Are the CrossFit Games Dead?

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Are the CrossFit Games dead? And should gym owners even care?

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper joins CEO John Franklin to discuss the state of the Games, as it heads into its 20th year.

Chris has been on both sides of this conversation. He worked for CrossFit HQ, recently interviewed the brand’s new CEO Bruce Edwards, and made the decision to reaffiliate his own gym.

He walks through how the Games shifted from a small community meetup into an expensive, sponsor-driven spectacle, and why that shift disconnected it from the everyday members who make up most affiliate gyms.

John puts Chris through a four-question report card on whether the Games still market the brand, measure real fitness, bring new people into CrossFit and keep members in affiliates longer.

Chris’ answers point to one consistent theme: Gyms don’t need to wait on HQ to fix this.

The pair dig into what’s actually working elsewhere, including HYROX, Spartan Race and Street Parking meetups.

They explain how gym owners can borrow those ideas to build their own intramural events, using the same repeatable workouts each year so members can track real progress and feel proud of what they’ve accomplished.

Tune in to hear Chris’s take on where the Games went wrong, and how any affiliate can create that same “peak moment” feeling for members without needing CrossFit HQ to get it right first.

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0:00 - Are the CrossFit Games still helping gym owners?

0:51 - What the CrossFit Games were originally built for

3:11 - When the Games stopped helping affiliates

7:21 - What gym members are actually looking for

10:20 - How the Open lost its original purpose

14:42 - Chris Cooper grades the CrossFit Games

20:25 - What Chris would change at CrossFit HQ

25:12 - Why fitness festivals outperform competitions

29:09 - How to reinvent the CrossFit Open for your gym

34:23 - Why Chris re-affiliated with CrossFit

Transcript

John 0:03

Are the CrossFit games actually dying? And more importantly, should gym owners even care? Over the last few years, we've seen affiliates leave, leadership change, and endless debates online about the future of CrossFit. For gym owners, it's becoming a lot harder to know what's actually noise and what's going to impact your business. Chris Cooper is uniquely positioned to talk about this. He's been on both sides of the conversation. He worked for CrossFitHQ. He just interviewed the new CEO at the TwoBrain Summit, and he made the decision to reaffiliate his own gym. So today we're going to be talking about all his feelings about the CrossFit games. I'm John Franklin, the CEO of TwoBrain Business, the world's largest gym mentorship company, working with over 3,000 gym owners to help them hit six figures in profit because yes, it is possible. This is going to be a reaction style conversation with TwoBrain's founder, Chris Cooper, on the state of the CrossFit games. Let's jump into it. So, Chris, we're going into the 20th CrossFit Games. Yep. You've been around since day one watching the brand evolve and also the games themselves evolve. The original idea of the games was a community event for people to gather to find the fittest on earth. Now it's being marketed as celebrating the methodology. And no one's entirely sure what that means. I guess I want to start this episode by saying, what is the purpose of the games? And is the games doing its job?

Chris 1:28

So the the original purpose of the games, and I think maybe the best purpose of the games is to bring CrossFitters together. And in 2007, that was the concept let's meet up somewhere. And it turned out to be Dave Castro's family ranch, and let's do a few events. They had three, right? There was a run, there was a lifting, I think it was, yeah, Max Deadlift, and then there was this Hopper event. And it was like, let's just see who does the best. And James Fitzgerald won and became the first CrossFit Games champion. And even the next year, when they filmed a documentary about it and it started to get bigger, they weren't yet saying fittest on earth yet. And um, even at that point, though, it was kind of like, let's find the person who's best at the methodology. And it felt like a festival, and people would show up and they a lot of them camped, they tented, and they just did the workouts for fun and they all high-fived and it wasn't a really big deal. Later on, when sponsorship came in, it became kind of this other thing. And that's kind of where the path diverged. And I think maybe uh we started to miss the bigger opportunity, which was to bring CrossFitters together to celebrate their fitness and celebrate the community and celebrate the methodology. So, in the beginning, like those first couple games, did you have to do anything to go?

John 2:40

Or you just kind of like show you.

Chris 2:41

No, no, especially 2007. There was a message posted on the CrossFit message board. We're all getting together and you know, show up here. And uh of the people who showed up, OPT won. And it's because he was a decent deadlifter and he was a really good runner and he did well at whatever the hopper event was.

