want to do once the event is over is send a post event email. And let's pull up an example of a good one. Basically, all you want to do is send an email out, thanking them for coming, explain what's going to happen next, offer the people who were not a member in your gym, some type of trial or assessment, whatever your intro thing is like, like give that out so they can come back. And then if you're going to do another SIM or you're doing some type of training program, I recommend putting a call out to that in the email as well. And then the final thing you can just say like, Hey, small businesses like ours really depend on Google reviews. If you had a great time, can you please leave a five-star Google review? And a lot of times people will because they just had an amazing experience at your event. Now, once the email goes out, we're not done. You had a photographer, video person running around all day, collecting all this media. The next thing we want to do is we want to create a carousel, sharing some of the finished times and congratulating all the people who went to the event. Let me show you an example of what that looks like. This is a photo from Lauren DeCesse's gym after a full simulation she did. So you can see here's the team. They're just standing against a black wall and they're holding whiteboards. One whiteboard has the time. The other whiteboard explains what the event was and then just has her Instagram handle on it right there. And if you had 10 different teams, that's perfect for a 10 slide carousel. If you know any of the people, the handles of the people competing, tag them in it because they are going to share it. They're going to use the photo for themselves. They're going to put it on their story. And what happens then? It's just a lot of exposure to your gym. Now, the final piece, you've probably collected contact information, especially if you're making them sign a waiver, which you should be doing for any of the people who were not members of your gym the following Monday. So let's say race days on Saturday on Monday, you're just going to shoot them a quick text and just say, Hey, it's. John from so-and-so gym. Thanks so much for competing at the high rocks event. I just wanted to follow up and see if you had any interest in coming in to try out one of our regular classes. And that's it. I know we just threw a lot of information at you. I don't want you to get bogged down in the details. The idea here is to test if Hyrox is right for your gym, and this is just a low-risk way to do it. You don't have to follow everything we said. The idea here is to throw an event, make a little revenue, and if it works, do more of it. But if you want more information on how to launch a successful Hyrox program for your gym, scan the QR code or go down to the link in the description and you can pick up our how to launch a high rocks program guide along with more detailed interviews with some of the most successful high rocks affiliates within the two brain gym network.