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Transcript

CrossFit Doesn’t Know I Did This · The Spin Podcast

• 0:00
  What I'm about to share with you, no one outside of HQ has
• 0:03
  ever seen. We're getting ready to go into
• 0:09
  the 16th Open. Over the years we've seen our
• 0:11
  ups and we've seen our downs in open participation.
• 0:14
  Last year was a particularly rough year, which made me
• 0:17
  question what is driving open participation?
• 0:19
  That's when I realized no one has ever made a CrossFit Open
• 0:23
  consumer report. Two Brain Business has one that
• 0:26
  applies directly to us. Their State of the industry
• 0:28
  report, they look at gym analytics.
• 0:30
  What are the size of the affiliates?
• 0:31
  What is the lifetime value of those athletes?
• 0:34
  How much are they paying? We've never done this for the
• 0:37
  CrossFit Open. So we did something no one else
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  has thought to do. We spent weeks and weeks in
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  front of the computer to scrape all of the CrossFit leaderboards
• 0:46
  for all time. I'm talking every division,
• 0:48
  affiliates, age, region, we have all that information and we put
• 0:52
  it in one report. We see different marketing
• 0:56
  initiatives around the open every single year.
• 0:58
  And my question has always been what is driving those?
• 1:01
  Are those data-driven decisions? And based on this report, I can
• 1:05
  tell you I don't think that they are.
• 1:06
  So I wanted to create the benchmarks for CrossFit to set
• 1:10
  in each affiliate all around the world in what we need to do in
• 1:13
  the open. If you click down below, you'll
• 1:15
  find the open report in Sun Barbell, spin.com.
• 1:17
  There's a lot more data in that report that I'm going to go
• 1:20
  through here. This is really dense stuff, but
• 1:22
  I think it's really useful for affiliate owners, athletes,
• 1:25
  anyone who really cares about the CrossFit community.
• 1:29
  So right off the bat, I want to give every affiliate owner
• 1:32
  metrics that they can't live without.
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  The first one is what is the lifetime of an athlete in the
• 1:37
  Open. On average athletes will do the
• 1:39
  Open 2.5 times, but that includes one time athletes and
• 1:43
  we know that only 40% of first time athletes actually do
• 1:47
  another Open. So what I did is I took those
• 1:50
  athletes out. I only wanted to see what was
• 1:52
  the lifetime of an athlete who's done more than one Open.
• 1:55
  Taking those athletes out doesn't do much to raise that
• 1:58
  number. It jumps to three Open
• 2:01
  appearances per athlete. You can also see in the charts
• 2:03
  that I provided a breakdown of how many athletes across all
• 2:07
  time have done how many Opens. You can see the largest portion
• 2:10
  is 1 time. 50% of all athletes are doing the Open one time.
• 2:14
  Only 2.9% are doing it 8 plus times.
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  If this is a lifelong goal of fitness and this is our yearly
• 2:21
  fitness check in, we want to see that number go up, up, up and
• 2:25
  up. My challenge to HQ is to set a
• 2:27
  new industry standard. We want to see five Opens per
• 2:30
  athlete. We want to set that goal and
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  then once we hit that goal, we want to get it to seven or
• 2:34
  beyond and beyond. We want people to do CrossFit
• 2:37
  forever. We want to keep them in the
• 2:39
  open. The second fact I want to note
• 2:41
  is how many athletes are in an average affiliate.
• 2:44
  So we know of the big affiliates, CrossFit 179,
• 2:47
  CrossFit Bison, CrossFit Diablo, they're all posting numbers like
• 2:51
  200 athletes, 300 athletes, 400 athletes in the open.
• 2:54
  But the average size of a normal affiliate is not that big.
• 2:57
  Most affiliates are only giving 21.9 athletes, so 22 athletes
• 3:02
  into the open each year. But to quote the state of the
• 3:06
  industry report by to bring business one more time, the
• 3:09
  average gym size is around 130 members.
• 3:12
  That's only 15 percent on average that members are doing
• 3:15
  the Open in any given affiliate. The last one is simple.
• 3:19
  Are we making these athletes any better?
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  We know most athletes drop out after the first year, so I
• 3:24
  wanted to only look at athletes who have done 2 plus Opens.
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  I wanted to take their bottom finish and compare it to their
• 3:30
  top finish overall. So you can decline at any point.
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  It turns out the date is really good. 80% of athletes are
• 3:36
  actually getting better across all time.
