What Equipment Do You Need for HYROX? A Home Setup Guide
You can train most of HYROX at home with surprisingly little kit: a way to run, a pair of kettlebells, a sandbag and a wall ball cover the majority. Here's the realistic home setup, what's hard to replicate, and how to work around it.
The short answer
You can train the majority of HYROX at home with surprisingly little kit: somewhere to run, a pair of kettlebells, a sandbag and a wall ball cover four stations plus most of your strength work, for a modest outlay. The two genuinely hard things to replicate at home are the sled (push and pull) and the dedicated SkiErg/rower ergometers, but every one of those has a workable substitute. Here's the realistic home setup, tier by tier, and exactly how to work around the gaps.
You do not need a fully kitted functional gym to train for HYROX, though it helps. I'm Richard Hynek, a HYROX PRO athlete (55:29 PB) and coach, and plenty of athletes I work with do most of their preparation at home and only visit a gym for the sled and ergs. Here's how to build a home setup that actually covers the race, mapped to the eight HYROX stations.
The short version
- Most of HYROX is trainable at home. Running, carries, lunges, wall balls and burpees need little or no equipment.
- Core kit: kettlebells, a sandbag, a wall ball, floor space. That's the high-value starter set.
- The sled is the hardest to replicate. Use a gym for it, or substitute heavy pushing/pulling and hill work.
- Ergs (SkiErg/rower) are nice-to-have, not essential to finish. Substitute with running and upper-body work.
- You can't buy your way out of compromised running. The most important "equipment" is a place to run on tired legs.
Map the kit to the stations
The smartest way to plan a home setup is to start from the race itself. Here's what each station demands and how achievable it is at home.
Notice the pattern: five of the eight stations are easy or medium at home. Only the sled and the SkiErg are genuinely hard to replicate, and the running, the biggest part of the race, needs nothing but a road or treadmill.
The home equipment tiers
Build it in stages. You don't need everything at once.
Tier 1: the essentials (covers most of the race)
- A way to run. Roads, a track, or a treadmill. This is half the event; it's also free or near-free.
- A pair of kettlebells. Trains the farmers carry directly and doubles as your main strength tool (swings, goblet squats, carries, presses). For the carry, the official Open standard is 24 kg per hand for men and 16 kg for women, rising to 32 kg / 24 kg in Pro, so buy toward what you'll race.
- A sandbag. Trains sandbag lunges and adds loaded carries, cleans and squats. The race standard is 20 kg (Open men) / 10 kg (Open women), and 30 kg / 20 kg in Pro.
- A wall ball + wall. Trains wall balls: 100 reps at 6 kg (Open men) / 4 kg (Open women), or 9 kg / 6 kg in Pro, thrown to a 3.00 m (men) or 2.70 m (women) target.
That's four stations covered plus the bulk of your strength work, for a modest outlay.
Tier 2: nice to have
- A rowing machine. Rowing is a 1000 m station; a home rower lets you train it precisely. Common enough secondhand to be worth it if budget allows.
- A pull-up bar. Grip and back endurance for the sled pull: dead hangs and rows are cheap grip insurance.
- A skipping rope. Cheap conditioning to keep the heart rate up between strength pieces.
Tier 3: the hard ones
- A SkiErg and a weighted sled with floor space. These replicate two stations exactly, but they're costly, bulky, and the sled needs a long smooth surface. Most home athletes skip these and use a gym for them, which is completely fine.
For a fuller breakdown of what to buy and what to race in, see our HYROX gear guide and best HYROX shoes.
How to work around the sled and ergs at home
The sled is the station people panic about replicating, but you can train the quality it demands even without one.
- For the sled push: train heavy pushing strength (leg press, hack squat, heavy goblet/front squats) and explosive lower-body force. Hill sprints are an excellent functional substitute. They build the same low-angle leg drive. Some athletes push a loaded wheelbarrow or a car (safely) on a flat surface.
- For the sled pull: train heavy horizontal pulling (rows of any kind), grip endurance (carries, dead hangs), and posterior-chain strength (hinges, deadlifts). A long resistance band anchored low lets you rehearse the hand-over-hand pattern.
- For the SkiErg: band or cable "lat pulldowns" and straight-arm pulls train the double-poling pattern, and your running covers the aerobic side.
Do at least a few sessions on the actual sled and ergs before race day if you possibly can. Substitutes build the underlying quality, but the sled is the single biggest overspend trap in HYROX, and meeting the real load and feel cold on race day is a classic, costly mistake. Find a HYROX-affiliated gym for a handful of skill sessions even if you train mostly at home.
The equipment you can't buy
Here's the thing all the kit lists miss: the most important "equipment" for HYROX isn't equipment at all. It's a place to practise compromised running: running on legs already wrecked by a station. You can own every machine on the floor and still blow up on race day if you've only ever trained your runs and your stations separately. The cheapest, highest-value session you can do is a brick: a hard station effort with the kit you already own, then a run, repeated. That's HYROX in miniature, and it needs almost nothing. See how to build a HYROX training plan and our dedicated training at home guide.
Train smart with the kit you have
A home setup is only as good as the plan that uses it. 8stations.ai builds your training around the equipment you actually have access to and the limiter you actually have, so if your sled is your weakness but you train at home, the plan biases toward the strength qualities that transfer, and tells you exactly when a gym session is worth the trip. Import your race, find your limiter, and stop guessing what to buy next.
Set a realistic first target with the time calculator, then start free and build a plan around your home setup.
FAQ
About the author
Richard HynekHYROX Elite athlete (55:29 PB) · elite OCR coach · founder of 8stations.ai
Richard Hynek is the founder and head coach of 8stations.ai — a HYROX Elite athlete and decorated obstacle-course racer who built the platform to put a racer’s eye and a coach’s method in every athlete’s hands.
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