Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Coop, I’ve got a great workout for you today. Are you ready?
Chris Cooper (00:05):
Yeah, let’s hear it.
Mike Warkentin (00:05):
OK, here we go. First, Fran, but it’s scaled up. 42, 30, 18 reps. And then you’re going to do it at 135 pounds. That’s part one. It is spicy. After that, we’re going to do a little Smolov squat cycle work, and then pirouette handstand practice. Your finisher, Chris, weight vest Cindy, except you get a 400-pound deadlift at the end of each round. Are you pumped to train today?
Chris Cooper (00:26):
No. No thanks. I’ll pass.
Mike Warkentin (00:29):
OK, it turns out it’s not 2015. You do not need to serve hard for the sake of hard beat downs at your gym anymore. So, what’s good programming? You’re going to find out today on this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m Mike Warkentin. Please hit “subscribe” wherever you are watching or listening. With me today is gym owner, Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper. He’s not doing the workout that I set up for him, but he is going to talk about why he’s not doing that workout and what he thinks of programming. Coop, welcome. How are you?
Chris Cooper (00:52):
Hey, great, man. You know, your workout reminded me of years ago we used to go and do these powerlifting meets inside a federal prison. I won’t name the prison, but one of my first visits, I was wearing a CrossFit hoodie from my L1, and this inmate is like, “CrossFit. We do CrossFit. Let me show you what my CrossFit workout is.” And he took a piece of line paper, and he just listed every exercise that he knew, and he was like, “That’s what my CrossFit workout is, and we do that every day.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s not really what I think CrossFit is.” But it was bad programming, and it was hard just for the sake of hard, and so today we’re going to talk about alternatives to that.
Mike Warkentin (01:27):
Yeah. And honestly, that inmate in that prison, he took the same path as some gym owners, and we’re all guilty of putting together workouts that were just way too hard. Like it’s my 30th birthday; I’m going to do 30 reps of 30 exercises. There’s a lot of people out there, you can bow your head in shame, just like I did, for putting together stuff like that for no point. So, we’re going to talk about good programming in 2024, how to get better results, retain your clients and make your business better. So, Chris, like I said, a lot of us have lost our way in programming at times because we just wanted to try different things and experiment and look cool, honestly. You’ve got a great programming story about Greg Glassman, CrossFit founder, from the original days back when he was programming his own gym, his own workouts. No one remembers the story. What is it?
Chris Cooper (02:08):
Well, so first, I don’t think I remember anybody using the term “programming” before Greg Glassman. It was always you were doing your routine or something else, right? And a lot of people would even say routine. So, in my world, and I’ve been a coach now for 30 years, Greg started using the word “programming.” And so, when he moved from doing one-on-one to doing small group, he realized that the challenge was going to be programming for all of these people so that they were doing the same workout at the same time because they all had different backgrounds and needs. And so, what he developed was basically an audit cycle. And this is a story that he shared with me, and it’s also been kind of corroborated by Greg Amundson, who was one of the clients at that original CrossFit gym. And so, what he would do is write the program for the month, and then at the end of the month he would go back and look at his client’s goals or results on certain benchmarks.
Chris Cooper (03:04):
So for example, he would write the program, and then at the end of the month, he’d go back and say, like, “OK, well what were our areas of common strength? Well, everybody deadlifted pretty well. Everybody did pretty well in the 200-meter intervals that we had. Their times were fairly consistent over the reps. However, when we got to the pull-ups, everybody seemed to struggle. That’s an area of common weakness, and that will be addressed in next month’s programming. And so, the next month’s programming would be a reflection of areas of common opportunities for improvement in the current month. Later though, when I visited HQ finally for the first time in maybe 2014, I just happened to be there while there was some programming going. And I think Tony Budding was the guy holding the pen, but there were a lot of people in the room, and it was this collaborative effort, and they were following the prescription from the L1 guide, but there was no audit process.
