Women in Their 30s & 40s Love Hyrox, While Pickleball Skews Younger, Data Suggests

An analysis of recent Venmo payment activity sheds some interesting new light into fitness trends. Spoiler alert: people love Hyrox

A scroll through Venmo can turn up some eyebrow-raising intel. Who sold their Peloton, who split an Uber last night and who treated themselves to a massage.

According to PayPal, which owns Venmo, it can also reveal some clues as to where fitness is headed. 

To find them, the company analyzed six years of its own U.S. transaction data from PayPal and Venmo, covering September 2020 through August 2026. It looked at anonymized, aggregated signals such as the words and emojis people type into Venmo payment notes, along with when and how often they make purchases.

Because Venmo’s user base has grown over that stretch, PayPal measured each term as a share of all payment notes rather than a raw count. It then checked those trends against month-by-month patterns to weed out data quirks.

One caveat: a payment note captures only what someone decided to type while paying another person, so the data reflects activities people pay for together.

That Hyrox fitness race all your friends won’t stop talking about? It’s showing up in a lot more memo lines. 

PayPal’s review of Venmo payment notes found that Hyrox activity is up about 20 times over two years, with roughly 138% growth in the past year alone.

The data aligns with Hyrox’s momentum. The fitness-racing brand expects more than 2 million athletes to compete during its 2026/27 season, and it says it now counts 20,000 affiliate gyms worldwide. In September, a consortium led by L Catterton bought a majority stake from Infront Sports & Media in a deal that reportedly valued Hyrox at about $700 million.

Notably, women account for 56% of Hyrox activity in the Venmo data, and the crowd leans toward people ages 30 to 49.

Meanwhile, pickleball, the sport that gained steam during the pandemic and led to the conversion of countless basketball courts, has lost a little of its brine. But its historically older player base appears to be skewing younger.

Players under 30 now make up 18% of participants, double their earlier 9% share, while those 50 and older dropped from 49% to 37%. Older players still outnumber the under-30 set 2-to-1, but the baton is clearly being passed down.

Not long ago, pickleball looked unstoppable. It spent five straight years as the country’s fastest-growing sport, and the Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA) estimated that 24.3 million Americans played in 2025, up 22.8% from the year before. Then came the first sign of a slowdown. SFIA’s mid-year data, released in August, showed participation grew just 1.3% in the first half of 2026. Over the same stretch, padel grew 14.5%.

The cooling is showing up on the business side, too. The Picklr, one of the sport’s fastest-growing franchises, cut corporate staff in September amid a string of club closures, and its CEO told franchisees the company is weighing its options. Still, the money hasn’t dried up. In May, an Apollo Sports Capital-led investment valued Pickleball Inc., parent of the PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball, at $750 million.