At the HYROX World Championships in Stockholm, Sustain Health had the exclusive chance to see the latest performance offerings from PUMA, amazfit and adidas up close with our team, and the timing could hardly have been better.
Hybrid fitness no longer looked like a fringe obsession for people with a suspicious fondness for wall balls. It looked like the next fully formed performance frontier: fast, technical, data-led and dressed with the quiet confidence of a sport that knows it is no longer waiting for permission.
On paper, HYROX remains gloriously blunt. Run a kilometre. Complete a workout station. Repeat until your lungs begin negotiating with your ambition. It is simple in the same way golf is simple: hit a small ball into a distant hole while your brain quietly sets fire to itself.
But Stockholm showed just how sophisticated the sport has become.
The best competitors are no longer relying on a stout engine and a high tolerance for misery. They are bringing together pacing strategy, specialist footwear, strength-endurance programming, recovery data and race intelligence with the sort of precision once reserved for Formula 1 garages and major championship golf bags.
Being there in person mattered. You cannot properly judge HYROX performance kit from a glossy product image, a spec sheet or a launch table lit within an inch of its life. You need to see it in the arena, under athletes who are running hard, dragging sleds, attacking stations and trying to keep their race plan from unravelling somewhere around the burpee broad jumps.
And in Stockholm, three brands were impossible to miss: PUMA, amazfit and adidas.
PUMA Made Stockholm Feel Like A Podium Fitting
PUMA did not merely turn up at the HYROX World Championships. It planted a flag, laced up something fast and started collecting evidence.
Across elite races, relays and age-group categories, the brand’s athletes produced a championship week with enough polish to make a marketing director start breathing into a monogrammed paper bag.
From our vantage point in Stockholm, PUMA’s presence was not theoretical. It was there in the warm-up areas, in the race lanes, on the podiums and under athletes who were asking their footwear to do something wonderfully unreasonable: run quickly, stay stable under load and keep behaving when fatigue had started kicking furniture around the room.
The standout result came through Jess Pettrow, who helped Australia win the Mixed Relay for the second consecutive year in a winning time of 50:19.
That number looks neat and manageable on a results sheet. In reality, it was produced in the sort of physical environment where sleds feel personally vindictive and wall balls appear to have been designed by someone with unresolved emotional business.
Pettrow had already finished fourth alongside Joanna Wietrzyk in the Women’s Elite 15 Doubles, which made her relay victory feel less like a late flourish and more like the closing note of a properly ruthless weekend.
Wietrzyk added serious Australian weight to the championship story. After that doubles performance with Pettrow, she finished second in the Women’s Elite 15 Solo race, ending a season in which she broke the world record twice and completed a clean sweep of the HYROX Majors.
That is not momentum. That is competitive vandalism in carefully measured trainers.
PUMA’s wider roster also made itself useful. Great Britain’s Lucy Procter secured second place in the Women’s Elite 15 Doubles, Linda Meier finished second in the Mixed Relay for Germany, while Jake Williamson and Hunter McIntyre took second in the Men’s Elite 15 Doubles. PUMA athletes also earned five further podium finishes across the age-group categories.
Those age-group performances matter more than a casual observer might realise. HYROX has built much of its appeal on the fact that everyday competitors race the same format as the elite field, often over the same weekend, usually with the same blend of courage, poor pacing and internal bargaining.
In that environment, kit is not admired under studio lighting. It is judged while people are tired, sweaty and discovering uncomfortable truths about their hamstrings.
Why The HYROX Shoe Has Become A Serious Object
The rise of the HYROX-specific shoe may be the clearest sign that hybrid fitness has entered a new stage.
This is not road running. It is not conventional gym work. It is not CrossFit in different wallpaper. HYROX asks footwear to perform a peculiar list of duties: run efficiently, grip hard, stay stable under load, cope with lateral movement, survive functional stations and keep the athlete secure when their legs have started behaving like unreliable witnesses.
PUMA’s response is the Deviate Elite HYROX, a performance shoe engineered specifically for HYROX racing. In Stockholm, it had the cleanest possible demonstration: athletes wearing it while winning medals and moving well under pressure.
Seeing the shoe in that setting made the point better than any product description could. The challenge is balance. Too much softness and lunges start to feel like stepping through pudding. Too much rigidity and every run becomes a small act of revenge. A credible HYROX shoe has to live between racing speed and training stability, which is not a comfortable neighbourhood.