Chris Cooper (03:56):
And granted, they were writing for crossfit.com where they couldn’t really track results anymore because nobody was posting their workout results online in the comment section anymore as they were in 2001. But the way that workouts were selected and programmed seemed to kind of miss the point to me. And it was now like, “Oh, let’s do this. Oh, that’s spicy. Oh man, that sounds brutal.” And of course as an avid CrossFitter in 2014, that got me really excited. Oh, that—man, that looks hard. I want to do all these; they look so crazy hard. But the reality is that none of those were geared toward a specific purpose. And that’s what good programming should be. It should always be geared toward an outcome. And somewhere collectively we’ve all kind of lost that; we’re programming to get people results, and we have to measure their results to know if our programming is any good, and if we’re not measuring those results, we can’t know if our programming is any good. And this is true whether you’re doing one-on-one training or small group semi-private like Greg was doing, or big group programming like we have in a lot of gyms now.
Mike Warkentin (05:03):
I rarely evaluated my programming after the fact. And the way I started to realize there were holes was honestly in the Open, which I don’t really like competition in gyms, but that’s my own personal ax to grind. But I realized, “Oh, as a gym, we are bad at handstand pushups,” or whatever it was. And that’s where I started to get feedback on the programming. But I never sat down for like almost a decade to sit down and say, is this matching up with my client’s goals? Because I didn’t know their goals. I didn’t ask them, I didn’t do goal review sessions, which, listeners, you should be doing. I didn’t do that. And then I didn’t sit back afterwards because I wrote these programming bibles like, “Oh, this is the perfect stuff,” and I walked away. I never sat down and said, “Did this get the result?” and that was a huge mistake. So, this is an interesting thing. We’re going to talk about this toward the end of the show, listeners, because we’re going to give you something tactical that you can do to make your programming better. But let’s talk about this. Should you do your own programming in 2024? Like what are the costs of doing it yourself, and when is it a good idea to use one of the many external providers that are out there?
Chris Cooper (05:58):
Yeah, so if you’re a one-on-one trainer and you’re working one-on-one with clients, you have to do the programming for that client. You have to start with their goal in mind and work backward to say, “Here are the inputs that will eventually get us these outputs,” and you have to measure their progress as you go. Brian Bott says to all of his clients, “The best program that I write for you will always be the next program,” because it is like he’s sighting in his rifle and getting more and more specific based on what the client responds best to. Right? Makes a lot of sense. One-on-one, it’s time consuming, but it’s simple to do. Semi-private, it’s a little bit different. In our semi-private model at Catalyst and a lot of gyms like Brian Bott, everybody has their own individual program.
Chris Cooper (06:43):
So you’re writing the program individually, they’re training together, sharing a coach. In a small group, all five or six people are doing the same program, but still, it’s a small group, and so you have this kind of intimate familiarity with the people. You can say, like, “You know what? Our aerobic capacity is kind of falling behind our other metrics. I’m going to program more of that next month.” And what some people will do, like Dan, one of our mentors, is he’ll say to the client, “Do you have a specific priority next month?” And if they’re like, “We want more biceps,” he’ll add that in there, right? And I get that like you are soliciting some feedback. You’re not letting them guide the programming. You know what they need, but they know what they want, and you’re putting some of that in there.
Chris Cooper (07:25):
Makes perfect sense. But when you’re talking about big group programming, it really doesn’t make sense to do the programming yourself anymore. And early on when I was mentoring gyms, and we’re talking 2013, 2014, a lot of gym owners would think, like, “The programming is my product. That’s my secret sauce. That’s my differentiator. That’s what people are buying,” right? We all thought that because we all thought we were brilliant at it. But the reality is they would spend 12 to 15 hours a month on the programming, and they would be reading brand-new books like “The Anatomy of Speed” and thinking, “How do I apply this?” And they’d be reading textbooks and arguing online about it. And eventually it became this like, “Who can make the craziest, hardest workouts? Who can make the spiciest workouts?” If you’re going to be spending more than an hour, two hours a week on your programming, you can probably buy back your time and use that time to grow your gym.
