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Zero to One-Point-One

November 19, 2015 Gym Marketing
Peter Thiel has a perspective you and I don’t. Think of the last time you heard the word “Monopoly.” If it wasn’t a conversation about the board game, the word was probably used in a negative context (i.e. in the news in the context of a lawsuit.) But Thiel’s perspective as founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook is different: he believes monopolies are good. True innovation creates a monopoly, says Thiel in “Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How To Build The Future.” He points to the copycat culture of China, where entire cities have been planned to duplicate their U.S. counterparts, and technologies are reproduced cheaply but rarely invented. According to Thiel, the only path to true prosperity is through novelty: being the first, and creating a monopoly. He believes competition drives prices down and hurts everyone. For example, the price of cars relative to an annual income continues to drop, and profit margins are sometimes nonexistent. But SpaceX (in which he’s also a large investor) has a monopoly on space flight; it can charge anything it wants. This might seem to be bad news for CrossFit affiliates. There are nearly 13,000 of us now, and many potential clients can’t tell us apart. This makes us a commodity service in the mind of the buyer, and drives prices down. But on the other hand, affiliates who CAN differentiate themselves from the pack have a massive opportunity. If their gym is obviously different–to the client, not the owner–they can move closer to “monopoly” status. The first article I ever published about the gym business was called, “Don’t Be Vanilla.” (June 16, 2009.) Differentiation was the point. For me, being a CrossFit gym WAS being different. But now we’re vanilla, too. How can you distinguish yourself from the pack and create a local monopoly even when there are other boxes around?  
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The Value of Singularity

November 19, 2015 Vision
This was originally published on April 25, 2012. This is an updated version. Singularity This is Alexei Sidorovitch Medveyev. He’s one of the greatest weightlifting coaches of all time, pioneering huge advances in periodization, biomechanics, and force development. His USSR teams dominated weightlifting from 1970-1974. A totalitarian approach to managing athletes has its obvious drawbacks. It can also teach us much, even 40 years later. Medveyev could control when his athletes slept, and for how long; when they ate, and what; what they lifted, and when. Under his guidance, the Soviet Weightlifting program experimented with colour; sound; and even smell, marching their athletes through different types of forest after their workouts and measuring relative recovery to the 10th power (spoiler alert: Siberian Fir is best.) You can read more about these ‘best practices’ in Managing The Training of Weightlifters (bottom right.) Worth the cover price just for the short paragraph on steroid usage recommendations for women. Medveyev also experimented with coaching methods. Concerned with far more than just load, bar speed, and reps, Medveyev measured the effects of voice quality; instruction quantity; and total practice time. Prilepin’s Table was developed during this period.  Other ideas were tried, measured, and discarded. One of Medveyev’s guiding principles: never give an athlete more than one instruction or correction in a training session.  Yes, they may need to raise their chin; they may need to stand taller; they may need to lift their hips more. All of those may be true, but only one may be corrected at a time. One instruction was useful; two instructions handicapped the athlete, splitting their attention. When a cue was mastered, the next was given. Information would be prioritized based on relevance, or timing. Do the same with your new contacts: on their first visit, they need to hear that CrossFit is novel, or different, or challenging, or fun, or Sport. As teachers, Coaches, and experts trying to deliver their ...
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Two-Brain Radio Episode 5: Greg Everett

November 16, 2015 Gym Operations Podcast
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Two-Brain Radio Episode 4: Jason Williams

November 9, 2015 Gym Marketing Podcast
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tbb greg strauch

The Currency of Coffee

November 5, 2015 Selling Gym Memberships
What’s your coffee worth? Depending on the time of day, that value could range from .30 to 5.00. As I wrote in “The Boldness Bump,” the price anchor for coffee has changed. But this essay is about the value of coffee to OTHERS. Coffee opens doors. Coffee stirs conversation. Here’s how I’ve used it to great advantage: In Catalyst’s annual “Fit It Forward” week, the first assignment I give our clients is literally “Buy a stranger a coffee.” Every year, in drive-thrus and coffee lines, dozens of Catalyst clients say, “I’ll pay for the guy behind me.” The benefit is far greater than the price of a cup, and the purchaser feels good all day. But until I told them to do it, few were. In our second location (2006,) our gym was above a women’s clothing shop. On opening day, I took the sales staff a tray of coffee as an introduction. That same afternoon, a teenager dropped a power snatch from over his head; all the track lighting in the shop below broke free and shattered. We resolved it peacefully. That coffee saved me five years of war with the neighbors. Before Catalyst opened, I sought advice from an elderly attorney. My partners-to-be were friendly guys with successful businesses, but I thought it wise to be careful. I walked down the street to the attorney’s office and stopped to buy him a coffee on the way. I could barely afford the coffee, let alone his advice, but he said, “Thanks for the coffee. I needed that. No bill.” In January 2013, I sat in the original Starbucks in Seattle with some of the HQ “inner circle”–Andy Stumpf, Sevan Metossian, and Jimi Letchford–and we were waiting for Greg. I was dangerously close to missing a flight home. But the wait gave me the opportunity to lay out what I was doing with 321GoProject over coffee. The next time I visited HQ, ...
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The Conjugate System for the Competitive CrossFit Athlete

November 5, 2015 Personal Development
by Jason Brown At more and more CrossFit boxes there are regular people moving extraordinary weights on a weekly basis. At CrossFit 781 we certainly do not neglect our strength training and have solidified ourselves as one of the strongest boxes around. Some people may think we have a strength bias or that our conjugate training leans more towards people increasing their training maxes rather than their conditioning. I definitely think there is some truth to this, but I’m going to tell you why we are able to cover all our bases on a weekly basis as well as outline a basic week of training and the structure we use to achieve multi-dimensional training perspectives in balanced and efficient way. The conjugate system by definition is a system that has features that are inverse in nature. To further demonstrate the basis of the conjugate system, there are multiple perspectives to this system that make it so successful. One being Max Effort Work. Max effort work occurs twice per week for both lower and upper body. Here the loads are high and the training volume is low. The variations rotate weekly preventing accommodation, burnout, as well as consistent improvement of training maxes. Louie Simmons developed the conjugate system from the Bulgarian system where lifters would hit a max for the day regularly. The conjugate system utilizes a long list of variations where maxes for the day are hit. More times than not people are hitting new records for a particular movement. The benefit of moving large loads is intra/intermuscular coordination but also psychological in the sense that you become accustomed to continuously hitting personal records albeit they may not be with the classic lifts. Typically we only test the classic lifts every 12 weeks where new maxes are almost always achieved. The inverse to max effort training is dynamic or speed training which occurs 72 hours after its counterpart max effort ...
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