Men's Health July 13, 2026 0 Comments

Unlock the Secret Weapon Xenom Uses to Explode Muscle Growth Like Never Before—Are You Ready to Outshine the Competition?

Ever watch a middle-aged woman in a green tank top hoist a barbell loaded with over 110 pounds like she’s auditioning for some epic superhero flick? Picture this: electronic beats pumping through the massive Ford Center in Frisco, Texas—yep, that colossal Dallas Cowboys practice facility—and there she is, arms shaking, muscles screaming, catching that barbell overhead like a boss. The crowd erupts, signs waving like it’s the Super Bowl, and for her, that lift? It’s no small feat—it’s a lifetime personal best. That moment? Pure gold. It’s exactly the kind of hero’s journey Keith Barlow, the mastermind behind Xenom—the newest contender in functional fitness competitions—wants every competitor to experience.

Xenom isn’t just another fitness event; it’s billed as “The Decathlon of Fitness,” a grueling two-day showdown of ten events that’ll push strength, endurance, skill, and grit to the limit. Think CrossFit meets a global stage where every competitor, be they rookie or seasoned gym rat, tests their mettle alongside the best. But here’s the kicker—can this fierce new format live up to the hype without alienating the everyday fitness warrior? Or is it only for the die-hards who crave that next-level battle? Hang tight as we dive into the sweat, cheers, and heart-pounding action that’s shaking up the fitness world like a well-timed snatch.

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A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN in a green tank top and black tights approaches a barbell loaded with a little more than 110 pounds. Electronic music blares through the Ford Center in Frisco, TX, the 510,000 square-foot headquarters and practice facility for the Dallas Cowboys. A judge raises his hand, and the woman pulls the barbell from the floor, catches it overhead, and fights for the lockout as her arms wobble beneath the weight. The rep is good. The barbell crashes to the floor. She screams in delight. A small group of friends frantically waves handwritten signs and cheers as if she has just won the whole event. She may as well have; it’s a lifetime personal best.

“That’s the highlight of her year, and now she’s a Xenom competitor for life,” Keith Barlow, founder of the new functional fitness competition, tells me from the floor of the inaugural event. “We want to give people their hero moment.”

She’s just one of over 250 athletes who traveled to the Lone Star State from around the world to try their hand at one of the newest additions to the growing roster of functional fitness competitions now populating gyms, convention centers, and your algorithm. Xenom, trademarked as “The Decathlon of Fitness,” consists of 10 events designed to test a competitor’s overall fitness. Over two days, participants run, snatch heavy weights, burn max calories on an air bike, and work through a blend of CrossFit staples like toes-to-bar, dumbbell snatches, wall walks, and rope climbs.

Across Xenom’s five “arenas,” men, women, and pairs cycle through heat after heat. I see a man lying supine, writhing from fatigue after a 5K blend of rowing and running, his mother wiping him down with a towel. I watch a 50-something with a six-pack confidently tear through deadlifts, front squats, and overhead presses with 135 pounds—the same workout completed by pudgier competitors and scrawnier 20-year-olds. Parents cradling ear-muffed babies cheer on their partners from the sidelines. The floor is filled with people of all ages, body types, and fitness levels, unified by the same idea: testing themselves alongside the best, at the highest level of competition they can reach.

Courtesy Xenom

XENOM’S PITCH IS to package the feel of an elite-level CrossFit competition into a mass-participation event that serious fitness hobbyists can put on their calendars year after year. By blending CrossFit’s training style and competition format with the standardization and production value of Hyrox, the running-forward fitness race that’s exploded in popularity over the last couple of years, Barlow wants Xenom to feel premium, consequential, and worth bragging about—more like an Ironman than a local comp, the kind of accomplishment people travel for, talk about, and maybe even tattoo the logo on their bodies.

To create the event format, Barlow partnered with CrossFit Motion in the U.K. and commissioned a university to produce an NDA-protected report on how to test the widest range of fitness in the most accessible way. Xenom borrows from traditional decathlon ideas: 10 events, each worth up to 1,000 points, spread over two days. They test strength, endurance, power, skill, work capacity, and recovery. Like Hyrox, the workouts stay the same from event to event, giving athletes a clear target to train for and the ability to compete against themselves. Unlike Hyrox, the tests require more than a V12 engine and an ability to grind; athletes need above-average strength, CrossFit-adjacent skill, and the ability to recover event-to-event and day-to-day.

That comparison to Hyrox is unavoidable, though Barlow insists Xenom is not a rival. He co-founded Fittest, a prominent PR agency that represents Hyrox, with his wife, Kate, who still runs it; Barlow has since stepped down to run Xenom full-time, and says there’s no friction with Hyrox founders Christian Toetzke and Moritz Fürste. When he told Toetzke about the idea, the duo spent an hour scribbling potential names on a napkin before landing on Xenom.

Hyrox proved that mass-participation fitness competitions can scale, and Xenom is betting there is room for a CrossFit-adjacent version of that model. CrossFit LLC itself is even a licensing partner, and both sides are careful to distinguish between the two. “CrossFit is the methodology, and Xenom is the competition,” Heather Lawrence Benedict, CrossFit’s senior director of sport operations, tells me.

