Two-Brain Summit 2026: 2 Days, 16 Speakers, Unlimited ROI

The Two-Brain Summit is back for its 10th year this June in Chicago, and it’s bigger than ever before!

Get your tickets via the link below and make June 6-7 the most valuable weekend of your entire year.

Headlining the owners side, bestselling author Mike Michalowicz will teach you how to stand out and attract the right customers to your gym. You’ll also hear from fitness business experts such as:

- Matt Souza of “The Sevan Podcast” and “Souza’s Show”
- Street Parking co-founders Miranda and Julian Alcaraz
- Rick Mayo, founder of Alloy Personal Training (1992)

And while you’re leveling up as a gym owner, your coaches will be honing their skills with some of the best in the industry, including:

- HWPO’s Michele Letendre, CrossFit Games coach and former athlete
- Power Monkey’s Dave Durante (gymnastics) and Chad Vaughn (weightlifting), both former elite athletes
- Bill Parisi, fascia expert and founder of Parisi Speed School

Tune in as Chris Cooper presents the full lineup and shares exactly what gym owners and coaches will be working on at the world's biggest gym business conference. 

Then, use the link below to get your tickets before prices go up on Apr. 1.

Links

Two-Brain Summit Tickets

Gym Owners United

Book a Call

0:01 - Intro

2:16 - Saturday lineup: Owners

9:18 - Saturday lineup: Coaches

11:50 - Sunday lineup: Owners

18:30 - Sunday lineup: Coaches

Transcript

0:02

So I've been running the summit for 10 years. That's 10 years of getting gym owners together in one place, bringing the best minds in the fitness business into one room for a day or a couple of days. And every single year I leave thinking, man, that was the best one yet. And every year as I'm starting to put together the next year's summit, I ask myself, what did gym owners need the most right now? And then I say, who's the best person in the world to help them with that? And that's led to amazing guests like Jocko Willink and Seth Godin over the years, Lisa Williams. This year, I think the team has actually done the best job they've ever done. The Two Brain Summit 2026 is June 6th and 7th at the Hyatt Regency, our best venue ever in Rosemont, Illinois. It's just right outside Chicago, very close to O'Hare. This is our 10th anniversary. This is actually the t-shirt from our very first summit back in 2016. And our theme this year is the power of 10. Now that theme means something, it's not just a number, it's a framework. It's how to take your 10 best clients and replicate them to 100 clients. It's how to take the 10 weekly actions that guarantee business growth, the 10 leadership skills that every gym owner has to build, and using those with intent to 100X your business. The whole event is designed around this theme. And to honor our 10-year anniversary, we've put together the best speaker lineup I think we've ever had. And I mean that. I've stood on that stage every single year. I know what makes a great summit. And this year, every single presenter was chosen because they have something specific, actionable, proven, and real that will change how you run your gym. So today, I'm going to walk you through every speaker. I'm going to tell you what they're bringing to the stage. And I'm going to explain exactly how this is going to help you and your gym. But first, early bird pricing ends April 1st. If you're listening to this before April 1st, go to twobrainsummit.com right now and lock in your ticket. Price is going up the moment that clock hits midnight. Don't let that happen. All right, let's talk about who's coming. Now, keep in mind that we don't just have people droning on on the stage. Everybody brings an activity that you are going to do with them. It's more like a workshop than a lecture. So we're going to start with the headliner. Because if you only know one name on my entire list today, it's probably Mike Michalowicz. And if you don't know it yet, you sure will after summit. Mike had built and sold$2 million companies by the age of 35. And then he became an angel investor and he lost everything, all his money, everything. Not some of it, right? Everything back to zero, the money, the confidence, almost his brain. And that breakdown became the turning point for him. He came back from that breakdown with a mission to create simple systems that actually generate wealth, not just revenue. And the system he's most famous for is Profit First, which has helped over a million business owners stop surviving and start accumulating real profit. His books are bestsellers, Profit First, which I just mentioned, The Pumpkin Plan, Fix This Next, Get Different, All In. His approach is anti-guru, anti-jargon, and absolutely no nonsense. We use a lot of Mike's tools right in our mentorship program. And at Summit, Mike's session is called. Get Noticed, How to Attract Customers. This is for every gym owner who feels invisible, who's doing great work, but you can't get the right people in the door. Mike is going to give you a framework for differentiation that doesn't require a big ad budget, just a clear strategy. And he's going to help you build your strategy together this year. This is the kind of speaker that you bring