PUMA also took the experience beyond the elite field. Its NITRO™ Lab arrived in Stockholm, where more than 100 pairs of Deviate Elite HYROX were won by the community. More than 500 people also joined a shakeout run that finished at Gröna Lund theme park.
That says plenty about the modern performance event. It no longer begins and ends with timing mats. It spills into the city. It becomes a moving congregation of compression socks, recovery drinks, split-time theories and people discussing station strategy with the grim urgency of a Treasury briefing.
A new colourway of the PUMA Deviate Elite HYROX will be available globally from 1 July on PUMA.com, in PUMA flagship stores, at HYROX events, on HYROX World, and through selected retailers across North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia.
amazfit Brings The Control Room To The Wrist
If PUMA brought podium presence to the HYROX World Championships in Stockholm, amazfit brought the dashboard.
The wearable brand used Stockholm to show its HYROX-focused ecosystem built around the amazfit Balance 3, Balance Ultra and Zepp App. This was not a general sports watch wandering into hybrid fitness with a borrowed pass and a hopeful expression. amazfit has worked with HYROX and taken input from top athletes to shape features around the specific demands of the sport.
That matters because HYROX is difficult to measure neatly.
A standard running watch can tell you pace, distance and heart rate. A gym tracker may handle reps and workload. HYROX requires a more integrated picture: endurance, strength, station performance, race pacing, transition efficiency, recovery, stress, sleep and the slow collapse of reason somewhere near the burpee broad jumps.
The updated Zepp App acts as the operating room. Training Balance and Weekly Focus tools help athletes assess sessions through strength and endurance demands, while subjective fatigue feedback gives users the chance to add something no sensor can fully understand: how grim it actually felt.
That is not a gimmick. A training file can say “productive”. The athlete can say “I saw my ancestors during the sled pull.” Both pieces of information have value.
amazfit has also introduced Hybrid Charge, a feature designed to estimate an athlete’s current energy level for hybrid training. It considers training load, general activity, recovery, sleep and stressors such as work intensity, lack of time, illness or reduced wellbeing.
That is where the system becomes more interesting than a simple race tracker. Serious preparation rarely falls apart because of one poor session. It more often erodes quietly through work stress, poor sleep and accumulated fatigue, all nibbling away while the athlete insists everything is under control.
Race Strategy Is Now A Wearable Feature
amazfit has expanded its HYROX Training Library within the Zepp App, allowing athletes to download hybrid sessions directly to the Balance 3 and Balance Ultra. These include different difficulty levels and race-specific formats such as HYROX First Half Simulation and HYROX Second Half Simulation.
That should appeal to anyone who has discovered that the first half of a HYROX race is where ambition starts writing cheques, and the second half is where the body asks to inspect the account.
The Balance 3 and Balance Ultra also include HYROX Training and HYROX Race modes. The standout feature is HYROX Virtual Pace, which allows athletes to see whether they are ahead of or behind their target strategy by seconds, while showing how much time remains to complete each running lap and workout station.
In a sport where pacing is part arithmetic, part self-knowledge and part not behaving like an idiot in the opening kilometre, that could be genuinely useful.
After racing, athletes can compare running splits and workout stations against average competition performances. This turns vague disappointment into exact disappointment, which is progress of a kind. More importantly, it helps competitors understand where time is actually being lost: on the run, in the Rox Zone, during transitions, under load or during that heroic opening burst that looked magnificent until the invoice arrived.
The amazfit Balance 3 is priced at £369.90, placing it as a competitive option for athletes who want HYROX-specific training, pacing, recovery and race analysis without wandering into the more alarming end of wearable pricing.
“HYROX is the fastest-growing sport in the world. However, its rapid growth and professionalisation mean that competition is becoming increasingly intense. At every stage—training, recovery, and competition—every detail matters. Our ecosystem tracks and analyses these elements, helping athletes reach the next level in hybrid sports”, adds Jesús Carrero.
adidas Enters The Hybrid Footwear Argument
While PUMA had the podium sheet and amazfit had the intelligence brief, adidas used Stockholm to sharpen its own hybrid performance story with the Adizero Dropset Pro.
The new shoe enters the adidas Training line-up as part of the Adizero Dropset franchise, aimed at athletes who refuse to choose between running speed and strength work because modern training has rather inconveniently decided it wants both.
