Is chalk allowed at HYROX?

Under the HYROX rulebook chalk is permitted only on the sled pull and the farmers carry, it must be the chalk the event provides, and using it at any other station carries a 2-minute penalty. Bringing your own chalk or carrying event chalk away from a station is the same 2-minute penalty. Always check the current rulebook for your race and division.

Do I have to take my gloves off for any station?

No station requires bare hands. Whether you keep them on is a comfort and speed decision, not a rules decision. Most people who wear gloves are better off leaving them on, because stopping to pull gloves on and off in transition costs time.

Do elite HYROX athletes wear gloves?

Some do and some do not. It comes down to their hands and their weakest stations. Grip-limited athletes and anyone prone to tearing their palms are more likely to wear them, especially for the sled pull.

Can I wear gloves in HYROX Doubles or Relay?

The same permission applies across divisions. Check the official rules for your race and division, since specifics can change between events.

Are Gloves Allowed in HYROX?

Q: Are gloves allowed in HYROX?

Yes. Gloves are permitted at every station and plenty of athletes race in them. There is no rule requiring bare hands anywhere on the floor. Chalk is the grip aid that is restricted, not gloves. Check the current rulebook for your race and division.

Short answer: yes, at every station. The longer answer covers chalk, what actually varies by race, and the question people are really asking underneath it.

Yes. Gloves are allowed in HYROX. You can wear them for the whole race, at every station, and nobody is going to stop you on the floor.

That is the entire answer to the question as asked. But almost nobody searching this actually wants a one-word ruling. They want to know whether wearing gloves is going to get them pulled up by a judge, and underneath that, whether gloves are a bit of a cheat. So let us deal with both.

Why people even ask

The question comes from other sports. Weightlifting has rules about straps and wraps. Some grip-sport events ban anything between your hand and the bar. Plenty of CrossFit boxes have opinions about grips and gloves that get repeated as if they were rules.

HYROX is not like that. It is a fitness race, not a lift. There is no governing principle that says your palms have to touch the equipment. Gloves do not give you a mechanical advantage the way a strap does, because you are still holding on with your own grip. You are just holding on through a layer of material.

What actually varies by race

The permission to wear gloves is not the thing to check. Chalk is where the actual restrictions are, and this is the part most people have backwards.

Chalk is the restricted one, not gloves. The rulebook permits chalk on the sled pull and the farmers carry only, it has to be the chalk the event provides, and using it at any other station is a 2-minute penalty. Bringing your own, or carrying event chalk away from a station, is the same penalty. So at six of the eight stations, a racer without gloves has no legal grip aid at all.
Equipment specifics by division. Weights and standards differ between Open, Pro, Doubles and Relay, and they get updated. Check the official HYROX site for the current spec sheet rather than a forum post from two seasons ago.
Venue rules. Individual venues occasionally add their own conditions. Rare, but it is a two-minute check.

For anything specific, read the official HYROX rules for your event. We are not going to reprint them here, because they change and a stale copy is worse than no copy.

The question under the question

Most people asking whether gloves are allowed are really asking whether gloves are legitimate. Whether wearing them means you did not really do the race properly.

They do not. A glove does not pull the sled for you. It does not make the kettlebells lighter or shorten the run. What it can do is stop your hands from becoming the reason you slow down, which is a real and common way to lose time that has nothing to do with your fitness.

If your grip fails on the sled pull with 30 metres to go, your legs and lungs did not fail. Your hands did. Fixing that is not cheating, it is removing a limiter that was never the point of the test.

The more useful question

Permission is easy. The genuinely hard question is whether gloves will help you, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on your hands and which stations break you down.

The sled pull and the farmers carry are where grip decides races. If you cruise through those and your hands never limit you, gloves are optional at best and the wrong pair will actively slow you down by cooking your hands over an hour-plus race. We wrote the full station-by-station breakdown in do you need gloves for HYROX, and if you have already decided you want a pair, what to look for in a HYROX glove covers what separates a good one from an oven.

One rule that is not in the rulebook

Never race in a glove you have not trained in. Not once, not on race morning, not because a pair arrived the week before.

A glove that feels fine in a ten-minute session can be unbearable at minute forty. Some slide once your hands are wet. Some trap heat until your hands are slick inside the glove, which is the worst of both worlds. You want to know that before it matters, not while you are standing at the rope.

That goes for anything you are considering wearing, ours included. We race them for the first time on 19 September 2026, and the same rule applies: train in them first.