Beyond CrossFit: The Gym Model That Wins Every Time

CrossFit changed the fitness industry forever—but with affiliate numbers declining, gym owners are asking, “What’s next?”

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper digs into why affiliate numbers keep shrinking, where former CrossFit gyms are going and what gym owners can do right now to stay competitive.

He explains how novelty-driven methods such as Hyrox are pulling attention and why the lack of clarity from CrossFit HQ has created uncertainty for affiliate owners.

Coop lays out a solution for managing methods and giving clients what they want in confusing times: adopting the Prescriptive Model. Instead of just selling class packages, he shows you how to actually coach clients with tailored prescriptions that blend strength, aerobic and high-intensity training to get results.

Done right, this approach improves retention, helps clients accomplish goals and ensures your gym thrives no matter what brand name is on the door.

Tune in to learn how to implement the Prescriptive Model in your gym and build a business that wins—whether it is affiliated with CrossFit or not. 

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3:03 - Why affiliates leave CrossFit

6:36 - Hyrox taking over competition

9:09 - Who has the best classes?

11:46 - Why ClassPass doesn’t work

13:57 - Solution: The Prescriptive Model

Transcript

Chris: 0:02

CrossFit changed the fitness industry. There's no denying it. I can remember walking through airports back in 2011, spotting CrossFit shirts and walking right up to strangers to say hello. I can remember seeing people walking into local gyms wearing board shorts and knee-high socks, and I knew exactly what they were about. I knew they were serious. I knew they weren't in the gym to gossip or flex in the mirror. CrossFit made working out cool again. It reintroduced intensity and function and to a large extent fun in exercise. And as the number of CrossFit affiliates now dwindles, we wonder where did it all go? I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And today I'm going to talk about what's killing CrossFit and where these gyms are going. So first, let's talk about why affiliate numbers are decreasing. First, over 10,000 former affiliates are gone. Possibly double that. Some of them disappeared mostly because while they were all great coaches, very few of them were good at business. And some are just leaving CrossFit now. They're de-affiliating, but they're not leaving as a group. They're leaving one-on-one. And some are becoming HyRox gyms, or some are becoming Mayhem affiliates now, or PRVN Proven affiliates, or another similar brand that seems to be on the rise in the wake of CrossFit's demise. Other people are trying to go solo. Many have de-affiliated and some of those have thrived. I was lucky I was Catalyst Fitness for years before becoming a CrossFit affiliate back in 2008 and remaining a CrossFit affiliate for about 15 years after that. But it was easy for me to go back to the Catalyst Fitness brand. But others have found themselves brandless and drifting without CrossFit on their logo. They don't know how to describe their service. Some of them even went back and reaffiliated, but overall, the number of CrossFit gyms keeps going down. What's interesting is that many of these brands are very much like CrossFit. Well, I won't say that they are completely derivative, but they borrowed at least one facet of constantly varied functional movement performed at high intensity from CrossFit, the originator. Others are almost entirely derivative. Even seasoned CrossFit veterans wouldn't be able to tell the difference without looking at the name on the sign out front. But these small little brands are growing and they appear to be winning anyway, and CrossFit purists like me don't get a vote. Unfortunately, as these gyms rebrand and re-home themselves in other affiliate programs, they're very unlikely to go back to the mothership again. And so while I've been saying, hey, yeah, I'll reaffiliate when I see promise, a lot of these other brands who rehome are now calling themselves other things, or maybe they've taken on a new brand like Matabolic and they're not coming back again. It's not a mass exodus where every CrossFit affiliate is leaving to become a mayhem affiliate or a proven affiliate or something else. It's really death by 10,000 cuts. Let's talk about why affiliates leave. First is the pursuit of the new thing. The affiliate numbers follow the interests of their clients, or at least they echo them. Clients are sometimes attracted to novelty, and that gets them in the door, but it's the job of the coach to keep them once they're in the door. I remember hanging up the CrossFit shingle back in 08 on my second gym. And yeah, there were people who just flooded in the first couple weekends because CrossFit was new, or