your whole staff to see. Now at Summit, we actually run two stages. There's just too much to be contained in one stage. So there's a stage for the owners, that's you, and there's a stage for your coaches to go and listen to with their own brand. They're not going to sit their butt in a chair and listen for two days either. They're going to get up and move and learn how to coach better and talk to some of the best in the industry. Back to the owner stage, on Saturday, right after Mike, we're going to talk about staff turnover. Now staff turnover is one of the most expensive and demoralizing problems in gym ownership. You find somebody great, you train them, they get really good, and then they leave. And then you start over. Corey Lewis doesn't have that problem. He's the CEO of Extra Mile Fitness, and he's been running his gym for over 13 years. He's expanded twice without shrinking again. His facility is now over 11,000 square feet. He has more than 10 team members on his staff. And here's the number that stopped me cold when I heard it. The average length of service for his staff is eight years. Eight years in an industry where the average coach tenure is counted in months, not years. Corey's also a two-brain mentor, which means he's not just doing this for himself. He's teaching other gym owners how to replicate it and build it in their own gyms. That's a different skill set altogether, and Corey's got that. At Summit, he's going to break down exactly what creates that kind of loyalty and longevity in a team. If you ever lost a great coach, and I have, I'm sure you have, you need to be in this room with Corey and work through this with him. The next talk might be the one that people underestimate and the one that they walk out talking about the most. Jolene Bingham and Lisa Palmer are going to take the stage. Now, Jolene is the CEO of 13 Stripes Fitness, Rebuild Fitness Training, and Omni Fitness. She's a successful multi-gym owner and Two Brains Tinker North America mentor, meaning she works with gym owners who are ready to go beyond just being profitable and start building real wealth. She and Lisa, who leads our Tinker Europe program and is, you know, equally as good, extremely successful, is a great investor and an amazing leader and coach. They're presenting together on the stage on one of the most honest truths in this business. Your gym can't outgrow you. Your business will hit the ceiling of your leadership, your mindset, and your personal development every single time. You're the thing usually holding your business back. Now, this isn't a motivational talk. They're not like Tony Robbins. It's going to be specific. They're going to help you find where you are in the bottleneck. What are the limiting beliefs? What do you need to develop in yourself before your gym can get to the next level? Jolene's been through it. She's built multiple businesses. She knows exactly where that ceiling comes from and how to smash right on through it. Rick Mayo founded Alloy Personal Training in 1992. That's not a typo. 1992. He's been doing this a lot longer than most of us. He's been in the game now for three and a half decades. He and his team have licensed the Alloy training systems to over 2,500 clubs worldwide. In 2019, they pivoted to a full franchise model, and they now serve 400 locations. Entrepreneur Magazine named Alloy a top 20 franchise. Rick's session is called The Client Journey, Franchiser, and here's why that matters for you. Even if you never planned a franchise, Rick has built systems that work at massive scale. They're replicated over and over across hundreds of locations with different owners, different markets, different clients. The client journey he's designed has to be repeatable, consistent, and profitable everywhere. That means the principles that he'll share are bulletproof. They're not, well, they worked in my one gym, right? They worked across 400 gyms and they're working now. That's the kind of validation that should make you listen very hard because whether or not you eventually want to become a franchisor someday, if you can copy these systems into your gym, your gym is going to work like a well-oiled machine, as if it's being run by somebody who doesn't have to pay attention to every single door opening at 6.05 a.m. Dr. Rick, Dan Trink, is the co-founder and co-owner of The Fort, a small group personal training gym with five locations across New York City. He's also the author of two books published by Human Kinetics and Rodale, a former men's fitness advisory board member and a longtime contributor to Men's Health, Men's Fitness, T Nation, and the New York Times. In other words, Dan knows content. He's been creating it professionally for years across multiple platforms. This is why I'm such a big fan of Dan. His session is about something that every gym owner is really wrestling with right now. How do you use AI to create content that actually sounds like you and not like a robot? Not that generic stuff that you're seeing on Facebook right now, which is clearly machine generated, posts that clients just kind of scroll past. more and more people are just becoming immune to that stuff. Dan's going to talk about creating actual content