The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness - Will Ahmed - #943
episodePreviously titled “#943 - Will Ahmed - The Downfall Of CrossFit & The Future Of Fitness” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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What led to the downfall of CrossFit?
Dude, how high and how hard did CrossFit drop the ball over the last few years?
Wow, CrossFit. Well, CrossFit is, first of all, a great grassroots movement in the sense that it literally began as an email list. And it's amazing to think how far they were able to go with that. And then you've got the Greg Glassman racism stuff and like the craziness during Black Lives Matter. And then you've got this whole new leadership team that comes in. By the way, around that time, we became partners with CrossFit. And I mean, I've now been building for 13 years, without question, the most dysfunctional partner we've ever worked with. And we've worked with a lot of partners. And a lot of dysfunction, I imagine, as well. A lot of different partners. And then the tragedy at this recent event. I don't know.
The whole thing is so poorly run, it's hard to even talk about it. Because it's such a missed opportunity.
2017?
Probably 2018? Something like that? Like absolute peak CrossFit?
How has the fitness industry evolved since CrossFit's peak?
I think so, yeah.
Yeah. If you'd said then what the next seven, eight years had in store, no one would have believed you. It's outrageous. And I think it... A lot of people, when they look at businesses from the outside, they see sophistication, they see popularity, they see a rate of adoption. The thing that nobody sees is what the internal operations of that company is like. And sometimes it can be all shiny, shiny and perfect out front. And inside is just a total mess. It's just a dumpster fire. And it feels like that might be the case.
And they also had like a great community and a great brand, which are two things that are, that are pretty resilient. Like when things go wrong and there's like elements of dysfunction. And even with that, I mean, it's unbelievable how, yeah, how sorry of a place it is now.
Turning people that whatever consume your product or are a user into an evangelist for it. I mean, it, everybody's new fitness pursuit is their most exciting thing. Every vegan wants to tell you about veganism and every CrossFitter wanted to tell you about CrossFit and every High Rocks athlete wanted to tell you about High Rocks. And then now every run club person is trying to get you to go to their run club on a Saturday morning and do a 5K. But yeah, the level of adoption that CrossFit had and the pace of change. And I think I get the sense that the only reason we're seeing High Rocks instead of hybrid training come through is because of the hole that has been left by sort of the exiting of of crossfit there's some new things it's a bit it's lower impact maybe it's a little bit more accessible to go and do a high rocks event than it would have been to have tried to go to sectionals or do a local crossfit comp like i'd rather do burpee broad jumps than try and do a snatch or a handstand walk but uh yeah i don't think i think high rocks is ascendancy can be laid at the feet of what crossfit dropped i
I think there's an opportunity for a lot of these different fitness communities. I mean, you have F42, you've got Barry's, you've got Orange Theory, you've got these different types of Pilates studios. And it sort of seems like people are looking almost for the new thing. And that in turn allows for these different micro-communities to pop up around a particular activity. And at the end of the day, I think... Weightlifting for a lot of people is intimidating. Exercise is lonely and hard. It makes sense that there are these boutique communities, so to speak. And so... I wouldn't actually attribute the success of these other communities solely to CrossFit's downfall. I think CrossFit in itself, it probably appeals to you and me, but you know, it had a high injury rate before they even had dysfunction as a, as a company. It is like a pretty intimidating workout out of the gates. Like there's a lot of people that it,
You don't just go in and have a gentle CrossFit session.
Yeah, there's a lot of people it's going to turn off like right out of the gate.
Yeah, you can go and plod along in a 5K, but you can't do that in a CrossFit class. Yeah. Yeah. What are you seeing from a fitness industry perspective at the moment? What is sort of the broad trends that you've been able to track over however long you've been watching everything?
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