John 2:58

So it obviously evolved over time, and the event got bigger and bigger and bigger, which is something I'm sure you can relate to having run the summit for 10 years and having it turn into something much larger than what it was originally intended to be.

Chris 3:14

Yeah.

John 3:14

Greg said the games lost money every single year in the modern era. So why do you keep doing them?

Chris 3:22

Well, you kind of get into this trap of okay, now it can't just be a barbecue and a peanut hopper, and now we need somebody to help us pay for it. So you you take sponsors on board. And, you know, of course, as it's Apex, it was Cross, it was Reebok, it was ESPN, Progenics was really big. And then because you have a duty to those sponsors, you have to put all of your media into hyping it up. And so it did work, you know, at CrossFit's peak year. The only marketing vehicle that CrossFit HQ was really putting out, the marketing vehicle that at least was reaching the broader audiences, like ESPN too, um, that was the games. And and that's how you attracted attention. And soon, when an affiliate said, What am I getting for my money? They could point to the games and saying, You're reaching this worldwide audience, and there's millions of people watching this thing, and Reebok has you in stores. I could walk down to the shopping mall and I would see CrossFit, CrossFit, CrossFit everywhere. And for a while, that was really, really valuable. Over time, though, the way the the game's direction went and the way affiliation went and the way popularity in CrossFit went, it it just lost that value to affiliates and it no longer became the marketing vehicle. In fact, a lot of affiliates started to complain it was the the opposite. It was like an unmarketing of CrossFit.

John 4:43

So when I started in CrossFit, affiliation was just this incredible gift where I slapped CrossFit on the door, yeah, and people would show up every single week wanting to try CrossFit. I had over a hundred members when I opened my gym, and it wasn't because I was a phenomenal coach, it's because I was doing CrossFit in my gym. When the games, like during that era, the games was like the primary marketing vehicle for CrossFit. You know, you owned a gym for 20 years. What type of people was that bringing into your gym?

Chris 5:15

Well, at first, there were a couple of early adopters, but even back then, you know, 2009, my gym was doing throwdowns and we were traveling eight hours to go do these challenges and it was fun. And you would see maybe the top 12 most passionate CrossFitters, they would be willing to travel and do this kind of thing. When the game started to get big and popular, and this was years later, if somebody knocked on the door and said, I just saw the CrossFit games, I want to compete in that, or we had one kid come in and say, I want to win the CrossFit games in three years, you know, the quality of the person that you're attracting, it's just they're they have a different incentive, you know. And of course, six months in, they're gonna be looking at your coaches and saying, that person couldn't beat me at Fran, and I've got a bigger deadlift than her. I can do more pull-ups than him, and comparing themselves and thinking like they are the top CrossFitter because they're doing well in the games. And then they start looking outside and oh, I'm gonna pay this external person for coaching and I'm gonna buy this super secret squirrel programming online. And then they start to separate themselves from the community. And so they'll want open gym access time and they'll want you to buy equipment like jerk blocks or you know, the worm or whatever, and they'll be dissatisfied if you're not catering to them. And unfortunately, a lot of gyms do. They think that their most valuable client are these elite CrossFit athletes, and they're not, they're the most challenging, troublesome clients in a lot of cases. And frankly, you know, to sometimes to support their CrossFit pursuit, they'll take a coaching job and they're not always the best coaches, and they're not always the best clients. And some of them open gyms and they're not the best affiliate owners always. Now, there's obviously unicorns who are good at coaching and good at competing, or good at opening a gym and good at competing. But the reality is that a lot of times the incentives just didn't align. And within a couple of years, those people were all out of my box. As as I realized they weren't my best clients, and we focused on our best clients, a lot of those people just laughed and did their own thing. And um, I ran into one last weekend and he hasn't even worked out in five years.

John 7:25

Well, I'm trying to think back to that era, and it seemed like the type of people and the type of messaging put out by CrossFit at the time was more in line with people who were trying to achieve elite levels of fitness, right? Yeah. You had the mascot, Pughie the clown.

Chris 7:41

Yeah.

John 7:42

And uh you had the term fire breathers, and it was a lot of people training for these really intense races, but somewhere along the journey, it became more about helping, you know, your stay-at-home mom, a busy parent, a dad who wants to just look a little better for um their kids. And I'm not sure like the messaging ever adapted from that. Yeah.

