Fitness
Fitness
World Fitness Project 2026 guide: athletes, workouts and how to watch
From Laura Horváth to James Sprague, here’s your guide to the World Fitness Project 2026, with the athletes, workouts and events that matter.
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This year marks the second year of the World Fitness Project (WFP), a new, multi-event league that’s offering a refreshing perspective on competitive fitness. After a hugely successful debut season in 2025, in which the WFP brought professional and everyday athletes together across the world, 2026 marks a pivotal year for the new league - punctuated with plenty of new challenges, exciting new workouts and world-class athletes, including Laura Horváth and James Sprague, looking to make their name in a rapidly-growing league.
Across three tour steps - London, UK; Indiana, USA and Copenhagen, Denmark - each of the 20 athletes in the men’s and women’s fields will battle tooth-and-nail across a range of functional fitness disciplines, from high-octane sprint work and functional tests to heavy-duty barbell workouts (and everything inbetween). Here’s exactly what you can expect ahead of WFP’s electric sophomore season, the workouts to try and how to follow along for yourself.
01
What is the World Fitness Project (WFP)?
Defending champion Laura Horváth is certainly one to watch
© Ádám Bertalan/Red Bull Content Pool
Founded by former CrossFit Games athlete Will Moorad alongside Isabella and Jackson Terry, founders of fitness nonprofit Goodlyfe, the World Fitness Project is a professional fitness league built on a clear set of principles: people over profit, integrity over shortcuts and real achievement above all else. As Director of Sport, Moorad has structured WFP around a tiered competition format designed to reward both elite performance and grassroots ambition.
In its inaugural season, the league signed 40 elite athletes as paid professionals - each receiving a set salary to compete at live events. At the top sits the Pro Division, featuring 20 contracted male and female athletes who battle through the season for points and rankings. Below that, the Challenger Division gives non-contracted competitors the chance to qualify via online events, compete alongside the pros, and fight for a coveted pro card ahead of the following season. For the wider community, the Competitive Field opens the floor to athletes of all levels, with divisions split by age group, skill level and team formats.
02
What makes the World Fitness Project different from other competitions?
Luka Đukić feeling the heat at last year's finals
© Esben Zøllner Olesen/Red Bull Content Pool
What makes WFP's structure different from other fitness competitions - at least by the standards of a sport that has historically rewarded the best performance on a single weekend - is the deliberate shift toward a season-long narrative.
Prior to WFP, elite functional fitness athletes have trained year-round for isolated moments with no financial safety net. Moorad is explicit about what the league is designed to fix. "A league structure creates continuity, storylines, rankings, rivalries and accountability," he says. "It allows fans to follow a season, sponsors to invest with confidence and athletes to plan their year like professionals in any other sport." The guaranteed pro contracts are the structural expression of that philosophy - flipping, as Moorad puts it, the equation that has long placed all the risk on the athlete. "It allows athletes to train smarter, recover properly and treat competition as a profession, not an expensive hobby."
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Where are the World Fitness Project 2026 tour stops?
Copenhagen will once again host the World Fitness Project Finals
© Esben Zøllner Olesen/Red Bull Content Pool
The 2026 World Fitness Tour spans three continents across three live events, each chosen to reflect the league's global ambitions.
- Drumsheds, London: May 1-3
- Grand Park Pro, Westfield, Indiana: August 28-30
- The Bella Centre, Copenhagen: December 17-20
Here’s the full lowdown:
Drumsheds, London: May 1-3
The season opens at Drumsheds in London), the cavernous former industrial space in north London's Meridian Water that has become one of Europe's most sought-after event venues. A field of 50 pro men and 50 pro women — made up of Signed Pros and online qualifiers — will compete alongside 20 elite teams, making it the largest WFP event to land on UK soil.
Grand Park Pro, Westfield, Indiana: August 28-30
From there, the tour heads stateside for the Grand Park Pro in Westfield, Indiana (28–30 August). Grand Park is one of the largest youth and amateur sports campuses in the United States, a sprawling multi-sport complex that regularly hosts high-profile national events. The same 50-athlete pro field format carries over, with qualifier spots at stake for athletes who narrowly missed London.