they wanted to try it, or they were attracted to novelty. Now, these were the early adopters, and of course they're going to be attracted to the next novelty. And so a lot of them quit and went and did P90X or whatever the next thing was back then. And just like clients, business owners don't want to miss out on that next best thing. They want to try HyROX or they want to try Alchemy because they've heard of that, or maybe it's something else. And they're in this for the long term, even if the current owners of the CrossFit brand are not. And let's face it, new stuff is exciting. I don't want to miss out on it. I don't want to miss an opportunity to give my clients something new. And sometimes it's even an improvement on the original. And that's one reason why a lot of people are deaffiliating now. Another reason is lack of clarity from leadership. Imagine that your landlord listed your building for sale. Would you wait around to see if you like the new owner, or would you start looking at other options just in case? After six months of hearing CrossFits for Sale, we're looking for a buyer, and you know, a lot of affiliates are like, what do I do? And they're looking around for alternatives. Just like if the landlord of the building where you lived listed your building for sale and they stopped making upgrades or improvements, would you start looking for alternatives? How long would you wait until you did? The challenge here is that we're reaching a tipping point, or CrossFit affiliates are. And while some of them are actually excited, I've spoken to a few of you who said, Yeah, I'm I might be the only CrossFit gym in my town soon. That's great, no competition. But others of us remember when we were the only CrossFit gym in our town and what a burden it is to be the only one explaining what CrossFit is and how it's not harmful and how it won't just turn you into this muscular beast overnight. But this is my greatest fear. The primary marketing source for CrossFit, the method, is CrossFit the community. And so every time a gym closes up shop or de-affiliates, that's about 122 members who are no longer attracting new people to CrossFit. They're no longer talking about CrossFit. Every time a gym leaves, the marketing engine gets a little bit smaller. And HQ isn't running ads or asking for referrals or producing meaningful content anymore. The affiliates are. And every time an affiliate goes away, that stops. And first growth slows down as more and more affiliates leave, and then it stops, and then the movement begins to shrink, and then it starts getting smaller really quickly. CrossFit's first tipping point was around 2007 when there were about 5,000 affiliates. What happens if we shrink to 5,000 affiliates again on the way down and we tip back the other way? Now let's talk about where affiliates are going. In 2014, most CrossFit affiliates were truly ride or die. They either hung in as affiliates or they went out of business. They didn't de-affiliate, they didn't become something else, they didn't just want to run a gym, they wanted to run a CrossFit gym. But now there are other options, many, many other options. And CrossFit is being cut up into little pieces and replaced piece by piece instead of all at once. So here are the other options. First, if you want to do CrossFit because you like competition, and which is the smallest part of CrossFit, this has largely been replaced by HyROX. HyROX has over 7,000 affiliate gyms paying about 130 bucks a month. Clients are coming in the door to do high ROX who weren't attracted to CrossFit, and CrossFitters are being pulled away from CrossFit competitions to do HYROCs. The numbers don't lie, and I don't even have to remind you of what they are. HYROX came out of Europe and there are other competing brands in Europe right now, but this is different. When people started doing Spartan race, they didn't de-affiliate to become Spartan gyms. They are doing that with HYROCs now. Second, where is the CrossFit community going? Well, Rogue has kind of taken the lead here. If you go to a Rogue invitational event, it feels like CrossFit around 2014. Happy, positive, supportive vibes. It feels like a family. Rogue is probably the best friend that CrossFit has right now. They are keeping the community together. They're even gathering people like me, other partners who are invested in keeping the CrossFit community together and kind of ring fencing it so that the new owners will benefit from that. And this is just me talking, although we are partnered with Rogue. Bill has never said this to me, but I don't see CrossFit acknowledging that friendship publicly at the level it should. I mean, Rogue does a lot for CrossFit more than just being the vendor of choice for the game's material. Rogue is really kind of holding the community together now, in my personal opinion. What about the OG vibe? Where's that