that connects using AI as the writer. He's going to give you a practical approach to AI content creation that makes the output better, faster, and way more human. It's going to sound like you. If you're spending hours a week doing social media posts or emails that don't land the way you want, or just doing it and hating it, this session is going to be your shortcut. Now, all of that is happening Saturday. If all you do is make it for one day, get the ticket and that pays for the entire weekend for you and your staff. And while you're doing that, over on the coach's stage, in the coach's room, your staff are going to be doing things that fire them up, that put new batteries in them, that will make them leave with excitement to help you grow your business, but also just to coach your clients better, to improve your product. Bill. Parisi founded Parisi Speed School, global performance training system with over 120 affiliate locations now. Bill is an amazing speaker. He's trained amazing coaches who train amazing athletes. Before he even built Parisi. Speed School, he built and managed a four-facility chain from 1993 to 2015, with each location averaging over $1.5 million in annual revenue. More than 30 years in the business, he's trained athletes from youth to professional athletes that you've heard of, and his session for coaches is about something that's becoming a competitive advantage, tissue preparation, fascia-first movement literacy, and isometric performance systems. If you've never heard of this, don't worry. Your coaches have, and you will after this weekend because they're going to be raving about. Bill. Bill's core argument is this. Intensity alone is not enough anymore. It doesn't win. The gyms that are keeping members healthy and progressing their fitness and paying them for years are the ones that understand how the body actually works, at a tissue level. Movement quality isn't just a nice-to-have, it's a retention strategy. Coaches who leave this session will have the tools that make their clients' results better and their clients' tenure longer. Both of those things matter enormously for your business. The Saturday afternoon Coach's Room workshop is going to be led by Metfix, Emily Kaplan, Pete Shaw, and Dale King. Emily, Pete, and Dale bring decades of experience in coaching, business development, and community building. And through Metfix, they help gyms move beyond workouts to deliver real results through metabolic health and nutrition and behavior change. To me, this really feels like the 2.0 version of CrossFit, but they would never call it that. Their work equips coaches and gym owners with practical systems that improve retention and increase member value and drive measurable outcomes for the client. This is the missing piece for a lot of gyms, especially if you've not addressing what's happening outside the gym, you're leaving a lot of results on the table. And when results dip, so does adherence, and then so does retention. And that's what these guys are here to fix for you as part of the Metfix crew. Let's move on to Sunday, because believe it or not, all of this is happening just on Saturday. My goal here is that every single day that you spend with us at Summit is so valuable that it can change the entire trajectory of the gym, that you get at least a 10X ROI immediately, on your Summit ticket and your travel. And over time, it multiplies a hundred, a thousand fold. So Sunday, Matt Souza, who you might know as the co-host of the Savant podcast, but he's also been the owner and head coach of CrossFit Livermore for over 12 years. But what makes him uniquely qualified for this session is what he's built outside of his gym walls. So Matt is the producer of the Savant podcast and the host of his own show called. Souza's Show. He's produced live streams for CrossFit semifinals and competitions, and he's the co-founder of Media Launch, an ad agency and educational platform built specifically for CrossFit affiliates and coaches. He knows how to tell a story on camera, behind a microphone, and in writing. And he knows how to do it in a way that actually attracts clients and builds a brand. Now, even if you're not a CrossFit affiliate, you are going to learn so much from Matt, because CrossFit was built on storytelling. They were a media company first, and Matt understands that, and he can translate that to your gym no matter what method you use. His session is called Make Money with Storytelling, and here's the key insight. In a crowded market, the gym with the best story wins. Not the best equipment, not the cheapest price, but the best story. Matt's going to show you how to find that story and how to tell it in a way that converts and keeps clients. Then Brian Bott is the founder and CEO of Aspire Fitness, which is a personal training business with two facilities in Jersey that brings in about $1.3 million a year. He's also a two-brain mentor, specifically in the area of semi-private gyms. His specialty is semi-private, of course, and his track record is absolutely remarkable. Semi-private, meaning two to four clients training with individualized programs, but under one coach at the same time, is one of the highest margin services