Chris 8:06

I think there's some confusion about what elite fitness is, and the message turned from everybody should strive for elite fitness as a buffer for their health to let's find the fittest person. And so that that led to a pursuit of competition for competition's sake. And, you know, you can see in the journal Greg kind of backpedaling from this a little bit, and then eventually him outwardly saying that he hates the games and not wanting to fund it anymore, and you know, actually uh saying what affiliate owners were already saying, which is that it's not attracting new people. Where's the value here? Why are we doing this?

John 8:43

And so what are people actually buying when they sign up to a CrossFit gym? Like what is the what is the value proposition?

Chris 8:50

Well, deep down, under many, many layers, it's probably they want to be proud of themselves and they're not. And they don't like themselves, maybe they don't like the way they look, the way they feel, something's rickety, they feel like older than they actually are on paper. And so what they're buying is the opportunity to become proud of themselves again. And when they sign up their kids in the gym, too, like, you know, they're doing that because they feel proud of their kids and they they want to continue to feel proud. So that means there is a value in having competitions or ways to for people to test themselves, but only because it's not a pass-fail test. It's so that they can achieve something that they can be proud of later. Like on their deathbed, I've got members and former members who are gonna talk about that time they deadlifted 500 pounds, not because they won a competition, but because they did it. You know, I've got a client who is a personal training client. She entered a triathlon, she did the bike stage, she rode 40 kilometers, she had to lose a bunch of weight to do it. Like that is that's a peak moment in her life that she's never gonna forget. And that's what we're actually trying to provide is ways that people can be proud of themselves. You don't need to have a worldwide leaderboard or be in the top 10% of CrossFitters at the deadlift to do that. You just need to for people to be able to stand on a podium. And I think that's where events like HyRox Spartan race, I think that's where they get it. It's not just for the elites. You know, there's there's so much of a gap between people at my gym and the people at the CrossFit games that they don't even relate anymore.

John 10:23

So you talk about how pride is the feeling we want our members to feel when they do the work in our gym. Yeah. The vehicle for that in CrossFit was the open. What happened there?

Chris 10:38

Well, so originally CrossFit had these tiers of competition. And so they they had sectionals, and if you won sectionals, you went to regionals, and if you won regionals, you went to the games. And they realized that there were so many people trying to enter that they had to have another level of competition. So they introduced the open just basically to filter people out or make sure that you were at least somewhat legit when you got to sectionals or regionals later. And what we saw that as was a big opportunity to make people proud of themselves in our gym, even if they would never make sectionals, even if they didn't care. It by adding an intramural layer to that, they could feel proud of themselves, of their team. And even if they were the worst last place finisher at every event, they could still win like the spirit of the open. And we just copied a model from my high school, but it's actually a lot like Hogwarts, if anybody's, you know, a Harry Potter fan. And so you divide people into houses and you put them on teams and they fit in, and it was incredible. And it gave us an excuse to put people on podiums, take their picture, and make them feel proud. Nobody else in their life is doing this. Like their boss is not uh giving them the employee of the month on Instagram anymore. And so that that really uh helped. And the intramural concept was so broadly adopted in CrossFit that uh, you know, almost everybody did it. But the problem was that because it didn't come from somebody who worked at HQ, CrossFit never formally adopted it as the intramural open, which I think they should have. And, you know, it it just became this stiffer and stiffer competition. And now if you're doing the CrossFit open, it's like, well, you have to be judged to this standard. And if if you're on videotape and some of your squats aren't deep enough, you are going to be ridiculed on different social media channels. Like, why would I even do this? And so now the open is shrinking, where similar events online, like in the cycling world, you've got Zwift and of course you've got HyROX. Like these are exploding, they're growing now because they they understand that the purpose is to make the person feel proud and give them a podium to stand on instead of a filter that tells them they're not good enough for high school gym class.

John 12:45

So if I'm hearing this right, the open started as a filtering mechanism. Yeah. It was making sure that when people got to the quote unquote real competition, they were legit. Yeah. And so what you realized over time was well, wait, you're getting everybody together to do these workouts, and maybe the best person in your gym is going to get 2,000th place, but there's still a lot of opportunities within the gym itself to create moments, make people feel special, take some of the elements of some of these larger competitions and bring them in-house at an element of fun. And you're saying that's something that maybe CrossFit missed the mark in terms of like facilitating within the affiliate community.