going? Well, you know, you can find that in some gyms that have different names now. You know, Iron Tribe is a good example. Ironically, the gym that many called a knockoff of CrossFit a decade ago is now kind of more CrossFit than a lot of other CrossFit gyms in many cities. And so that OG vibe seems to be doing well in gyms like Iron Tribe, and that's just one example. But you don't really find it in a lot of gyms. You wouldn't find it in mine. And so if that's what you're looking for, though, you know, you might not find the original OG CrossFit vibe in a CrossFit gym, for example. And some people are looking for that, and some people do care about that. For example, the gym that my daughter belongs to is a former affiliate. They really embrace the OG vibe. She loves it, but they don't call themselves CrossFit anymore. And so, you know, this difference of philosophy is really what's slicing CrossFit up. Is we can debate, well, they should be calling it CrossFit or they can do CrossFit as long as their trainers are certified, whether they call themselves something else or not. We can debate that to death, but the reality is that it's not stopping the outflow of affiliates. What about CrossFit classes? Aren't they the best fitness classes in the world? Well, in last month's edition of Men's Health, the 11 best fitness classes were listed as metabolic, core power yoga, F-45, Solid Core, Cycle Bar, Performance, Lifetime Alpha, Mayweather, Boxing and Fitness, Equinox is fully vested, class, row house. You know, there were there were a lot on that list. CrossFit was only mentioned with a warning. Hey, before you run out and start doing CrossFit, that's the only time CrossFit even appeared in the article. And of course, Orange Theory was on that list too. And what does this mean? It means that the tide of novelty is turning away from CrossFit. And the way that you get that back is that you do something that's kind of different or new. What's interesting to me and infuriating to longtime CrossFit affiliates is that many of the programs that I just listed on this list that appeared in men's health, they're CrossFit derivatives. They're CrossFit but without muscle ups. Or they're CrossFit but with kettlebells only instead of barbells. They're constantly varied functional movement performed at high intensity with no credit given. And maybe they're just constantly varied functional movement performed at high intensity on a rower, or constantly varied functional movement performed at high intensity with no complicated barbell skills. Whatever, there's no credit given. And so a lot of clients see this as the evolution of CrossFit. The methodology itself, uh, you know, let's talk about where that's going now. Okay. So the class options that I listed earlier lack a distinctive CrossFit element, right? The workouts look the same every day and they don't vary by much. And in full transparency, a lot of CrossFit gyms run this way too. Every class is a lift and then high-intensity interval training. And this wasn't the original methodology. Instead, the original methodology covered all the bases, including aerobic conditioning, uh often just called monostructural but confused, uh, weightlifting, gymnastics, and hit high-intensity interval training. The original gym did not have the go hard everyday mentality that many gyms now have, mostly thanks to the influence of the games. And that mentality is potentially harmful long term. It's very tough on clients to go hard every day. At first, it's exciting, but gradually they get burned out and they leave. And ironically, the chains that I've just listed have mostly adopted that mentality. They are selling intensity, they are commoditizing intensity and putting it up for sale, and they're gonna have the same churn problems that a lot of boxes have these days. To counter the obvious problem of crushing yourself every day, Men's Health recommends are you ready for this? That nobody buys a membership at any one gym and instead uses class pass to mix and match classes at different gyms every day. As if clients are gonna research every possible training option every day, change their commute, sign in on time, reserve their spot, and then properly coach themselves to optimal fitness by combining these classes into the perfect program for them. It is crazy and random to think that this would even work for elite athletes with unlimited time to train and a desk job that allows them to browse five different websites every day to figure out what workout's gonna work for them. These are the people who are susceptible to AI coaching and online programming. And the article even goes on to recommend a few different prescriptions. So they said that if you want to build muscle, you should do three strength style workouts, one cardio-style workout, and one mobility or recovery style workout each week. If you want to improve