that a gym can offer, and the highest retention. Our data shows that you can generate two to $260 per hour or more. Coaches earn way more than they would doing personal training and extremely more than they would coaching a group class. Clients get better results because they have a personalized program. Owners keep their best staff because their coaches are making a real career. Brian has built systems for launching this program that work in real gyms, not just on paper. He knows where gym owners get stuck and he's going to walk you through this step by step. If you're not running semi-private training yet, this session could be the highest ROI 45 minutes of the last five years for you. And I know I'm supposed to say this is the highest ROI 45 minutes of your year, but the reality is that this could change your entire business. We were running personal training and group training at Catalyst for the last 20 years. When we merged them into semi-private, it changed the entire game for us. We love it. The clients love it. The staff loves it too. After Brian, Dane McCarthy is going to come on stage. He's the founder of The Athletic Clubs, which is a team-based training concept with seven studios in New York City. He has new locations opening this year in Jersey, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. And Dane was a former semi-professional rugby player. He built his business around the way that team sports actually work. Members show up at the same times every week. They train with the same people and they're led by the same coach. The result is a genuine community, not just the word community, but the actual thing. It's building community with intent, with purpose, and that's what makes it work. And the retention numbers prove it. When people have a team, they don't quit. His session is called Reinventing Group Training, and he's going to challenge some assumptions that you might have about what group fitness can look like if your group classes feel interchangeable, if clients are coming and going without much connection. Dane has a model that fixes that structurally from the ground up, and you can copy this model. You're going to work on this model with Dane. Daniel Purrington is going to be on stage next. Now, Dan is a two-brain mentor. He's the founder and CEO of Woods Lawn Fitness in Portland, Oregon, and he also comes from the medical world, not the fitness background, even though he loves fitness and he's an amazing fitness coach. He comes from the medical world, which gives him a perspective that most gym owners don't get to have. We just don't have experience in that world, but Dan, here's what he's built. A gym that grosses over$500,000 a year in about 3,000 square feet, 170 members, paying an average of$350 a month in average revenue, a 36-month average length of engagement, no paid ads, and he only takes four new members per month. Dan has figured out that growth isn't always more. More members, more space, more marketing. Sometimes growth is better, but his growth is deeper. It's more intentional. And the thing that's standing between most gym owners and that kind of precision is fear. The fear of raising rates, for example, or the fear of saying no to the wrong clients, the fear of capping membership, the fear of just changing what you're currently doing, even though that, you know, if you don't change, nothing will change. If you want to change your business, you have to change your business. And if you want to change your business, you have to get over the fear and Dan's going to help you with that. His session is going to name that fear and then dismantle it. Take it apart piece by piece. And if you've been playing it too safe, when you know that your business needs to evolve, Dan's session is for you. The Sunday afternoon workshop is led by Street Parking by Miranda and Julian Alcarez. I'm really excited to see these guys again. They've done such an amazing job. You know, there were a lot of brands that were founded by people who started in the. CrossFit movement, and very few actually went on to become successful. But street parking has become a phenomenon in its own right. They built something remarkable, which is a massive, loyal community of home gym athletes who train together virtually, who show up for each other and pay monthly for years. Miranda and Julian built that without a physical facility at all and the principles behind it programming community identity belonging applied directly to the brick and mortar gym if you've ever met somebody who does street parking they're going to talk about street parking the way people talked about crossfit back in 2009 they've got the t-shirt they go out to the street parking meet up once a year this workshop is going to give coaches tools they can use immediately to build the kind of connection that keeps your clients coming back it's a real brand now that's going on on the owner's stage on sunday so back to the coach's room on sunday because while that's going on there's amazing stuff happening in the coach's room again and by the way the equipment in the coach's rooms the stuff that you're going to be playing with you know doing that all comes from rogue they're a key sponsor