The Bella Centre, Copenhagen: December 17-20
The season culminates at the World Fitness Finals in Copenhagen, Denmark (17–20 December), held at the Bella Center - Scandinavia's largest convention and events complex. Only the top 30 points-earners from across both tour stops qualify for the Finals; crucially, no Signed Pro is guaranteed a place simply by contract. The Copenhagen event also expands the competition to include masters, next-gen and age-group divisions, making it the most wide-ranging event on the calendar.
04
Which athletes should you watch at World Fitness Project 2026?
Jonne Koski acknowledges the applause
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When barbells are being thrusted overhead and athletes collapse over the finish line, it can be hard to identify the most compelling stories to follow in the world of functional fitness. Here are eight athletes to keep an eye on this 2026 season:
James Sprague
The reigning WFP champion arrives at Drumsheds with a target on his back, and he knows it. The 23-year-old US athlete - who also won the 2024 CrossFit Games title - is perhaps the most complete athlete on the men's roster: consistently in the top five across wildly different workout demands. His one known soft spot is max-effort barbell lifting - heavy events have caught him out before, including a 21st place in the Clean Ladder at the 2024 Games - but his ability to bank points everywhere else more than covers it. Before he was a champion, he found functional fitness through his father, a Masters athlete who'd used the sport to overcome alcohol addiction, and claimed that the sport “helped me overcome a hole that I never thought I’d get out of.” Today, he says, "WFP has the potential to be a game-changer.” Having won it, he now has to prove the first time wasn't a fluke. Defending champions in season-long formats are rare beasts; if Sprague handles the pressure as cleanly as he handles a barbell, this could be his year.
Laura Horváth
Horváth won the inaugural WFP season in Copenhagen last December, and she did it by refusing to panic when things didn't quite go according to plan. The Hungarian - 2023 CrossFit Games champion, two-time Rogue Invitational winner - is the clear favourite heading into London. What sets Horváth apart isn't just the raw ability; it's also her composure. "Experience, practice, believing yourself - not crumbling under pressure, not looking at the leaderboard too much, just focusing on the next task, and not where I'm at but where I'm going," she said after claiming victory in Copenhagen, a mentality you can see clearly in her Olympic lifting, which has earned her a national championship and the barbell clean and jerk record. Keep an eye out for Horváth’s support squad, too, headlined by her brother, coach and strategist Kristóf. They’ll be cheering her on, rep-by-rep.
Patrick Vellner
Considered to be one of the sport’s most laid-back and relatable athletes, there’s no narrative in competitive fitness more compelling right now than Patrick Vellner's final lap. The Canadian veteran - nine CrossFit Games appearances, five podiums and still the greatest athlete in the sport never to have won it all - has confirmed that 2026 will be his final year of competition. "My plan for the 2026 season is to compete at as many events that have been pretty defining in my career as possible," he said. "Show up one last time for all the people who showed up for me over the years." Not only has he recently undergone a heart ablation procedure in the off-season, one of Vellner’s most telling signature moments was competing at the 2019 Games with a torn bicep and still finishing ninth. Simply, London could see one of the sport's greatest competitors at something close to full health for the first time in years.
Laura Horváth and Aimee Cringle go head-to-head on the rings
© Esben Zøllner Olesen/Red Bull Content Pool
Aimee Cringle
If there’s one athlete who will have the Drumsheds crowd in her corner from the first rep, it's Cringle. The UK native - and number-two seed for this WFP season - finished second in the entire inaugural WFP season, fighting tooth-and-nail for back-to-back podium finishes at both tour stops. At 25, Cringle is still building on her talent for fitness, but what makes her style so compelling is a relentless, no-fuss approach to competition, especially when you consider she was still a nursing graduate in 2019. Cringle arrives in the 2026 season with a competitive hunger and a home crowd cheering her on - a potent combination for an athlete still in the early stages of their career.