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  Only around 20% of athletes never improve or decline in
• 3:42
  performance. The key bit of information for
• 3:44
  affiliate owners and coaches out there is we see 50% of the time,
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  once an athlete stagnates in their performance or declines,
• 3:52
  they will drop out of the Open the following year.
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  Again, if we're using the Open as a gauge on retention for
• 3:58
  athletes who are declining, that's an important moment for
• 4:01
  affiliate owners and coaches to step in.
• 4:02
  You all already know this, but if they're dropping out 50% of
• 4:06
  the time, it could be that they're getting older or they
• 4:09
  haven't been hitting certain pieces and you need to step in
• 4:11
  and say, hey, This is why you're seeing your decline in fitness.
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  Maybe that's OK. You're 65, you know, going to
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  66, things are getting a little harder and that's all right, but
• 4:20
  maybe you just need to work on more stuff in the gym.
• 4:23
  The main point of this report is a statement, statement to HQ and
• 4:26
  affiliate owners. One of the ideas I had in this
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  report is I wanted to act like I was going to go into a board
• 4:35
  meeting with HQ as an HQ employee.
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  I want to say, hey, here's the metrics we're seeing in the
• 4:39
  open. Here's what we need to focus on
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  moving forward. I wanted to give
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  recommendations, a game plan of how we can attack.
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  I wanted to look at what caused the decline in open
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  participation and what has slowed the growth.
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  And I think it's going to continue to slow the growth
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  moving forward unless we make these adjustments.
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  The key example for that is 1 of demographics.
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  A simple report I ran was count of athletes by age per year.
• 5:01
  You can see that here in the red we have 2015, which is when we
• 5:04
  were going into our highest growth period. 20/18 was our
• 5:07
  peak and we have 2025 in the white.
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  As you can see, in 2015 in the red, it's skewed left.
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  There's a peak around 28 years old, which means that the open
• 5:16
  felt younger. You can see that skew is still
• 5:18
  true in 2018, the peak being right around 28 or 29 years old.
• 5:23
  Now, when you compare that to 2025, five in the white, that's
• 5:26
  when the whole idea becomes apparent.
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  Between the ages of 23 and 36, you can see that that population
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  has been hugely decimated. So if you've been around for a
• 5:34
  long time and you've questioned yourself, has the open felt
• 5:37
  older? It has.
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  It's because the open isn't being refilled from the bottom.
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  It's being carried by those who have been around for a long
• 5:44
  time. And this is shown with the
• 5:46
  masters. You can see the masters have not
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  nearly dropped off the same. My first recommendation, restore
• 5:54
  the participation feedback loop. If you've not been around since
• 5:57
  about 2015, this might not be apparent to you.
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  I know a lot of the employees at HQ haven't been around since
• 6:02
  then and this is something that might have gone looked over.
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  CrossFit is a participatory sport.
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  What I mean by that is you only go and watch events if you know
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  someone who's doing the event or if you're doing it yourself or
• 6:14
  you're closely connected. I'm talking family affiliate
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  members or someone close like that.
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  So using that methodology, we look back at the old structure
• 6:22
  of competition. You start in the open, you then
• 6:25
  go right to regionals. There were so many more regions
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  in the world in 2014. Then we can then sound to super
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  regionals where we combine some of the smaller regions into big
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  larger regions. And now you have the semifinals
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  where pro athletes can go to any which one they want.
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  This is totally change the perception of what it means to
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  be an athlete. In 2014, you had athletes as low
• 6:45
  as 50th in the their small region go to regionals, a larger
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  team base with larger teams. Six people were on a team, not
• 6:53
  4. So when you went to these
• 6:55
  events, there were hundreds of athletes all competing at that
• 6:59
  event, all from a three to four state range.
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  This made those events feel huge because it was a local community
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  all coming. What this does in the affiliate,
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  So when you have someone who's on a team and they're 4 with
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  qualifying into the regional, that athlete probably isn't a
• 7:15
  pro athlete. There's somebody who trains once
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  a day. What happens is they're training
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  in the affiliate. Someone close to them is like,
• 7:21
  oh, that's cool, I want to continue to be an athlete, all
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  trained with them. It then trickles down someone
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  who's not very far in athleticism to them, sees them,
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  starts training, that person grabs another one up, and then
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  it trickles all the way down to the 50 year old soccer mom who
• 7:37
  just wants to come in and train every day.
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  She sees people do fun things, the whole gym community, and the
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  vibe is more electric because everybody's into training.
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  He creates an environment that sustains training itself.