Chris 13:25

Yeah. And you know, there were other um examples too. So we did the intramural open at Catalyst first, but there I remember going to other boxes in the Boston area and they were doing Friday Night Lights, which was amazing, you know, and I think Back Bay had it. And they would just set up a studio like this, and the their regular clients would come in and they'd yell out their names, and the clients would feel all famous. And you see this, of course, in HyROX now, and you see this in Spartan Race. And it's not really the winning or the filtering or even the PRs that make people feel that way. It's I'm famous for a minute here, I'm being celebrated. I mean, the biggest app in fitness is Strava, and Strava is just like an app that finds ways for you to feel like you've won something.

John 14:08

To your point, my biggest concern with CrossFit in general is that there needs to be a mechanism that gets new people excited about CrossFit and brings prospects into affiliates. Right. And so if we were saying the games was the original mechanism for that, it was this meetup to get to bring new blood in, get people excited, show people what we're all about. I want to ask you four questions about the games, uh game show style, and and see see what your responses are to see where we are in terms of if that is the goal, you know, basically the report card.

Chris 14:44

Okay.

John 14:45

Question one Does the Games do a good job of marketing the brand?

Chris 14:50

No. The games does not produce a single new CrossFitter. And while it once did, there was certainly a time where the new people coming in who were attracted by the games were not a great fit for most of the gyms. But but now they don't attract anyone.

John 15:06

Do the games do a good job of measuring fitness?

Chris 15:11

They do, but the scope of fitness that they're measuring is narrowing. And, you know, especially for the last few years, like you you couldn't come out of winning the Iron Man World Championships and and even qualify for the CrossFit games. So while CrossFit's message is like broad and general and inclusive, the reality is that like across the entire spectrum of fitness, it's become narrower and narrower over time. And I'm not just talking about skill set, but also like aerobic capacity, endurance, for example. And I get it, like it's a lot more fun to go and watch a max clean and jerk or a max snatch or something with explosiveness or even high risk. But the reality is that like that excludes the vast, vast majority of exercisers in the world. And that's why runners, cyclists, triathletes, like that's why they're not watching CrossFit games anymore or even trying to bleed into that circle where they once did.

John 16:08

And you may have already answered this, but do you feel the games are bringing new people into CrossFit, or do you think it's deterring people from trying CrossFit?

Chris 16:18

I can't say for sure that it's deterring them, but it's definitely not bringing people in. I mean, you look at the last couple of years of the games, and maybe this is a bad example because it there has been like a calamity in there, but also it's become so specialized that there's not a lot of new blood coming into the games. You get a lot of repeat champions because they're getting better and better and better at a narrower scope. And of course, you know, this is somebody who's never been to the games, but as an uh incented observer, I really think that where HyRox does a great job is making it feel like a festival of fitness, making it attractive to runners, for example, who's a massive group, to try something new. Maybe their squats don't hit the standard depth of the CrossFit games, but that's part of the attraction. Like nobody is gonna be saying, you're doing it wrong, you're bad at this. And I think you know, we have a bigger opportunity to actually change the course of fitness in our culture if we stop worrying so much about squat depth and start worrying more about like how am I gonna make people feel great about working out?

John 17:23

Yeah. How to how do you get people into an affiliate? Exactly. You can't change their life if they don't walk in the door. So, question three, which sounds like is a resounding no. Does the games bring new people into CrossFit? No. So we talked about how the games may not be bringing new people into CrossFit, but there is an existing core community of CrossFitters. Does the games do a good job of keeping members in affiliates longer?

Chris 17:53

That's a harder question, but I don't think so. And I I think like if this is the reason to continue doing the games, there's really not much reason there. While there are some OG members of CrossFit gyms who do follow the games and they do stay up to date on who the new competitors are, and maybe they follow all the qualifiers and stuff like that too. Those people would not leave the gym if the CrossFit games went away. That's not why they're there, you know. And and again, they're so far away from being at that level that they they don't feel like um they're trying to qualify for it. It it's like, let's say that you started kids' soccer programs. There was a gap between being the beginner at soccer and going to the World Cup. I mean, no adults join recreational soccer leagues and stay with them year after year after year. That just doesn't happen. You know, the alternate example is like the Tour de France. When people start cycling, they generally don't stop and their investment just deepens over time. They do see the Tour de France cyclists, they do compare themselves, they interact with them on different apps and stuff, but they can stay in cycling without feeling as if like I'm I'm gonna race, I'm getting better. Because eventually you stop getting better. And if you're the more focused you are on competition, you know, ironically, the the worse your fitness deteriorates over time. You're way more likely to get injured. You're living on that razor's edge, it's just not sustainable. Where really you want people put into a practice that makes them feel great about working out. It's something that they can stick with because there is a community, not because they're aiming at this thing that they're probably never gonna hit. But also, like, you know, last year a member did the open and they had this amazing score on the clean and jerk or like how many burpees they got. So they're really excited this year to see if they got more fit because I'm gonna compare my score against last year. And then they never see that work out again. Like there is no comparison. And yes, you know, CrossFit coaches are supposed to understand that like your fitness is improving, but if I'm not comparing apples to apples, how am I supposed to know that? You know, especially as a client. And it's very I would wager a guess that like most CrossFit coaches do not do a good example of explaining how your fitness is improving from one year over the next when the when the events aren't identical. So how how is the person supposed to know, like, yeah, my fitness is improving based on these metrics when it's just like, well, I guess I did the open again.