Jonne Koski
Training out of CF Varasto in his hometown of Pori, Finland’s Jonne Koski has been competing in functional fitness since 2014, when he won the Euro Regionals at just 19 yearsold; followed soon after by a ninth-place finish at the CrossFit Games. With over a decade in the sport, Koski’s background as a swimmer has cemented his dedication and aptitude for putting in the work on the competition floor, recognising any potential failure as simply “fuel for next year”. Crediting his success in functional fitness to 2009 CrossFit Games athlete Mikkao Salo, Koski’s top-10 finish in 2025’s WFP secured his place as a contracted athlete in 2026. Having also recently had a baby with fellow athlete Emilia Leppänen - together, they’re dubbed the "Fittest Couple in Europe" - expect Koski to bring a new kind of intensity to the competition floor. He’s got everything to prove, nothing to lose.
Jonne Koski is one half of the "Fittest Couple in Europe"
© Esben Zøllner Olesen/Red Bull Content Pool
Oda Lundekvam
Norwegian athlete Lundekvam brings a remarkable dual identity into the 2026 season: a WFP competitor in her own right and, simultaneously, the captain of CrossFit Oslo Kriger - the team that won the 2025 CrossFit Games team title, the first European team ever to do so. Lundekvam’s connection to CrossFit Oslo's culture of collective excellence - a gym of over 1,000 members in Norway who were reportedly following every rep at the Games - gives her a support infrastructure and a sense of purpose that you can't manufacture. With four consecutive top-10 finishes and having battled through both qualifiers and both WFP tour stops to earn her spot in Copenhagen, don’t expect Lundekvam to slow down anytime soon.
Chandler Smith
At 32 years old, USA’s Chandler Smith is now one of the most recognisable athletes in the world of functional fitness. With repeat performances in the CrossFit Games - 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 – ex US-army soldier Smith is entering his second season at the World Fitness Project under the Pro card with a point to prove. In 2025, he secured three top-10 finishes and will be keen to make a strong impression this year, especially in the workouts involving the Echo bike and barbell power snatches.
Andrea Solberg
Known as the “queen of handstand walking,” Norway’s Solberg arrives at the Copenhagen finals in seventh position, with a remarkable comeback across the season’s tour stops, with seventh, fourth, third and fifth place finishes. Ahead of the finals, this success came not just from her strength in bodyweight movements, including handstand pushups and handstand walking, but also her proficiency in deadlifting and running - a group of movements that could see Solberg secure a top-10 finish in Copenhagen.
05
World Fitness Project 2026: The workouts
Laura Horváth is a formidable mix of raw ability and composure
© Ádám Bertalan/Red Bull Content Pool
Six workouts have been announced for the London Pro, and they paint a clear picture of what WFP demands from its athletes: no single-discipline specialists need apply.
The weekend opens with a gut-check of a couplet - four rounds of toes-to-bar, a 500m run and overhead squats at 83kg for men - before shifting to a showcase of pure gymnastics skill in Workout 2, where athletes must navigate rope climbs, handstand walks with mandatory pirouettes and weighted double-unders inside a punishing 13-minute cap.
Workouts 3 and 4 lean into the engine room. The third is a six-movement grind across the rowing machine, Ski Erg, box jumps and dumbbells, while 4A asks athletes to find a one-rep-max deadlift - immediately followed, after just a two-minute rest, by 100 calories on the Echo Bike. It’s a brutal pairing that's likely to become the talking point of the weekend by itself.
The final two workouts strip things back to raw speed and strength - pure fitness fundamentals. Workout 5 is a punishing ladder of ring muscle-ups broken up by 18m carries of a 90kg sandbag, and the weekend closes with three rounds of power snatches and overhead barbell lunges against a seven-minute clock - a sprint finish that will sort the leaderboard in a hurry.
Taken together, the workouts programmed for London will reward athletes who are as comfortable under a heavy barbell as they are upside-down on their hands - which is precisely the kind of complete, well-rounded fitness WFP has set out to celebrate.
Explore more on the World Fitness Project
06
How to watch the World Fitness Project 2026
World Fitness Project is on a mission to make competitive fitness more pro
© Esben Zøllner Olesen/Red Bull Content Pool
Want in on the action? Visit the official World Fitness Project for details on how to get tickets to each of the three tour stops - London tickets are now on sale, here - and find out about each athlete stepping onto the competition floor.
Catch all the action online: the World Fitness Project finals will be streamed live on the WFP website and on YouTube.
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