Kokoro Thoughts

The Benefits of Accessory Gymnastics on the Everyday CrossFitter

The Truth About CrossFit Affiliates: Independently Owned Small Businesses at the Core of the CrossFit Movement When people hear the word "CrossFit," they often picture high-intensity workouts, community-driven fitness events, and perhaps even the spectacle of the CrossFit Games. What many do not realize, however, is that the vast majority of CrossFit gyms—also known as CrossFit affiliates—are not owned by a centralized corporate entity. In fact, CrossFit’s affiliate model is unique within the fitness industry precisely because it prioritizes independence, entrepreneurship, and local ownership over corporate control. This article will explore what it truly means to be a CrossFit affiliate, why these gyms are not part of a traditional franchise system, and how the decentralized nature of CrossFit supports small business ownership and local community building. We'll debunk the common misconception that CrossFit affiliates are part of a revenue-sharing empire or beholden to a larger corporate chain, and shed light on the foundational principles that make the affiliate model one of the most grassroots and empowering structures in the fitness world today. The Affiliate Model: Independence by Design Before we get much further into CrossFit as a small business, it’s probably important to establish some BASIC pieces of what makes a CrossFit affiliate. CrossFit is not a franchise. It is a brand that offers an affiliate model—an approach that has more in common with independent artisan coffee shops than it does with global gym chains. To become an affiliate, an individual must meet a few basic requirements: Complete the Level 2 Certificate Course , which ensures that the affiliate owner has a foundational understanding of CrossFit methodology and can coach others safely and effectively. Apply to use the CrossFit name by submitting an application that includes a business plan, a location, and a statement of intent. Pay an annual licensing fee , which grants the business the right to use the "CrossFit" name in their branding. That’s it. There are no demands for profit-sharing. No royalties. No rigid operational mandates. Once an affiliate is approved, they operate entirely on their own terms. They choose their own pricing, programming, marketing strategy, coaching staff, facility layout, and member engagement model. They own their business. This degree of freedom is rare in the fitness industry. Franchise models such as those employed by Orangetheory Fitness, F45, and Planet Fitness involve detailed and sometimes intrusive controls on how a gym is run, often down to brand aesthetics, music playlists, and approved equipment suppliers. Those businesses are answerable to a parent corporation that typically takes a percentage of monthly revenue and exerts oversight into every facet of operations. By contrast, a CrossFit affiliate is a business that exists independently. CrossFit LLC does not take a percentage of revenue, does not own any portion of the affiliate’s assets, and has no authority over how the affiliate chooses to structure its business or serve its community. This is not a technicality—it is a deliberate choice built into the DNA of the CrossFit movement from the beginning. As a business owner, the looseness of CrossFit’s model is both a boon and a curse. A lot of people who are new to CrossFit usually think that a CrossFit membership at CrossFit Blue is also a membership at CrossFit Red. No Revenue Sharing, No Market Carving Because CrossFit does not participate in the revenue generated by its affiliates, there is no incentive for the parent company to “extract value” from them. The $4,500 annual fee (as of 2025) to license the CrossFit name is the only financial transaction between CrossFit LLC and the affiliate. The affiliate keeps every other dollar it earns. There are no profit-based royalties, no tiered marketing assessments, and no shared gross revenue pools. Affiliates are not required to report their earnings to CrossFit. This allows owners to reinvest profits back into their gyms—hiring coaches, improving facilities, offering member benefits—without being siphoned by a distant corporate entity. These are some of the more positive aspects of affiliate ownership. On the other side of the coin, CrossFit does not create protected markets or enforce territorial boundaries. In a franchise system, a corporate headquarters typically grants geographic exclusivity to franchisees to prevent competition within the brand. Not so with CrossFit. Multiple affiliates may operate in close proximity to one another, and each one is free to innovate, differentiate, and cultivate their own unique culture. This lack of market segmentation might seem counterintuitive at first, but it fosters diversity, innovation, and quality through natural selection. Since no affiliate can rely on brand exclusivity, they must deliver an exceptional experience to retain members. The result is a landscape of varied and passionate small businesses, each putting its own spin on CrossFit’s core methodology. Small Business at the Heart of Every Affiliate Each CrossFit affiliate is a reflection of the person or team behind it. The owner is often the head coach, community leader, janitor, and business strategist