How she's preparing for her WFP title defence

It has been exactly 10 years since Laura Horváth first made her mark on the international stage and the distance travelled is measured in more than just time. In 2015, a teenage Horváth stood atop the Athens Throwdown podium and claimed her first-ever competition win. It was a different era of the sport – and a different life for the Hungarian in more ways than one. At the time, she didn’t even own a bank account and walked away with her €5,000 prize purse in cold, hard cash.Fast forward a decade, however, and the functional fitness superathlete is far from an underdog looking to go home with a pocketful of cash. As she gears up for the upcoming 2026 World Fitness Project (WFP), Horváth finds herself not just as a contender, but the reigning champion after a historic 2025 win in Copenhagen. From that breakout moment in Greece to her current status as a dominant force in her sport, Horváth is ready to defend her crown and, in the process, cement a 10-year legacy of excellence – but, in the evolving world of functional fitness, victory is never guaranteed.

Watch Horváth’s documentary, Together We Rise, to find out why she credits her success under the lights not just to her relentless work ethic, but to a family that moves, thinks and operates as a single unit:

49 min

Power in Every Rep: Together We Rise

From family roots to global champion: the story behind Laura Horváth’s rise in elite functional fitness.

As Horváth can attest, the pressure of competition evolves the moment you stop being the one doing the chasing. That feeling of securing a win – from her first-ever at the Athens Throwdown, all the way to WFP in Copenhagen – is the payoff for every pre-dawn 5am session and every missed social event. Once you start frequenting the podiums, however, the air tends to get a little thinner and the atmosphere a little heavier.

Such is the challenge that Horváth faces as she approaches her second season in the WFP, this time as the reigning victor. This significant shift doesn’t just require a change in strategy or training philosophy, but also in mindset – a feeling acutely felt by the 29-year-old athlete. “You learn from your wins and you learn from your failures,” says Horváth. “I’ve learned enough lessons, I’ve lost so many times, I can’t even remember how many times I finished second or worse in a competition and didn’t reach the podium.”

Laura Horváth was crowned World Fitness Project champion in 2025

In this particular case, there’s an additional pressure for Horváth – not only has she won the WFP and the Rogue Invitational three times , but also the CrossFit Games in 2023, an impressive run of victories that’s seen her become a household name in functional fitness. “I just want to keep on winning,” she says. “It’s easier said than done.”

Beyond these titles, however, Horváth has brought something else into the second season of the WFP: a crystal-clear understanding of what this defence of the top spot actually demands. The WFP season runs not as a single event, but rather as a season-long accumulation of points across multiple tour stops.

That structure, she’s come to understand, requires a specific kind of mental discipline – one that resists the gravitational pull of any individual result, good or bad. “It’s a whole season,” she explains. “It’s not just one event. If something goes wrong in one of the tour stops, that doesn’t mean that’s how the whole season is going to play out. If that passes, try not to dwell on it too much, because there is another event to focus on.” She learned this, she says, from last year – not from its peak moments, but from its low ones.

Laura Horváth and the team behind the title

Chief among those was a ninth-place finish at one of the season’s earlier stops, a result that in a single-event sport might have felt terminal. Under her brother Kristóf’s guidance – and the sibling philosophy they’ve refined over years – she recalibrated and locked in for the remaining heats, eventually standing the highest on the podium. “We have this rule not to get the highs too high and not stay in the lows too long either,” Kristóf says. “Laura’s greatest strengths are leaning into who she is as a person and as an athlete, never giving up and having a determination that never wavers.”

Today, this philosophy is a fundamental part of her approach to training strategy, with Kristóf keeping a close eye on things. “Nothing is linear,” says Horváth. “Whatever you expect, probably the opposite will happen, so you just have to roll with the punches.”

Now, the temptation to look back at all of that – to let the weight of what she’s already achieved soften the edge of what comes next – is precisely what Horváth is working to resist. “Everyone starts from ground zero,” she says. “Just because last year turned out the way it did, it doesn’t mean that this year is guaranteed.” The clean slate is both a mental practice and, in structural terms, a literal fact: no points carry over, no advantage is banked. The reigning champion and the first-time qualifier will begin at the same start line.

Horváth is hoping her training brings rewards again this season

I’ve been focusing on the right things and working on those. We’ll see in a couple of months if it pays off

All of which means “there’s room for improvement,” Horváth explains. “I have goals that I still want to achieve.” This improvement, she continues, included having a longer off-season and working on her (admittedly few) weaknesses. “This sport is so broad,” she says, “we have so many different movements, time domains and disciplines that we need to learn.” Her run-up to the 2026 season has seen Horváth “focusing on the right things and working on those,” she finishes. “We’ll see in a couple of months if it pays off.”

Part of this story

Laura HorváthHungary’s Laura Horváth is a titan of the fitness training world, named The Fittest Woman on Earth in 2023 and winner of the World Fitness Project in 2025.Power in Every Rep: Together We RiseFrom family roots to global champion: the story behind Laura Horváth’s rise in elite functional fitness.