For the past few years, the centre of gravity in competitive fitness has shifted. While the CrossFit Games remains the pinnacle of elite performance for many, the rise of Hyrox has shown just how powerful a repeatable, standardised competition format can be for the everyday athlete.
Enter Xenom: a new stadium-scale competition series that aims to bring that same clarity and accessibility to the CrossFit community.
Founded by longtime CrossFitter and fitness entrepreneur Keith Barlow, Xenom positions itself as ‘the decathlon of fitness’ – a two-day competition featuring 10 fixed events designed to test total human performance across strength, gymnastics and endurance.
The event is also backed by serious investment firepower, including Jeffrey Katzenberg – the media veteran behind DreamWorks Animation – with equipment partner Rogue Fitness supplying the competition floor. Crucially, Xenom isn’t just CrossFit-inspired – it’s the first official global event series licensed by CrossFit itself.
But the idea wasn’t born overnight. ‘If you want the philosophical answer, this has been about a decade in the making.’ Barlow told Men’s Health.
Barlow’s own CrossFit journey started 10 years ago after discovering the training style that, in his words, was ‘hugely transformative’. That journey eventually led him to work with Hyrox – and it was there that the lightbulb moment arrived.
‘There are millions of CrossFitters in the world and no one’s giving them anything at the moment that reflects what they do day in, day out in the gym,’ he explained. In other words, while CrossFit builds broad, adaptable fitness, many competitions still test only narrow elements of it.
What Is Xenom?
Xenom’s answer is a fixed 10-event format, held over two days inside major stadium venues. Across the weekend, athletes tackle a mix of classic CrossFit modalities – maximal strength, monostructural conditioning and high-skill gymnastics – designed to test what CrossFit defines as ‘broad work capacity across time and modal domains’.
Events already revealed include:
1RM snatch – athletes have nine minutes and four attempts to establish their max lift. 60-second max calories on the Echo BikeAscending gymnastics ladder featuring wall walks and rope climbsBarbell cycling workout (deadlifts, front squats, shoulder-to-overheads and thrusters)3km run directly into a 2km ski erg
Day two will feature additional mixed-modality workouts – including combinations of toes-to-bar, dumbbell hang snatches and muscle-ups – with several events still to be revealed.
Athletes compete individually or in same-sex pairs across three divisions: Elite, RX and Compete.
Is Xenom for Everyone?
Crucially, while the elite field will be battling it out at genuinely eye-watering standards, the format has been designed so that almost anyone who trains regularly in a CrossFit gym can take part. Athletes compete in three divisions, with loads scaled appropriately across each category.
That means the same workout structure remains intact, but the weights and demands shift to match ability levels. Take the barbell conditioning workout on day one: competitors cycle through 12 deadlifts, 9 front squats, 6 shoulder-to-overheads and 3 thrusters, with loads set at 50kg in Compete, 60kg in RX and 70kg in Elite (with equivalent scaling in the women’s divisions).
The idea is that a regular box member who’s comfortable with the movements can line up alongside more seasoned athletes and complete the same test, just at a different intensity. ‘So long as you are doing a form of CrossFit, you basically have a level that you can come and compete at,’ says founder Keith Barlow.
The result is a competition that still crowns the fittest in the room, without locking the stadium doors on everyone else trying to find out where they stand. Or as Barlow puts it: ‘CrossFit Games experience, for everyone.’
The Scoring System
Where Xenom diverges from traditional CrossFit competitions is in the scoring and consistency. Each of Xenom’s 10 events carries a benchmark 1,000-point ‘elite’ score, representing world-class performance. Athletes earn points based on how close their result comes to that standard – or even exceed it if they outperform the benchmark. Scores from all 10 events combine into a total, known as the Elite Performance Index (EPI), allowing athletes to track and compare their fitness globally.
‘You show people how they perform, you let them compare themselves to others, and then you show them how they progress,’ Barlow explains.
In practical terms, that means the athlete who scores 6,500 points in Dallas can compare directly with someone scoring 6,800 in London – something that’s been harder to quantify across traditional CrossFit competitions.
The aim, says Barlow, is simple: create a repeatable global benchmark for fitness.
CrossFit Competition, Evolved
If Hyrox proved that a mass-participation fitness race could become a global sport, Xenom is attempting to do the same for the CrossFit community. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Barlow says the concept simply applies lessons learned elsewhere.
‘You’ve got to evolve,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to look at what works in other places and think about how to reconnect and re-energise the competitive community.’
The result is something that sits somewhere between the CrossFit Games spectacle and a Hyrox-style mass participation event.
When, Where and How to Enter
The inaugural Xenom event takes place June 27-28, 2026 at the Dallas Cowboys’ training complex in Frisco, Texas; with London, Miami and Paris already announced as future stops in the series.
Each competition will host around 2,000 athletes, competing in the same standardised events across the weekend. Right now, a ballot is open for the Dallas event, with 250 free entry spots available before general ticket sales begin.
If Hyrox was the marathon of fitness, Xenom might just be its decathlon. And for CrossFitters looking for a true test of their training, the stadium lights are officially on.
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With almost 18 years in the health and fitness space as a personal trainer, nutritionist, breath coach and writer, Andrew has spent nearly half of his life exploring how to help people improve their bodies and minds.
As our fitness editor he prides himself on keeping Men’s Health at the forefront of reliable, relatable and credible fitness information, whether that’s through writing and testing thousands of workouts each year, taking deep dives into the science behind muscle building and fat loss or exploring the psychology of performance and recovery.
Whilst constantly updating his knowledge base with seminars and courses, Andrew is a lover of the practical as much as the theory and regularly puts his training to the test tackling everything from Crossfit and strongman competitions, to ultra marathons, to multiple 24 hour workout stints and (extremely unofficial) world record attempts.
You can find Andrew on Instagram at @theandrew.tracey, or simply hold up a sign for ‘free pizza’ and wait for him to appear.