all in one. They are on the floor coaching classes at 6:00 a.m., answering emails between sets, and updating the whiteboard for the next day's WOD. The CrossFit affiliate model enables—and demands—entrepreneurial effort, creative problem-solving, and direct human connection. Most affiliate owners are not investors or corporate entities. They are former athletes, military veterans, parents, healthcare professionals, or fitness enthusiasts who found meaning in CrossFit and wanted to share it with others. They put their own capital on the line, sign their own leases, and build their communities one athlete at a time. This is “small business” in the truest sense. CrossFit affiliates (in general) are not beholden to shareholders, venture capitalists, or public earnings reports. Their success depends not on branding alone but on service, trust, and consistent value. The community aspect of CrossFit—the camaraderie, accountability, and shared struggle—is forged precisely because the people running the gym live and breathe that community alongside their members. Local Impact, Global Movement The paradox of the CrossFit affiliate model is that while each gym is independent and locally operated, the global CrossFit movement is stronger than ever. More than 12,000 affiliates worldwide serve hundreds of thousands of members, yet no two gyms are identical. The programming at a CrossFit box in Cape Town may differ significantly from one in Boston, but both are tethered to the same foundational principles: constantly varied functional movement performed at high intensity, scalable to any level of fitness. This diversity is a strength. It allows each affiliate to serve the specific needs of its community, whether that's competitive athletes, elderly populations, first responders, or complete beginners. An affiliate in a rural town might run a hybrid fitness and social club, while one in a dense urban center might focus on high-performance training for working professionals. The point is: each gym decides what matters to its people. CrossFit’s global footprint is the sum of thousands of micro-communities, each run by an owner who is personally invested—financially, emotionally, and physically—in the health and well-being of their members. This hyper-local focus yields trust, accountability, and longevity in a way that top-down, corporate gym models simply cannot replicate. Innovation from the Ground Up Another powerful benefit of the affiliate model is innovation. Since CrossFit HQ does not impose a singular way of doing things, affiliates are free to experiment. Whether that means running nutrition challenges, hosting local competitions, partnering with schools or health clinics, or adopting new technology to enhance coaching, affiliates are often on the leading edge of fitness experimentation. Some of CrossFit’s most successful movements and ideas originated not from headquarters but from individual affiliates. Concepts such as kids' programs, adaptive athlete training, and community fundraising WODs (like “Murph” on Memorial Day) have all grown organically from the affiliate base. Rather than suppressing innovation in the name of brand uniformity, the CrossFit model encourages it. When one affiliate develops a best practice, others often adopt it—not because they are required to, but because it works. In this way, the CrossFit community functions as a decentralized network of ideas, empowered by the autonomy of its individual nodes. A Different Kind of Fitness Economy In a world where big-box gyms often treat members like commodities and owners like franchise operators, CrossFit’s affiliate model offers something profoundly different: a grassroots, human-centered approach to fitness. Each gym is a small business serving real people. Each owner is a leader, a risk-taker, and a contributor to the health of their community. There is no CrossFit “market share” to be claimed by a corporate boardroom. There are only individual affiliates doing the daily work of coaching, encouraging, and transforming lives. While the CrossFit brand provides legitimacy, visibility, and a shared language, the affiliate model ensures that power and ownership remain in the hands of those who earned it. This is a rare and principled stance in an industry that often trends toward consolidation, franchising, and control. In Summary: The Power of Independence CrossFit affiliates are not corporate franchises. They are independently owned and operated small businesses. There is no revenue sharing. There are no enforced territories. There is no central control over programming, pricing, or operations. What unites these gyms is a shared commitment to improving lives through functional fitness—and the belief that entrepreneurship and community are better drivers of success than bureaucracy and uniformity. For prospective members, understanding this truth can change how they view their local gym. They aren’t walking into a branch of a massive fitness conglomerate—they’re stepping into someone’s dream, someone’s life work, someone’s purpose. For affiliate owners and coaches, this model offers the opportunity to build something real and lasting, something that reflects their values and serves their community on a human scale. CrossFit doesn’t own its affiliates. And that’s exactly why they thrive.