The Adizero Dropset Pro blends speed-focused Adizero thinking with the stability-led DNA of Dropset. That is precisely the territory hybrid athletes are now hunting: light enough for fast movement, planted enough for loaded stations and controlled enough for the messy moments when fatigue starts offering tactical suggestions.
Seeing adidas present the shoe around the HYROX World Championships made sense because Stockholm was not a gentle showroom. It was a live stress test for the whole hybrid category. This is where the difference between genuine versatility and marketing optimism becomes painfully visible.
The launch follows the earlier Adizero Dropset Elite, adidas’ hybrid racing shoe developed alongside HYROX World Champion Tim Wenisch. The Pro model applies that performance mindset more broadly, targeting athletes at all levels who are preparing for competition or building hybrid fitness into regular training.
Adidas says the Adizero Dropset Pro has been tested with hybrid athletes Graham Halliday and Fabian Eisenlauer, which gives the shoe credibility beyond the controlled environment of product development and into the sweatier realities of daily training.
Performance Fashion Has Stopped Apologising
One of the more revealing threads from Stockholm was how far performance style has moved.
The old separation between running kit and gym kit now looks as dated as persimmon woods and white belts worn with too much confidence. Hybrid athletes want apparel and footwear that can run, lift, grip, brace, accelerate and still look intentional when the session is over.
That is not pure vanity, although anyone who says vanity plays no role in sport is probably lying under oath. Confidence matters. Identity matters. Feeling properly equipped matters. And in a sport built around repeated physical discomfort, even small psychological advantages earn their place.
Research cited by adidas found that nearly half of hybrid athletes — 49% — say their current training footwear limits performance during workouts. The same research says four in five hybrid athletes expect their footwear to support every part of a workout, while more than a third say they have not found a single pair of shoes that works across every exercise in their training.
That explains why the HYROX World Championships Stockholm felt like such a product battleground. Shoes are no longer accessories. Watches are no longer passive recorders. Apparel is no longer merely kit. For athletes chasing time, confidence and repeatable performance, these are part of the competitive system.
“Hybrid athletes are redefining what performance looks like,” said Bernhard Serr, VP of Product at adidas Training. “Athletes are no longer training in one lane, and their footwear needs to evolve with that shift. At adidas, we are committed to advancing training through deeper collaboration with elite athletes and the wider hybrid community – listening, testing and innovating to meet the real demands of the sport.
The Adizero Dropset franchise reflects that commitment, supporting athletes from preparation through to competition, with Adizero Dropset Pro built for the full demands of hybrid training.”
Underfoot, the Adizero Dropset Pro brings together Lightstrike Pro foam for lightweight cushioning and energy return, energy rods to support heel-to-toe transition and propulsion, Lighttraxion for lightweight grip, and Continental™ rubber for traction in wet and dry conditions.
It also features a 2.6mm Adizero sockliner, designed to keep weight down and maintain a low stack height. That matters because ground feel is not a luxury in hybrid training. When an athlete moves from running into lunges, sled work or loaded movement, too much softness can turn control into interpretive dance.
The adidas Adizero Dropset Pro will be available from 17th June via adidas.com/training-shoes.
Stockholm Showed Where Fitness Is Going Next
The larger story from Stockholm is not simply that HYROX is growing. It is that the sport is professionalising at speed.
For our team, seeing the latest products from PUMA, amazfit and adidas in person at the HYROX World Championships Stockholm made that shift feel obvious. This was not performance technology sitting politely on display. It was footwear, wearables and apparel being positioned around the real demands of a sport that punishes weakness in planning, pacing, recovery and equipment choice.
Athletes such as Jess Pettrow and Joanna Wietrzyk are showing what the sharp end looks like when endurance, strength, composure and consistency are stacked together. PUMA and adidas are building footwear for the strange demands of running hard and lifting under fatigue. amazfit is turning the smartwatch into a race-planning, recovery-monitoring and pacing tool for athletes who want more than a polite summary of how much everything hurt.
That is the modern HYROX competitor in one fairly vivid image: data on the wrist, specialist shoes on the feet, lungs somewhere near the emergency exit and just enough competitive delusion to believe the next race can be quicker.
At the HYROX World Championships in Stockholm, the sport looked bigger, sharper and more sophisticated than ever. The athletes brought the theatre. The technology brought the insight. The footwear brought the grip, bounce and stability.
And HYROX brought the pain.
Generously, naturally, and with absolutely no regard for anyone’s weekend plans.