John 20:27

So you obviously have strong opinions about where the games are today. If we were starting from scratch, you got two days. Bruce invites you to HQ and says, Chris, how are we fixing this this thing? What what are you telling them?

Chris 20:40

Well, I don't believe in um inventing things. What I believe in is like, let's look at what's actually working out there. And there are models that look a lot like CrossFit who are doing a better job. High Rocks is one. There are models of people who actually came from CrossFit, like street parking, who are doing an amazing job of having a fitness festival. I have members from my gym who used to go out to Vegas to do the street parking big collective meetup and do a workout there. I've also got a lot of former members from my gym who meet on the waterfront here in Sault Ste. Marie every Saturday and they do street parking workouts together. And I think like success leaves clues. And if you look at those, you can say, what should we actually be doing here? If the CrossFit Games is not attracting new CrossFitters, if it's out of reach for most of the people in the gym, and frankly, it might not be attracting the right people anymore. Now it's time to rethink things and say, let's have a massive fitness festival instead. And the original intent in 2007 was like, everybody meet up at this ranch, bring a tent. We're gonna, we're gonna run 5K in the dirt, and we're gonna do a heavy deadlift, and then we're gonna have this fun little chipper challenge. There's gonna be a keg of beer afterward. Let's go. I mean, I think you'd actually attract a lot more people that way. And, you know, where these other events do a great job. And I I mean 5Ks and community marathons. They attract first timers who just want to achieve something. They attract people who've done it before, who want to do better because it's the same distance every time. And they attract people who might just be brought in by their friends, you know. I am a big sponsor of a local bike ride here in August. There's a hundred K, a 70K, a 40K, probably 300 people sign up for it. Some of them have never ridden 40 kilometers in their life. Some of us are racing.

John 22:26

So the challenge I see is the style of CrossFit competitions where you have, you know, five to ten events over the course of multiple days. I did a HIROX. I'm in the venue two hours later. I'm on my way home. Done. They released Xenom, which I thought was a step in the right direction. It's like a CrossFit's answer. And I was a little disappointed to see that it was going to eat up a full weekend and there was snatches and handstand push-ups. And as someone with young kids who doesn't like, I can't take three days to go to a fitness festival or competition. It's like, how do you address that? Because I think part of what made the open work well was hey, it's an hour and a half on Friday or an hour and a half on Saturday, and it was just chunked over, you know, five weeks, yeah, rather than uh, hey, this is three days of your life that you have to train for this thing that you don't know what it is. Yeah.

Chris 23:25

Well, and that's that's the challenge, right? Because if I'm just the average gym goer and my coach says, you got to sign up for the open, it's how we're gonna measure your fitness. Maybe out of the five events, I do really, really well at max overhead squat, pick one. And then the next year it comes up again and you're excited to retest, but the max overhead squat isn't there and the events are completely different. Did I do as well? I guess. And my coach says that I'm more fit, but I didn't actually do that thing that I've done before. So I don't, I don't understand it. And you'd actually be better off if if your approach is just let's bring people together and have fun and love working out again to have a fitness festival that way. If your goal is like, let's actually test your progress, then choose a series of five baseline workouts. We used to have them, Fran, Murph. Do them all as part of the annual test. Let people see their actual progress. Forget about who's competing. Like if I'm 227,000th overall worldwide, and uh let them actually see their own progress. Cause at the end of the day, that's what matters to me, is my own progress. And if I can't see that year over year from the open, eventually I'm gonna say, what am I doing here?