In the past we have had a ton of community events inside and outside of the gym. The events are awesome and they have all been special in their own way. For a long time we had two major events a month with a really high percentage turnout. A few months ago, I was thinking about what makes CrossFit gyms so magnetic, and why people keep coming in every day. There are obviously A LOT of reasons why CrossFit gyms create such powerful communities and have such high engagement and it would be silly to try and distill community engagement down to one reason. I looked through some old anthropology research I had done a number of years ago and I was reminded of two simple concepts, the third place and the global village. Gyms in general, but CrossFit gyms specifically and especially our gym is most people’s third place. The concept of a third place is simple and it is defined by its denomination: our first place is home, (generally) our second place is work, and our third place is X. CrossFit gyms offer that third place, everyone does the same workout, we all start and stop at the same time and we do it together. The CrossFit model, the class model, doesn’t recognize external factors or status. The group class model levels the playing field and everyone suffers together doing the same workouts. At our Broadway location we would have happy hours AND a themed workout every month and almost 30-60 people would come every time because their social network was firmly grounded in the gym. There are people who have been at the gym for over 7 years because the gym provides a respite from work and responsibility as well as a gathering place for old friends. What’s really interesting about this is that most people, today, go to work and go home every day without a consistent stopping place. In the past this was not always the case. In the small Greek village where my grandmother lived, the men all gathered at the cafe and drank espresso each day and they still do that today. In Russian rural communities, the men all go to banjas and relax and drink vodka. There are all kinds of examples of this behavior throughout history and there are a number of well-regarded texts on the reason behind human gathering and interaction. While I was reminded of the third place I also couldn’t help but think about the similar, but somewhat antithetical, concept of the global village. Today we can pick up a phone, computer, or tablet and see someone a foot from our face that might be all the way on the opposite side of the world. Information that was once locatively trapped, has no borders and is now shared freely. As active members in a community we have a unique, valuable, and equally as important opportunity to learn about the people that we see everyday. As everyone knows it’s easy to get caught up in the comings and goings of the outside world but I’d encourage everyone to get to know the awesome people that are in your class that you see everyday and workout with everyday. There are A LOT of incredible stories in the gym, I’d highly encourage everyone to get to know some!

For those of you who have been here this won’t seem at all like a hot take, but I REALLY dislike social media. There are a lot of reasons but I’ve found that what bothers me most is that it cheapens thought and it puts a premium on volume over quality. If every post has an inspirational quote there’s a very good chance that the poster is in danger of creating an ideological oxymoron or just having a completely unclear message. Posting recycled garbage on an instagram feed goes against anything that we teach teens in high school or young adults in college about writing and cohesive written thought. At Verdant I’ve tried to keep the messages repetitive and unwavering. My primary message, “Positioning over Depth,” has been a combination of my ideology as well as a product of circumstances. The denotation is quite literal: make sure the positioning of a squat is what is valued over the depth of the squat. The connotation is also fairly obvious but it’s just a reflection on what is most important when building strength and working out under intensity: perform good movement at all times and don’t worry about the standards even if that means we aren’t “RXing” the workout. There are all kinds of different body types and levels of fitness that walk into Verdant and the goal is to get them to do the best movement they can do without compromising position. It isn’t reasonable to ask everyone to squat below 90 degrees; squatting below 90 is the EVENTUAL GOAL. We have a fair number of students that lose a lower lumbar curve or have a dramatic pelvic tilt or any number of other issues in their squat. We give them additional stretching, different muscular balancing exercises, and even then we still may have them squat with good positioning above 90 degrees. CrossFit is amazing and we can all agree that it works and is good. But there are proper applications of even the best things in life. Ice cream is amazing and good, but if you ladle a pint into your ear you are going to wind up with some problems. Everything that I’ve learned through CrossFit has wound up to be more or less correct the issue is that there may be coaches or institutions that rely too heavily on a what they are learning without applying an appropriate amount of analysis to the end result. For years I haven’t let people join my barbell club until they participate in the barbell development program. Is it because I enjoy the nuances of lifting to a villainous degree? Yes, but it’s also because there is NO REASON to have anyone even try a snatch in a professional barbell environment if they can’t press a bar from behind their neck over their head in full squat depth. That would be like letting people go to college who haven’t had any formal training or taking an executive and making them a plumber. The pieces don’t add together. There are building blocks to all the movements and patterns that we achieve in CrossFit and at Verdant and those building blocks are in place for safety and efficacy.

