How Did CrossFit, a Workout This Hard, Become So Popular? | Market Inventors

"It really feels like you don't quite want to live, but you don't quite want to die either."

Front squats with a 55-kilogram barbell, 2 reps a set, 8 sets; 50 front squats at 45 kilograms; pull-ups, 3 a minute for 10 minutes; toes-to-bar, 8 a minute for 5 minutes; three 5-minute rowing intervals. That was one CrossFit class for Grace, a woman in her thirties. "Went for a new PR (personal record)," she wrote on Weibo. "It really feels like you don't quite want to live, but you don't quite want to die either."

Walk past a CrossFit gym and you will probably see people like Grace grinding through gymnastics and weightlifting movements. Under the background music, barbells crash onto the floor, rowing machines whoosh back and forth, and cheers go up one after another.

Even if you don't do CrossFit, you have probably heard of it: a training program that crosses functional movements from weightlifting and gymnastics (pull-up bars, rings, jumps) and mixes aerobic work with anaerobic. As you can tell, it has a tough, macho image — and yet plenty of the people doing it are women like Grace. They call themselves CrossFitters.

CrossFit may be the fastest-growing fitness program in the world right now. Over the past 10 years, more than 13,000 CrossFit gyms have opened worldwide. A Forbes report put the brand's value at more than $4 billion — almost level with Ralph Lauren, which ranks 98th at $4.092 billion in Interbrand's 2016 Best Global Brands ranking.

It does well on social media too: 2.7 million followers on Facebook, 1.6 million on Instagram — more than Nike Training Club's 1 million — and over 900,000 subscribers on its official YouTube channel.

It is not yet mainstream in China, but within its own niche it has clearly caught on. CrossFit arrived in 2013, and mainland China now has 95 gyms certified by CrossFit headquarters (official website data as of publication). A year ago the number was 17. In other words, CrossFit's rise in China is barely two years old.

"We're seeing a shift in the fitness space — people are no longer obsessed with heavy equipment like treadmills and step machines, and are moving toward more social, class-based forms of exercise, like Zumba, Pilates, yoga and CrossFit," said Matt Powell, a sports industry analyst at the market research firm NPD. Google Trends, though, shows CrossFit far outrunning Zumba and Pilates.

What Kind of Business Is This?

Few people know that CrossFit is not only a fitness program but also a company — the biggest difference between it and most other fitness programs. CrossFit gyms have spread so fast around the world mainly because that company built a standardized, repeatable business model.

To use the CrossFit name and training methods — that is, to get a brand license — a gym needs one coach certified by CrossFit Inc. (Level 1 through Level 4, at roughly $1,000 per certification). On top of that it pays the company a $3,000 "certification" fee every year. Inside the CrossFit system these gyms are called affiliates; in practice they are not far from franchisees.

CrossFit Inc. is in the hands of Greg Glassman, who created the training system. He has never disclosed the company's revenue, but Forbes estimated it at around $100 million in 2014. The money comes from commercial partnerships and from coach training and certification — but affiliate fees alone, the price of selling the CrossFit concept, bring in more than $40 million a year.

Opening a CrossFit gym is comparatively cheap. It takes little heavy equipment — no treadmills, no ellipticals. Wang Tianhua, who opened CrossFit Slash in Beijing last September, told us: "A slightly pricier treadmill might cost as much as all the equipment in an entire CrossFit gym." What CrossFit uses is rowing machines and weightlifting gear — barbells, kettlebells — which are relatively cheap.

Because classes are small, usually 8 to 15 people, CrossFit is also flexible about space. A gym can open in two or three hundred square meters, or even a few dozen. That means less pressure from rent.

"I think CrossFit the company runs a really good model and a really good business — build a platform, set the standards, brainwash the affiliates," Xie Yiwei, a fitness writer on Zhihu, wrote in an email to QDaily. He used to be a CrossFit enthusiast and now runs two fitness studios, neither of them CrossFit.

Guo Fulin, another gym owner who has done CrossFit, agrees: "At bottom CrossFit is a brand and a business model. It doesn't add up to a complete fitness system."

Who Is Pushing It?

"We don't have a business plan, a marketing plan, or a marketing strategy," Greg Glassman told QDaily in an interview. Yet he plainly knows how to draw public attention, and he has his own ideas about business. Reebok, CrossFit's only apparel partner, has been one of the forces behind the program's popularity — and is, of course, part of Glassman's model.