of this event and they make it better every single year the sunday morning workshop is going to be led by hwpo training with michelle latonde now michelle started in the crossfit world in 2009 working at the front desk of a crossfit gym within a year she earned her level one and she began coaching full-time she went on to become a crossfit games athlete i'm sure you remember her if you're a crossfit games fan she was a crossfit games coach and still is she's a member of the l1 seminar staff because her personality is even greater than her athleticism as hard as that is to believe in 2016 she retired as an athlete and launched deca comp where she coaches competitors at the highest level of the sport including patrick velner a nine-year crossfit games athlete and five-time podium finisher she joined hwpo training in 2023 and now she leads their affiliate programming full-time what coaches are going to get from michelle besides just joy and energy which i always get every time i talk to michelle but your coaches are going to get real technical depth to that same standard that michelle applies at the elite level applied to the gym floor this isn't service level programming tips it's the work somebody who has spent decades obsessing over movement and performance mastery also on the coaches stage sunday eric connor owns crossfit reform in rancho santa margarita california just outside los angeles in one of the most competitive fitness markets in the world but his gym still grosses over fifty thousand dollars a month he's increased gross revenue by more than a hundred percent since 2016 in 2022 and 2023 alone he added 20 percent to his revenue i'm amazing he pays two full-time staff members sixty to eighty thousand dollars a year with retirement benefits and he's done all of this without running paid ads so his session for coaches is called keep members for a thousand sessions it's a very clear target a clear goal for them to hit it's a long game it's not just about getting somebody in the door but about building a relationship that keeps them training with you for years eric's specialty is retention and staff development and his results prove that his system works coaches who understand retention are invaluable to any gym because every client they save is revenue that doesn't have to be replaced with marketing this is the session that makes your coaches irreplaceable because they will become great at keeping your clients longer and of course if you've got irreplaceable coaches your clients can't replace them in their lives either and then rounding out the coaches room on sunday is a workshop from power monkey fitness led by dave durant he was an nc double a all-american at stanford a multiple u.s. national champion in gymnastics a world team member and a member of the two thousand eight u.s. olympic team after his elite career he co-founded power monkey fitness to coach and mentor athletes worldwide in technical mastery and long-term performance chad vaughn is a nine-time national champion an american record holder in the clean and jerk and in the master snatch clean and jerk and total he's a two-time. Olympian competing in 2004 and 2008. He founded Barbell Mobility to help athletes improve their movement quality and their longevity and their performance under the bar at the same time. This is world-class technical coaching from two athletes who represent the absolute pinnacle of their disciplines, gymnastics and weightlifting. Whatever your gym offers, your coaches will be better at providing that after this workshop. And so that's the lineup. I didn't mention myself, but I'm always get to be on stage. I'm going to give the opening address and I'm going to give the closing this year. Mike Michalowicz is going to speak on attracting the right customers. Corey Lewis on building a team that stays. Lisa Palmer and Jolene Bingham on your personal growth as a leader. Rick Mayo on a client journey that scales over 400 locations. Dan Trink on AI content that sounds human. Bill Parisi on training that keeps clients longer. The Metfix team on metabolic health and behavior change that drives retention. Matt Souza on storytelling that makes money. Brian Bott on semi-private training that works and provides careers for your staff. Dane McCarthy on reinventing group fitness. Daniel Purrington on breaking through that fear that's holding back the growth of your gym and you as a leader. Plus, Michelle LaTonde and HWPO on elite level coaching. Eric Conner on keeping members for a thousand sessions. Street parking on community that sticks. And Power Monkey on technical mastery. All of this in two days, two speaking tracks, one room full of the best gym owners and coaches in the world. We take over Rosemont. You will make new friends. You will shake hands. You will hug. You will work out together. You'll sweat together. I'm going to say this one more time. Early bird pricing ends April 1st. And after that, the prices go up. There's no extension. There's no exceptions. If you're serious about your gym, if you want 2026 to be the year things actually change, be in Rosemont on June 6th and 7th. Go to TwoBrainSummit.com right now and lock in your ticket. I will see you there myself.