The First Verdant CrossFit Gym Wide Strength Cycle

We have recently started our first official Verdant Fitness Teen Strength and Conditioning Program. Whenever we start a new strength cycle or a new program I usually dive head first into a bunch of reading and research. It’s always tough to synthesize all the different points of view and theories that have been developed, but there are a few areas of training young adults that most experts agree on. While the athlete is still young most specialists agree that coaches should place a high emphasis on developing as many skills as possible and beginning to specialize later in the athlete’s development. I’ve spoken to several sport specific coaches and virtually everyone has their own timeline for sport specific specialization and it varies wildly from sport to sport. Sport and strength and conditioning isn’t codified in any meaningful way here in America so training methodologies and purely subject to the individual coach’s ideology. With all of the variance in mind I have done my best to distill the most relevant information and apply it to our program. We are placing a huge emphasis on body control, kinesthetic awareness, and functional movement. The latter seems almost like a cop-out given how generalized “functional fitness” can be. To explain further we will be jumping, crawling, getting inverted, moving forwards, backwards, and laterally, and we will be learning how to squat, press, and pick things up off the ground. Many of the adults who come to our Sunday gymnastics class have done some of the body control that we are teaching our teenagers. Gymnastics is relevant here because it’s probably the best discipline, in my opinion and experience, for creating good all-around athletes. One of the issues that I see with gymnastics is that like many other sports it starts to specialize a little too early. We are taking some of the best pieces of gymnastics training, namely body control across multiple domains and modalities and pairing that with basic lifting technique as well as throwing and catching. The goal is to help our younger students become good athletes. They aren’t going to be taught anything sport specific (other than throwing) because they don’t need to be taught those skills right now. In CrossFit f you can’t do a strict pull up it doesn’t make much sense to do a kipping pull up or at least not many at a time. Similarly, if a young athlete can’t do a push up why are we having them begin to learn complexities of a sport that they won’t be able to succeed in because of a lack of physical strength? If I have a CrossFit athlete that wants to “work on” muscle ups but they haven’t taken the time to develop their dip all we are doing is wasting our time on a skill that they can’t achieve. One of the biggest blocks to young athletes is the same block that I find in new competitive young athletes in CrossFit. They come to my gym get strong QUICKLY and get new skills QUICKLY and then they start to seem those incredible gains decrease. It’s not the programming it’s that they weren’t training correctly and when you train correctly you see immediate gains but everyone has a ceiling and the closer you get the smaller the gains. Kids are the same way, if you train a child to play only soccer they are going to be better than most other kids their age up to a certain point, usually right around 16. At that point you need to be an amazing athlete and a good soccer player to start progressing to the NCAA level. If you can’t keep up you can’t play. Why do so many Division III or II players get drafted to the NFL? Because they ran a 4.3 40 yard dash and there aren’t many people that can do that. If they have that physical ability they can be taught how to play football, provided they can work their way through a playbook.