"There were a lot of apparel brands who wanted to work with us back then. But I rarely saw eye to eye with them," Glassman said. In 2010, when Reebok headquarters sent Chad Wittman — now Reebok's general manager for China — to meet and negotiate with him, Wittman waited a week at a championship venue before he got in the room. "Partnering with CrossFit was a difficult 'courtship,'" Wittman told QDaily. Once Glassman realized that the people Reebok had sent were CrossFitters themselves, the two sides clicked. "That meeting started at eight or nine at night and went on until two in the morning, and the whole time we talked about fitness, physiology and nutrition," Glassman said.

The partnership formally began in 2011, making Reebok the only apparel and footwear brand allowed to make and sell training gear carrying the CrossFit logo.

To push CrossFit into emerging markets, Reebok takes part in opening the first few gyms in each one. It screens promising applicants, helps them with marketing and promotion, supplies coaches with clothing and gear, and lets them use the Reebok logo. These are "Reebok-certified" gyms, or Reebok Boxes. MeWellness in Shanghai, mainland China's first CrossFit gym, and Slash in Beijing are both Reebok-certified.

Reebok used the same method in South Korea, and their joint promotion turned CrossFit there from an unfamiliar import into a program with more than 90% brand awareness. "In that country of 50 million people, there are now 200 CrossFit gyms," Chad said. Reebok is also the title sponsor of CrossFit competitions. Today the CrossFit crowd uses Reebok products almost across the board, and Nike has found the community very hard to enter — in 2015 it was even banned from appearing at the CrossFit Games.

The deal has lifted Reebok's numbers too. Chad Wittman, Reebok's general manager for Greater China, told QDaily that the CrossFit line accounts for the largest share of all Reebok's collaboration lines, which include Spartan and UFC. In China, CrossFit apparel is growing at double digits. Reebok chairman Matt O'Toole has said that people who buy CrossFit training shoes are more likely to go on and buy Reebok running shoes and other mass-market products.

The biggest force behind the sport, though, is still Glassman, who built the whole system. Nearly 40 years in the fitness industry, he found an unmet need in the market, and he understands marketing.

Pushing the limits of strength is not enough to make CrossFit mainstream. To reach a wider public, health is a good subject. That probably explains why the goal Glassman set for CrossFit is not a number of new locations but "spreading health information" and lowering the rate of chronic illness — high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes. CrossFit, he claims, is "a simple solution to the world's most complicated problem — chronic disease."

He launched CrushBigSoda.com, under the banner of opposing sugar-added drinks and fighting chronic disease, and it regularly gets him into the papers. He has also acted on it: he once hired lobbyists to press Congress to regulate the soda industry.

Training Buddies, and Community

"Forging Elite Fitness" — that is how CrossFit defines itself on its website. At bottom this is a niche market built on people trading up, and it is aimed squarely at the middle class.

The four CrossFit gym owners we interviewed are all CrossFit enthusiasts themselves. Asked to describe the customers, Kong Liang said they are "highly educated, want more out of the quality of their lives, and are willing to push past their comfort zone." He came across CrossFit by chance while studying in Australia on a government program, later taught himself the methods at an ordinary gym, got his coaching certificate in 2014, and opened Qiantang CrossFit in Hangzhou.

CrossFit costs roughly what sits between a traditional all-purpose gym and personal training. In China's first- and second-tier cities, a monthly CrossFit membership usually runs above 1,500 yuan, and a year costs more than 10,000. Vince, 31, who has done CrossFit in both the United States and China, told us that fees at Shanghai gyms are basically the same as in New York and San Francisco. Measured against average incomes, then, CrossFit in China is relatively more expensive, which means anyone training at a CrossFit gym long-term needs considerable disposable income.

Most CrossFitters were already fitness enthusiasts, or had some athletic background, before they took up the sport. Some first met it abroad, while traveling, on business trips, or studying overseas. Lin Junxian heard about CrossFit while studying in Japan; he had been working out at a gym for two years, and watching a CrossFit competition got him interested. Ruay, 30, heard about the method at a gym in Malaysia and went looking for a CrossFit gym after returning to Xi'an; before that she was already a distance runner and did some strength work. Grace in Beijing fell for the sport after a friend dragged her to a CrossFit gym; by then she had already been running marathons and entering trail races.

Community. Every person we interviewed stressed it.

"CrossFit's model is that a group of people set a goal together and then get there together. The really impressive thing about it, I think, isn't the training — it's that community is the core," said Guo Fulin, who sees this as a big reason for its popularity.

"CrossFit feels like a party to me. You can shout out loud during training, take your shirt off, and when you're completely spent, your teammates cheer you on," said Lin Junxian, who is studying for his coaching certificate.

Gym owners and coaches often point to the atmosphere as what separates them from a traditional gym. Wang Tianhua said his gym has even created a community manager job; every month she organizes themed outings for members away from the gym. "People's values are fairly close," he said.