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  So as we got rid of how many members were on a team, how many
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  athletes could qualify to go to regionals, how many regionals
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  there were, how many semifinals there were, it is raise the bar
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  for athletes that has an impact on the affiliate.
• 8:01
  So my solution is simple. Right now we give 20% of open
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  registrations back to the affiliates.
• 8:07
  These are usually in gift cards. I don't think that that ROI is
• 8:10
  worth it. Yes, you can buy a barbell or a
• 8:12
  rower, different things like that, but what you need is asses
• 8:15
  in your gym. We give that 20% to subsidized
• 8:18
  regionals. Everybody will say, well, that's
• 8:20
  not very much money. If you want to go back to
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  regionals, yes, I get that point, but the number everyone
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  will quote is that regionals used to cost around $1,000,000 a
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  piece. It did.
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  We were throwing money out the door to pay for these things.
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  We were paying for all kinds of people to show up that we really
• 8:35
  didn't need thanks to market pressure and what we've had to
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  overcome over these these past few years, we've had to get
• 8:40
  lean. These semifinals are now costing
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  around $300,000 to throw a really good one.
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  Subsidizing those will go a long way.
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  Also, if you're pulling from a smaller state base or a smaller
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  travel base, you will get more people who are going to these
• 8:55
  events. That's larger community
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  involvement. That's more bodies at the event
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  watching the athletes, That's more people interested in
• 9:01
  CrossFit, and that means more vendors will show up, which
• 9:04
  means that these regionals can be self-sustaining it in a few
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  years if we move to this model. And remember, this all boils
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  back down to growth in the affiliate.
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  To get young people in the gym, you need them to feel electric
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  in the gym, and that usually happens with competition.
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  I know competition in the sport is a dirty word right now, but
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  this is a problem we're solving. The last one's not seen in the
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  data. During this process we really
• 9:30
  had to ask ourselves, what is the Open all about?
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  The Open was never just a test of fitness.
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  It was a shared moment where affiliates and athletes felt
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  connected to something larger than themselves.
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  The belief that CrossFit was actively changing how the world
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  thought about health showing up felt meaningful in the Open
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  because it felt aligned with that mission.
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  Over time, HQ stopped feeling like a movement willing to fight
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  for that big mission. I'm talking NSCA, Coke, and the
• 9:56
  status quo. The Open now feels like a
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  recurring product and not a cultural movement.
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  The only thing keeping the cultural movement together is
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  the local affiliate members themselves.
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  And more and more often they're asking the question of why am I
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  doing this? I'm putting a ton of effort into
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  something that I see very little return for, and I'm not sure.
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  The only thing that they know that they might get in the
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  future is retention, and most people aren't good at looking
• 10:19
  that far in advance. Most importantly, the open turn
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  into a transaction. Athletes pay $20 to put their
• 10:24
  name on a global leaderboard that they rarely revisit, and
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  it's tied to a percentile that often discourages more than it
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  motivates. The Open's lost its focus on
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  being about health. Crossfit's about health, not the
• 10:36
  percentile and the Open leaderboard.
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  So my request is simple. The Open isn't about difficulty.
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  It's about meaning. And right now we have a crisis
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  of meaning. The Open cannot survive as a
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  product without a cause. Participation only returns the
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  Open when HQ is willing to lead from the front.
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  If you've made it this far in the video, you might be asking
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  yourself, who cares? My local affiliates?
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  OK, we don't need the Open. We'll say you do really care
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  about CrossFit. We're only as strong as the
• 11:02
  entire community as a whole. This way that we have together
• 11:05
  is much larger as a whole than it is a part.
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  So I tell you now, even if this was a rough report to go through
• 11:10
  and I said a lot of negative things, they are just facts.
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  I want CrossFit to be as good as it can be and we can only do
• 11:19
  that if we acknowledge the issues.
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  Sign up for the 2026 Open. You will enjoy yourself and
• 11:24
  you'll learn a ton from it. We need to fix these issues as a
• 11:27
  community, and I've presented a few options of how we can do
• 11:30
  that. Be sure to click below.
• 11:32
  There's a ton more in this report.
• 11:34
  We'll be talking about it on the Barbell Spin at 7:30 on
• 11:36
  Wednesday. If you have any thoughts, please
• 11:39
  put those down in the comments below.
• 11:40
  We'll be going over those on the show.
• 11:42
  Thank you so much for watching. Please participate in the
• 11:45
  CrossFit Open in 2026. Thanks.