CrossFit as a sport follows a pretty interesting path. Eight to ten years ago most CrossFit gyms were being run out of garages and industrial warehouses and there really weren’t any chic upscale CrossFit gyms until a few years later, 2012 I think. CrossFit at its genesis was gritty, hardcore, and not for the faint of heart. Every gym had their own rules and even the way classes flowed varied gym to gym. Some of this still holds true today, probably a lot of it holds true, but one area where some gyms have really changed is the attitude towards competition. We have a very small CrossFit competitive crew at Verdant. That is by design. It isn’t meant to be overly accessible and there are a few reasons for that. The first is that competitive CrossFit isn’t something that most people should do. CrossFit and our classes are designed for promoting health and wellness. The second reason is tied to the first, the competitions have gotten really intense. Baseline metrics are MUCH higher than they used to be. For most people they are unattainable (which I think is good) and for others there is a risk of injury. The third reason our crew is small is because the competitive landscape has changed. It is not for weekend warriors anymore. I don’t think that people should have been casually competing in CrossFit anyhow, but now it’s really separated into a professional sport. I have a whole other article on the shifting CrossFit Games landscape. Also, to be realistically competitive you need to be able to devote a lot of time to the sport and casually coming in for an hour doesn’t work. The fourth and most important reason is that I am rigid, the culture I want is rigid, and it is largely uncompromising. No one is special and absolutely no one deserves anything. We all do the same programming because we are a team, there are variations, scales, progressions, and emphases for different individuals but we are a team and we do the same thing. We also have a “Fran Rule” and if you complain you do Fran. Do our regular members do competitions? For the most part, no. That isn’t part of the culture of the gym. I sequester our competitors to times that are for competitors. That’s part of being competitive, you need to make sacrifices. If the only time you have is at 515pm you’re taking the class and you had better beat everyone or else what are we doing calling ourselves competitors. The emphasis at our gym is to get outside and hike, bike, camp, raft, kayak, or do snow sports on the weekends. At the beginning of every competitive season we gather as a group, I go over the rules and parameters of what we do and what our culture is, and then we talk about our goals, our dreams, and the concrete dates ahead of us. That conversation is private but I believe it lays the foundation of what our culture is and what that season will be. Briefly, the culture that I keep referencing is very simple. It is important that every person on the team or in the competitive group is held to the same standard, no one is special. There is an expectation about smart food consumption and during meet prep there is an expectation that people will not consume alcohol. The primary reason is that it’s arguably the worst intoxicant to abuse during the competitive season as it dehydrates the athlete and dramatically affects at least one training day. This sport is merit and performance based and best scores earn competitive spots on the highest teams. We have only ever had one tie and I had to make the unpleasant decision about who would represent our team at regionals. We have everyone arrange workout times and sessions on an open platform so that no one is left out and so no one works out alone. When issues between personnel arise the expectation is that the parties will address the issue within 24 hours. This last is a big one as these team experiences are unpleasant when all members don’t get along and bad chemistry begets poor athletic performance. We don’t do fundraisers for our athletes. No one is special. Part of the initial conversation is that there is a financial cost to the competitive nature of semi-pro sports. Verdant pays registration fees for the top teams and in the past we have paid for flights and lodging for our national competitors. Just like the sport that sponsorship is merit based and there is an expectation that athletes are going to perform at the level they qualified for. NB: I’m not talking about USAW in this article because it’s such a different thing. The culture is the same, but the attitude towards competition is different. Once an athlete is proficient at the snatch and clean and jerk a competition isn’t different physically than a training session so the risk of injury is very low.

One of the benefits of the stay-at-home order and the social distancing protocols is the ability to maybe gain some perspective. We can see better, perhaps, what is important and […] The post Phase Response to COVID-19 appeared first on Verdant CrossFit.

This is an email that I sent on May 6th. It was at a low point in our nation’s response to COVID-19 and I felt like it was necessary. “I […] The post May 6th Email to Verdant Members appeared first on Verdant CrossFit.