your cardio, you would do two cardio-based workouts, two strength-based workouts, and one recovery style workout each week. And if you want to lose weight, the article recommends you do one or two strength-based workouts per week, and one cardio-based workout and one wildcard workout, as well as one recovery style workout per week. It's up to the client to figure out where should I go for my two strength-based workouts this week? Is it metabolic? Is it fully vested? What do I do? But this sounds a lot like the prescriptive model to me, except in two brain gyms, the coach makes the prescription. And in Men's Health magazine, the reader is left to kind of figure it out on their own. Honestly, you and I see this article for what it is. It's just a promotion for class pass, and it's also a recipe for disaster. Instead of dabbling in a bunch of different things and trying to fit the puzzle together, clients would be far better off to go to one gym, get all of that work that they need, strength, aerobic, anaerobic high-intensity interval training, following the prescription of a caring coach. Because let's figure, you know, regular people don't know how to do it. Which five classes should they pick? How do they know which gym to go to on Monday? This is all solved by the prescriptive model and a little bit of variation in your class options. So here's the big opportunity. Yes, you know, CrossFit affiliation is suffering, and people are leaving because it's death by a thousand cuts. They're going to try this class this day, that class the next day, and the mainstream media is getting behind this idea. But this creates a massive opportunity for you, whether you want to call yourself a CrossFit affiliate or not. And that is to offer the prescriptive model at your gym. Make your new clients a tailored prescription at your gym. In other words, coach them by telling them exactly what to do, which classes to attend, and how often to show up in a given week. Don't just try to sell them on coming to CrossFit classes two times a week or three times a week or unlimited based on price. That is not the same thing. Selling how many classes you have is not the same as making a prescription. Every three to six months, you should meet with that same client again and update their prescription. If you don't, they will start tweaking it themselves and try to slap together a fitness plan based on novelty and wild guesses. Even if they do it within your gym, they're gonna go out looking for alternate programming or follow the stretch program on their phone. This is not what you're about. Your coaching must be holistic and you must prescribe a person do strength this many times a week, come to these two classes, do aerobics this many times a week, come to these two classes. They don't have to be separate classes, they can all be the same, but you have to tell them what to do. You can also add some of these options to your gym without a total rebrand or de-affiliating. You can add high rocks and still be CrossFit. You can add CNU stretch and your clients won't need a stretch lab membership. You can add a Parisi affiliation and coat youth athletes for performance, whether you call yourself CrossFit or not. These are collaborative affiliations that build on your platform instead of competition outside your walls. So I want to sum up because I talked about the problem and then I said that the solution is to adopt a prescriptive model in your gym. Many people like me are keen to see what will replace CrossFit or if the brand can revitalize itself under new leadership. But there's no need to wait and be caught in this vacuum of stress and what will eat, won't he? Like what's gonna happen? Or waiting to see if the landlord sells the building to somebody new that you don't like. You can decide to keep your CrossFit affiliation or not and still compete with all of these options and all this variety yourself by adopting the prescriptive model. How do you do that? Well, you know, I'm Chris Cooper and this is Run a Profitable Gym. You can go to gymownersunited.com, you can ask questions about the prescriptive model, you can get some of my free guides there, and when you're ready to be coached to implement the prescriptive model, you can talk to my team about getting some mentorship. Knowledge is not power because knowledge does not create action. Knowledge is great for helping you decide what to do, but coaching gets it done. And when you join gymownersunited.com, you're gonna get a lot of knowledge. Eventually, when you're ready to apply the prescriptive model and stop trying to compete with 12, 50 different things, try stop trying to decide whether you should affiliate or deaffiliate. You can take control of your gym, take control of your clients' lives the way they're asking you to do, adopt a prescriptive model and be successful no matter what the name is on your door.