Courtesy Xenom

Xenom officially announced its arrival in late February 2026, backed by a $15 million seed round led by WndrCo, the investment firm run by DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Dropbox CEO Sujay Jaswa. Before its debut, the brand also secured partners with deep roots in the functional fitness ecosystem: Rogue as equipment provider, Pliability as a banner sponsor, and PRVN and HWPO, two popular training and coaching brands. The goal is to scale globally; future events are planned for London (August 2026), Miami, and Paris, and a long-term vision of roughly 2,000 competitors at each comp. That vision comes at a price: entry for Xenom London 2026 is currently listed at just over $300. That’s just a bit more expensive than many Hyrox entries and much more than the basic $20 CrossFit Open registration fee—but the scale and pageantry of the two-day Xenom event are on a greater scale.

CrossFit, of course, has its own mainstream competition: the CrossFit Games. Since launching in 2007, the Games have functioned as an aspirational window for the average weekend warrior to peer through and see what the methodology is capable of producing. But with only 60 athletes advancing to the final stage in 2026, earning a spot at the Games is nearly as elusive as making an NFL roster. Add in a turbulent stretch marked by the death of an athlete at the 2024 CrossFit Games, declining Open participation rates, and leadership turnover, and Barlow sees an opportunity to tap into the fervent support of the CrossFit community and offer athletes something CrossFit itself never has: a Games-like experience built for a much larger audience (like most fitness brands, Xenom would tell you its audience is “everyone”).

“CrossFit…was very much catered towards…the biggest competitions,” Barlow says. “Like, you have your 20 or 30 best athletes in the world, and it’s a spectator model, [to] get as many [people] as possible to watch these people doing it.”

But can Xenom truly appeal to the masses while relying on highly technical barbell lifts? That will be the challenge of the next few years. That might be the biggest obstacle for Xenom to appeal to the broadest possible audience: these events are hard for the average exerciser, and several of them have high-skill barriers to entry.

The 10 Xenom Events

Xenom’s events are the same across its three divisions, Compete, Rx, and Elite, which are scaled in ascending level of difficulty. The competition takes place over two days.

Day 1

1 RM Snatch for Load – 9-minute time cap
Ascending Ladder – Wall Walk, Rope Climb AMRAP
60-seconds max cal Echo Bike
Barbell Cycling – 12 Deadlifts, 9 Front Squats, 6 Shoulder to Overhead, 3 Thrusters – 5-minute time cap
2K Echo Ski + 3K Run – 40-minute time cap

Day 2

Toes to Bar, DB Hang Snatch, Muscle Up – 6-minute time cap
5RM Rhino Pull – for load, 3-minute time cap
Burpees, Echo Ski, Echo Bike – 12-minute time cap
Heavy Clean Ladder – 8-minute time cap
Handstand Pushups, Chest-to-Bar, DB Lunge – 12-minute time cap

Courtesy Xenom

HUNDREDS OF COMPETITORS attended the first Xenom (some of whom received free or discounted entry), and many of them praised the event’s organization and atmosphere. Events ran close to the minute. Spectators lined the arenas and cheered from just a few feet away. First-timers warmed up beside current and former CrossFit Games athletes. The details were equally polished: free water and Gatorade were available throughout the venue, judges and volunteers were friendly and communicative, and to prevent confusion about the event’s kilograms-only loading system, Xenom even handed out spiral-bound, laminated guides showing which color plates belonged on a barbell for each event.

Still, even a well-run first-year event had a few friction points. A couple of competitors noted that there wasn’t a formal athlete meeting, so standards were explained shortly before events began in a music-drowned arena—a concern later echoed by some athletes on Reddit. Workout volume was another issue. Ten intense events over two days is a heavy training load for anyone, even Games-level athletes. And the EPI scoring system borrowed from traditional decathlons—in which points are accrued event to event on a scale rather than a straightforward measure of time or weight, as in a 5K or powerlifting meet—was not immediately intuitive to every competitor.

“I’ve competed in a lot of events in my life, and these events are kind of beating me a little bit, but in a good way,” says Cody Lanphere, a Hyrox and CrossFit competitor who placed second in Xenom’s Men’s Rx division. “You can be a strong person, you can be a cardio runner, whatever, but the cool thing… is that [Xenom is] going to show your weakness, but you’re also going to get to show your strengths as well.”

“If [Xenom’s] goal was to kind of create a mass participation event, unfortunately, I do think they overshot the Compete category, and it’s a little too hard for your average CrossFitter,” adds Clay Hamilton, a longtime CrossFitter who competed at Xenom in the Rx division in the 50 to 54 age category.

For now, Xenom isn’t the simplest to understand, and it’s certainly not the easiest to finish. It’s a competition for the competitive, a way for those whose training is central to their lives to find a big stage to make all their hard work feel worthwhile and credible. It’s for that woman in the green tank top who, under the ceiling of an NFL-caliber arena and the weight of a shaky barbell, found the ideal stage to find out how strong she really is.

Andrew Gutman, NASM-CPT is a journalist with a decade of experience covering fitness and nutrition. His work has been published in Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, Muscle & Fitness, and Gear Patrol. Outside of writing, Andrew trains in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, helps coach his gym’s kickboxing team, and enjoys reading and cooking.