It’s still way too early in the year to name any activity The Sport Of 2025, but if you forced me to do it today, I would begrudgingly give the title to Hyrox.

It’s conceived as a competitive, total-body workout, and it burns for weightlifters and endurance junkies one and the same.

Every weekend, fitness fanatics gather in large numbers in major cities – New York, Riga, Miami Beach, Bangkok – for epic obstacle courses, running eight kilometres and stopping after each to perform punishing exercises such as sled pushes, weighted lunges or burpees. The faster you complete the course, the higher your score is in the Hyrox worldwide rankings.

My reluctance to call Hyrox the sport of the year – or even of the month – has nothing to do with its popularity, which has almost tripled over the last year and keeps growing. It’s more of a categorical qualm; I wonder if it’s a sport at all. It feels more accurate to call it a fitness discipline, or perhaps a challenge. It exists as a hybrid of many other pursuits that are dominating the health world as of late such as Pilates, running and CrossFit, and maintains a crucial commonality with all of them: It’s a solo activity.

Many surveys indicate that people in North America are exercising more now than in previous years; the Canadian fitness industry is expected to triple by 2028. Dig deeper, and you notice something else: It’s individual fitness pursuits that are driving the boom. Canadians aged 15 and over run, swim and cycle more than they do any other sport; and the fastest-growing fitness trend of the last year, quadrupling in popularity, was remote personal training. Meanwhile, adult participation in sport has dropped by nearly 20 per cent over the past two decades in Canada. Save for pesky pickleball, most activities that are currently in vogue do not require opponents or teammates, and they range from ancient (rucking and grounding) to cult adjacent (hot-cold therapy) to just plain weird (ever hear of quadrobics? No, not the equation.)

It’s odd to me that we are so aggressively opting for individual fitness pursuits over good ol’ team sports. I spent the first half of my 29-year-old life as a hockey player and the second as a competitive distance runner. I miss the camaraderie and shared mission of a team sport, yet love the accountability and objectivity that comes with chasing a personal running goal. But there is richness in both, so why are we disproportionately flocking toward one side of the aisle? Is it simply that solo missions are more convenient, or cheaper or simpler to learn? Or is it something else?

One common explanation is that organized sports haven’t bounced back since the pandemic. Guy Faulkner, kinesiology professor at the University of British Columbia and chair in applied public health for the Public Health Agency of Canada, said the pandemic only accelerated the general population’s march away from team sports and toward less structured fitness pursuits over the past 30 years.

Once people learned to exercise inexpensively with activities that required less money, equipment, space, time and organization, they kept these newfound habits. It’s easier to attend a Cross-Fit class than to organize a hockey game with your 20 friends.

Meanwhile, the offerings in individualized training have become far more appealing: There are now fitness apps that allow personal trainers to tailor workouts based on metrics like heart rate and sleep quality; trainer-less gyms that use AI to provide real-time feedback on lifting form; even ChatGPT can spit out a surprisingly individualized workout plan. Plus, the rise of wearables has created a tantalizing self-optimization movement, quietly getting some of us addicted to our own exercise routines. Suddenly, cycling solo on a stationary bike while closing your Apple Watch rings, looking at your Zwift avatar cruising through Watopia, and then posting all of it on Strava, doesn’t feel that lonely anymore.

But, really, you’re still alone, in a time when the bogeyman of loneliness affects one in four people. The number of adults without a close friend has quadrupled since 1990; and we eat, work and live alone more than generations before us. Loneliness is our bogeyman: Even the World Health Organization recently called it a “global public health concern.”

Engaging in team sports is a proven way to stave off loneliness that boosts our psychosocial health – our ability to interact and form meaningful relationships with others. It’s also as strong an indicator of longevity as not smoking and staving off obesity. It’s still unclear if our new, flashy, individual pursuits can provide the same benefits. It begs the question: Is it wise to squander the bit of leisure we have per day on yet another solo hour? Are these sexy new solo sports and fitness trends pushing us deeper into the jungles of our respective personal islands?

In the research world, how we work out is a secondary question to if we work out. Faulkner, for one, has no issue with the rise in individualized fitness, if that’s what gets people moving. There is a second, squarely optimistic take, too, which involves rethinking what constitutes exercising with others. Take Hyrox, for example. Each competition follows the same format and scoring system, which allows athletes to compare their results with others around the world. The competitions are social gatherings in themselves, with adjacent events, conferences and postevent parties. Athletes also have the option to partake in doubles races and relays.

So, while perhaps not in its intended sense, Hyrox is a true hybrid activity: an individual sport that we do with others. It’s the type that’s come to dominate the fitness world. And, by Faulkner’s definition, if it gets people out the door – and in the swanky boutique or fitness studio – then it’s a good one.

“The most effective form of sport,” he said, “is the form you will sustain.”