Kong Liang also stressed that CrossFitters share a spirit of "daring to step out of the comfort zone" and "liking a challenge." Having suffered together and signed on to the same philosophy of pushing past your own physical limits, CrossFit has risen in their minds from a hobby, or a purchase, to a matter of values.

Glassman put it more bluntly: "The combination of [training] pain and laughter seems to be really important — I think the mechanism behind this may have something to do with Stockholm syndrome." The truth CrossFitters draw from the sport, he said, is that nothing in life is easy.

"Your workout partner — we call them a training buddy — can become one of the closest people in your life. We've seen a lot of training buddies become best friends, even married couples. In a community like this, anything can happen." Whether Glassman is describing exceptions or the rule, this community clearly has a strong sense of itself. An article about CrossFit in The New York Times read the group psychology this way: "For those of us who have it good, freedom can feel like oppression, and oppression can feel like freedom."

Marketing on Social Media

Here is a video from CrossFit's official Instagram account: a woman missing her right forearm doing a one-armed snatch with a barbell. The clip, which looks like it belongs at the Paralympics, has more than 2,000 comments, among the most on the account.

CrossFit's other social media accounts are full of similar videos of people pushing past their limits in ways that leave ordinary viewers open-mouthed. When the company posts plain text, it picks inspirational lines.

Google Trends shows CrossFit drawing steadily more attention from around 2011. It caught the wave of social media, video above all.

CrossFit has a large following on every platform, and according to a one-week sample taken in 2014 by the social media firm Simply Measured, it is among the fitness brands with the highest follower engagement, ahead of Nike Training Club and the upmarket gym chain Equinox. Five social media staff at CrossFit headquarters run these accounts; their job also includes defending the sport's reputation online and editing its Wikipedia entry — they edited it so often that their IP address was blocked.

What About China?

Getting Chinese consumers, who have a relatively thin fitness culture, to love a workout this hard is not easy.

CrossFit officially says the sport suits anyone, but it asks a lot of your heart, lungs and core, and it is unkind to anyone starting from zero. As Ruay, who does it, put it: "When you first start, before you've been through anything at all, you're already exhausted — and when you're that tired and your body hasn't adjusted, the fun goes out of it."

Gyms have tried to lower the barrier with a "foundations course" for beginners; before joining regular group classes, members have to work through it and pass a test. For most people the foundations course is still hard. In Wang Tianhua's experience, many newcomers can't even do a proper squat. Before you can get these people to love pull-ups, weightlifting and loaded squats, you may first have to get them to love exercise.

But because opening a CrossFit gym looks cheap, plenty of people want to try. CrossFit's own members are natural candidates to become franchisees. Liu Haijiang is one. He started training last September and soon had the idea of opening his own place. "I think this thing is great, with a lot of room to grow." With help from the owner of Xi'an's first CrossFit gym, he opened his own this past May. Kong Liang told us that every other CrossFit gym in Hangzhou was opened by someone who trained at Qiantang.

Wang Tianhua said he tells people who come asking about opening a gym to calm down. "It isn't the case that because something is hot abroad, it will take root and grow once it gets to China," he said, adding that only about 10% of registered CrossFit gyms actually make money. "With so many gyms opening now, I think what's really happening is that everyone is carving up a CrossFit population that was pretty much already there. Beyond those hardcore exercise fans, growing the market may take more time."

Xie Yiwei, the former CrossFitter who runs two fitness studios in Shanghai, arrives at a similar figure: "90% of gyms are doing so-so or downright badly. China's CrossFit industry just "looks good from a distance"."

"The end goal has to be a complex, not a standalone box — in CrossFit-speak, 'box' means gym — you have to extend the product line and go beyond it, or you won't survive," said Li Zhongyuan, who runs Chuncheng CrossFit. Most CrossFit gyms in China sell more than CrossFit. Alongside it they offer personal training, and sometimes yoga, Zumba and combat sports; some sell healthy meals next door.

CrossFit headquarters and Reebok are nonetheless optimistic about China. In mid-October Glassman visited CrossFit gyms in Beijing and Shanghai, came away "very encouraged," and immediately set another China trip for February.

"Chinese people are very ambitious, driven, goal-oriented. Once they try CrossFit and feel the change in themselves," said Chad, Reebok's general manager for China, "this sport will spread like wildfire."

"But I run it as a service business, or as entertainment. Being fun matters a lot, especially in China," Wang Tianhua said.

Cover image from Reebok, Flickr, Wikimedia, CrossFit's official Instagram, CrossFit Slash and others.