What’s Replacing CrossFit?
CrossFit changed the fitness industry. There’s no denying it.
I remember walking through airports in 2011, spotting CrossFit T-shirts and walking right up to strangers to say hello.
I remember seeing people walking into local gyms in board shorts and knee-high socks, and I knew 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, function and, to a large extent, fun.
But as the number of CrossFit affiliates now dwindles, we wonder, “Where did they all go?”
First: Why Affiliate Numbers Are Decreasing
Over 10,000 former affiliates are gone.
Some disappeared—mostly because few of the owners were good at business, while they were all great coaches.
Some have just left CrossFit—and not as a group. Some became Hyrox gyms, Mayhem affiliates or PRVN affiliates, and some attached themselves to another similar brand that seems on the rise.
Some tried to go solo. Many deaffiliated, and some have thrived. Others found themselves brandless and drifting without CrossFit in their logo. Some went back to affiliation, but, overall, the number of “CrossFit” gyms keeps going down.
What’s interesting is that many of the “alternate brands” are very much like CrossFit: They borrowed at least one facet of “constantly varied functional movement performed at high intensity.”
Others are almost entirely derivative: Even seasoned CrossFit veterans wouldn’t be able to tell the difference without looking at the sign out front.
But they appear to be winning anyway, and CrossFit purists like me don’t get a vote.
Unfortunately, as these gyms rebrand and rehome themselves in other affiliate programs, they’re very unlikely to go back to the mothership again.
It’s not a mass exodus.
It’s a death by 1,000 cuts.
Old-school vibes circa 2013.Why Affiliates Leave
The Pursuit of the “New Thing”
The affiliate numbers follow the interest of clients. 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 inside.
Just like clients, business owners don’t want to miss out on the next thing: Hyrox, Alchemy or something else. They’re in this for the long term, even if the current owners of CrossFit aren’t.
And let’s face it: New stuff is exciting. Sometimes it’s even an improvement on the original.
Lack of Clarity From Leadership
Imagine your landlord listed your building for sale. Would you wait around to see if you liked the new owner or would you start looking around at other options?
After six months of this—with the landlord no longer making any upgrades or improvements—would you start looking around even more?
How long would you wait?
The Tipping Point
Some affiliates are excited to be the only CrossFit gym in their town. But others remember carrying that burden alone: being the only one to explain what CrossFit is, how it’s not harmful and that it won’t make you a beast overnight.
But this is my greatest fear: The primary marketing source for CrossFit (the method) is CrossFit (the community).
Every time a gym leaves, the marketing engine gets a little smaller. HQ isn’t running ads or asking for referrals or producing meaningful content anymore.
First growth slows, then stops. Then the movement begins to shrink, and then it gets smaller very quickly.
CrossFit’s first “tipping point” was around 2007, when there were around 5,000 affiliates.
What happens if we reach that level again on the way back down?
Where Are Affiliates Going?
In 2014, affiliates were truly ride or die: They either hung in as affiliates or they went out of business.
Now there are other options—many, many other options. CrossFit’s being cut up into little bits and replaced, piece by piece.
Here they are:
1. CrossFit Competition
The smallest part of CrossFit has been replaced by Hyrox. Hyrox has over 7,000 “affiliate” gyms paying about $130 per month. Clients are coming in to do Hyrox.
2. CrossFit Community
Rogue has taken the lead here. If you go to a Rogue event, it feels like CrossFit circa 2014. Rogue is probably the best friend CrossFit has. It’s keeping the community together, for now. But I don’t see CrossFit acknowledging that friendship publicly at the level it should.
The high days of the global CrossFit community are over, though Rogue events are filling the gap to some degree.3. That OG Vibe
Iron Tribe—ironically, the gym that many called a “knockoff” of CrossFit a decade ago—is now “more CrossFit than CrossFit” in many cities.
4. CrossFit Classes
In a recent edition of Men’s Health, the “Best Fitness Classes” were listed as:
MADabolicCorePower YogaF45 TrainingSolidcoreCyclebar Performance Life Time Alpha Mayweather Boxing + Fitness Equinox’s Fully VestedRowHouse Orangetheory Fitness
“CrossFit” only appeared once in the article—in a sentence warning people not to “run out and join a CrossFit class.”
What’s interesting to me—and infuriating to longtime CrossFit affiliates—is that many of these programs are CrossFit derivatives. They’re CrossFit … but without muscle-ups. Or they’re CrossFit … with kettlebells instead of barbells.
They’re constantly varied functional movement performed at high intensity. No credit given.
5. CrossFit Methodology
The “class options” I listed above lack a distinctive CrossFit element: The workouts look the same every day.
And, in full transparency, a lot of CrossFit gyms run this way, too: Every class is lifting plus HIIT. This wasn’t the original methodology.
Instead, the original methodology covered all the bases, including aerobic training, weightlifting, gymnastics and HIIT.
The original gym didn’t have the “go hard every day” mentality that many facilities now have. That mentality is potentially harmful long term: It’s tough on clients. Ironically, the chains listed above adopted that mentality.
To counter the obvious problems with “crush yourself every day,” Men’s Health recommends—you ready for this?—that no one buys a membership at any one gym and instead uses ClassPass to “mix and match” classes every day.
As if clients are going to research every possible training option every day, change their commute, sign in on time and properly coach themselves to optimal fitness.
It’s crazy and random to think this would work even for elite athletes with unlimited time to train and a desk job that allows them to browse five different websites every day.
Men’s Health goes on to recommend a few different prescriptions:
If you want to build muscle, 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,” do two “cardio-based workouts,” two “strength-based workouts” and one “recovery-style workout” each week.If you want to lose weight, do “one or two strength-based workouts per week,” “one cardio-based workout” and one “wildcard” workout, as well as one “recovery-style workout per week.”
Sounds a lot like the Prescriptive Model to me—except in Two-Brain gyms, the coach makes the prescription. Here, the reader is left to kinda wing it.
Of course, regular people don’t know how to make a good plan.
Which five classes should they pick? How do they know which gym to go to on Monday?
This is solved by the Prescriptive Model and a little bit of variation in your class options.
If you tell clients “just do CrossFit three times a week,” they’re going to start hunting for novelty themselves.Here’s the opportunity:
Offer the Prescriptive Model at your gym.Make your new clients a tailored prescription at your gym (i.e., coach them—tell them 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, three or four times per week. That’s not the same thing.Every three to six months, meet with your clients and update their prescription. If you don’t, they’ll “tweak” it themselves and try to slap together a fitness plan based on novelty and wild guesses.
You can also add some of these options to your gym without a total rebrand or deaffiliation:
Summing Up
Many, 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 to see if the landlord is going to sell the building.
You can decide to keep your CrossFit affiliation, or not, and still compete with some of these options—or all of them—yourself.
To talk to a mentor about the Prescriptive Model and the method that will support your fitness business, book a call here.
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