John 24:37

I'm trying to think back to like I think at Madison they did a good job of having a bunch of different stations and places and things you can do. And they actually had areas where you could go work out as a spectator. And I guess in practice, you could make it so it's like, hey, we got 15 different workout areas with 15 different workouts, and you sign up for the one that you like, and you go do that, and it turns into what you're saying, more of like a come work out with other people who like doing the thing that you're doing in an interesting venue rather than come watch these people compete and have that be the core of what the experience is.

Chris 25:15

Yeah, I mean, the CrossFit games used to say we have the fittest spectators on earth. And what's amazing though is that how little movement the spectators are doing over that three-day period. This is the only time of the year when they're sitting still for three days like this. And like a lot of the vendors will have max double unders in one minute or max skier calories in two minutes or whatever, and people line up to do that. Where if we've got 30,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin today, why aren't we doing shuttle runs and burpees and high-five a stranger? You know, that seems like a massive opportunity missed. And it's an opportunity that will actually help people fall more in love with the brand, bring new people in, and help affiliates by boosting love of CrossFit.

John 26:00

Yeah, the last year in Madison, I remember Mayhem. You remember that area where everybody used to camp with the RVs and stuff? Like Mayhem set up a village there and they had like a full workout area, and it was smashed the whole weekend. They probably got more traffic than any of the vendors in the village who were trying to attract people because they actually had a place where you could go and do workouts and meet with some of the kind of popular people there.

Chris 26:26

Yep. You know, and this is to HQ's credit, like I missed this the first few years we did Summit too. I did not understand the value of having a place to work out until we trashed a few hotel gyms and were uninvited back. You know, and so then it was like, okay, well, let's now let's bring in people who do really amazing fun workouts. And at 5 a.m., 6 a.m., you know, Khalipa's like sold out and street parking this year did an amazing job of running these morning workouts. And and a lot of people, that's what they'll remember from the summit more than anything else. So if you're a fitness brand and your methodology is like, we want to change health, you can't change health by forcing people or hoping people will compete or keeping members by only six months. You improve their health by having them fall in love with fitness again every day, every month, every year, and keeping them for 10 years. And if you want to help affiliates do that, that's what's actually going to make the shift in the world. And the way that you do that is with a festival, not a competition where you're highlighting like the elite.

John 27:30

That is an interesting idea in that you could bring, like, you could bring a friend, and there's different types of workouts. And so maybe you have a station where if you want to snatch and do handstand push-ups and these more technical movements, that's fine. But then over there, it's like you got a sled and you can run and do some of those events that like you don't actually do very often in a CrossFit gym, but some of the things that you do, like the the the cool kind of like uh pieces of equipment that Rogue will make specifically for the games and anybody can use, right? Like a lot of those, a lot of those in the stadium where they had the where they had the the fields and they did the sprinting and stuff, like that's the type of stuff that is inherently CrossFit, but the type of stuff that like I could take somebody off the street who likes running uh and and have them pop in there and do it without a ton of explanation.

Chris 28:18

And that's where, you know, if you want somebody to like get a taste of CrossFit, for example, like that stuff is fine. When we do corporate groups at my gym, we're going to have a couple of challenges. You know, who can who can do the monkey bars the longest? And then at the end of the night, we put people into groups of three and we flip the gigantic tires outside and we take their picture and they're all doing this. And it's that feeling of accomplishment that you can give people. Where if you try to just throw somebody into a regular CrossFit class, the movements are so complicated that all they're going to hear is like, you're doing it wrong, you're doing it wrong, you're doing it wrong, even if they think they've got a lot of experience as an exerciser. So you you bring the barrier to entry down, you do stuff where they can't get hurt, but they can't like do it wrong. Pushing a sled is a great example. And now they actually can get a taste for it and you know, kind of love it.

John 29:12

And so let's say, you know, they don't want to do this festival idea. We're gonna we're gonna stick to this competition. It's meant to test the fittest on earth. We're we want to find the fittest on earth. There's still a huge opportunity in the open, right? I remember some of my best memories as a CrossFit affiliate owner happened during those open workouts where someone would get their first double under, they'd get their first pull up, they'd get their first muscle up, and they do it in like this huge crowd of peers. And it was just this beautiful thing that happened for five weeks in a row before it was gone. How do we redesign the open in a way that serves affiliates better?

Chris 29:50

Well, I think it is really important to have these novel type movements in there, you know, knees to elbows. That was always a big one in my gym, double unders every year. And there's a certainly a point where you're trying double unders, you're trying double unders, you're trying double unders, but you won't try as hard as if you're in what would feel like a competitive environment. When I was working for CrossFit, they sent me to Harvard to talk to Dr. John Rady, and Rady called this collaborative competition. So, yes, I want to climb the rope for the first time, but I also really want you to climb the rope too. I want to be proud of myself for achieving it, but I'll be equally proud of you too. And that's another way to build pride. The opportunity in the open is that it gives people a bar to rise to. And Glassman famously said, you know, when you ride alone, your wheel is always in front. What he meant by that was, you know, in the cycling analogy, you push harder if there's somebody right in front of you just because they're there. You don't care if you beat them, but you care if you go faster. And so having a CrossFit open event like this is great, especially if you know what the events are in advance so that you can train for it, especially if you know who hasn't achieved this before or who has done it nine times but not 10 before, or who's been struggling. And what the affiliates can do there is they can really put more of an emphasis on that feeling of competing with yourself by offering specialty clinics leading up to it. Oh, we know there's going to be double unders. You haven't had a bar muscle up yet. Let's spend a weekend working on that. You're so close. And what that happens then is the client invests more time and usually a little bit more money in practicing that one skill. When the test comes up, they're able to do that skill and they actually have a peak moment in life. And I think that the first few years of the CrossFit Open, you really got that sense of it. We had people, they would want to come back and like try the open workouts two and three times, and and we thought that was a problem. That was a win. Like you want to come back and redo this workout again because you're so close. And I'm giving you this peak moment, and you want to keep trying and trying it. And uh now it's it's like, okay, well let's see how many wall balls you can do in a row, and let's let's have these different type movements, and your your video is gonna go live on the internet where strangers are gonna pick your form apart and we're gonna crap on everybody that doesn't hit squat tapped. It's a very different feeling, and you're trying to give your client a peak moment so they love their fitness again. So if if you're an affiliate owner and you've got 100-150 members at your gym, you don't know what HQ is gonna do for their events. So, what I would do is I would obviously train people for a broad spectrum, but I would consider running my own event and I would pick the same events every year, or you know, at least two-thirds of them would be the same. So you're gonna have a 5K run, you're gonna have like a max deadlift or a max clean and jerk, you're gonna have some kind of chipper involving three or four of this list of 10 things, and you're gonna repeat these things often so that people can actually see their progress, see where they're hitting PRs and stuff. Oh, last year I couldn't even do those pistol things, and now I can't. And instead of having like a gym leaderboard, you basically make sure that every client knows here's where you are and here's what you're trying to achieve. So that you're using your own app to track their own individual progress. Put them on teams if you want to have an element of competition, have them run side by side so that they can feel like, hey, I can go faster than this, or you know, Zoe is two steps ahead of me and I'm I'm gonna try and catch up to her, or something like that. Absolutely. Have the cheering crowd, have the podiums, have the celebrations, give out whatever crazy awards you want to. But the reality is like, you're not trying to find the fitness fittest on earth. You're not trying to qualify for them for something that happens outside your gym. You're trying to find an excuse and a reason to celebrate your members' fitness, period.

John 33:51

So take the things of the open that worked, which was getting people together to do a workout, getting your community together, and giving them opportunities to push themselves and celebrate milestones that they otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity to do in your regular group classes. Yep. Is that what I'm hearing? That's right. So it's clear based off of our conversation that the games may not be serving the affiliate community um the way it once was. And that the goal of the game should be to bring in new people into the CrossFit ecosystem and keep existing affiliate members in longer. Yep. That said, there are still glimmers of hope. You recently re-affiliated.

Chris 34:32

Why? Well, I am very optimistic, and I think we've reached this natural inflection point with the games. It's 20 years in. We have these other examples in the marketplace, and we have an opportunity to do something with the existing infrastructure that will actually help bring people into CrossFit. I think CrossFit HQ is figuring this out. But the great news is that affiliates don't have to wait. We can run our own little events. We can have something in our community, we can partner with people who are doing 5K's marathons, bike races, strongman events, whatever we want to. And we can build our own intramural and we can do it with the focus on making our members feel famous, making them feel good, and helping them fall in love with fitness again.

John 35:13

If you want a guy that shows you step by step how to throw an intramural open competition in your gym, just scan the QR code here or click the link below to grab a copy.