Chris Cooper (08:21):
Instead, if you are making less than $100,000 a year, you need to buy yourself some time. Programming is just a really efficient way to do that. There’s some great options out there like Mayhem, like CompTrain, like NCFIT, and they’re going to give you constantly very functional movement performed at high intensity. They’re going to do a really, really great job at it, and they’re going to give you like coaches’ notes, right? And for now, even if you love programming, for now, use one of these services. It’s going to plug right into your booking and billing software probably. It’s just so simple. It’s such a leverageable service, and then you use the time that you would’ve spent programming to work on your marketing or your sales or whatever project your mentor has given you.
Mike Warkentin (09:05):
If I had done this, if I had spent less time arguing online, trying to create the cleverest workout and spent even half of that time learning how to sell and market, my gym would’ve been much, much more successful, much, much sooner. I eventually offloaded programming because I started to just despise it. All of a sudden, I had time to work on the business, not in the business. And I still love programming, but I just didn’t want to do it anymore. And what you said is really interesting because I chatted with Jason Khalipa and MDV from NCFIT yesterday, and they said this: I asked them, “How many people are on your team for like creating stuff?” It’s like 12 to 20 people that they have creating the NCFIT program, and they’re doing all this stuff. They’ve got this annual prospectus that comes out that tells you what’s coming and what’s good.
Mike Warkentin (09:45):
We know what you’re going to work on. They’ve got coaches’ notes, which also take a huge—like coaching development is included in that, right? You don’t have to dial up your coaches because they’re reading the purpose of the workout, how it should run, all this other stuff; that gives you a lot of backup there. They’ve got all the different streams going on. They’ve got videos. They’ve got everything. They’ve got warmup. They’ve got all this stuff in there. And I think about this, like, “How much time are they putting into it?” It’s a lot. This is a whole business. I can’t match that time. And if I could, I would be neglecting other aspects of my business. So, I mean, that’s a good way to ask you, Chris, like who’s a favorite provider for you that you really, really like?
Chris Cooper (10:21):
Well, I like NCFIT, and I like it—I mean, I like it a lot. So, they give you that annual prospectus, and while they can’t look into my gym and track everybody’s results and change the programming based on that, everything they give me has a reason. And programming is like a haircut; anything looks good as long as it looks like it’s done on purpose. So, in gyms where they say, “Ah, clients left because they want different programming,” the programming is not the problem. The problem is that the clients do not see their future with this programming. They don’t understand why they’re doing this program anymore. And so, they think, “I’m doing this because it’s hard or because it’s spicy and because it’s novel. And when those things run out, I’m going to go find the spicier, the harder, the more novel things somewhere else.” But if you explain to your clients every day, “Here is exactly why we’re doing this right now,” or “Here is the intent of this program,” or “Here’s how this program gets you to your specific goals,” nobody will be leaving your gym over the programming.
Mike Warkentin (11:24):
Yeah. And that mirrors what they said; that’s what they said to me yesterday. I said, “Well, what about these spicy workouts?” And they said, “We put those in from time to time, but we specifically tell the clients, ‘This is hard for this reason. We’re going to challenge your capacity and show you where you’re lacking,’” and so on and so forth. There’s a reason for that. It’s not the reason that I had in 2015 where I’m like, “I want to show people like—I want to beat them up a little bit and give them that burn that they come back for.” That didn’t last long term. So, it’s interesting. And guys, I’ll tell you listeners, if you’re a Two-Brain client, head to your dashboard, and in the marketplace, you’re going to find, I’ll dare say it, a spicy offer from NCFIT that you can check out. Please do that if you are a Two-Brain client, and we’re not going to use that word for the rest of the show. Chris, why did you go back—after talking about all this stuff—why did you go back to programming your own gym? You’ve got a big company, you got lots of stuff going on, but you’re doing the programming at Catalyst in Sault. Ste. Marie. What are you trying to accomplish there?
Chris Cooper (12:11):
Well, I shared the Catalyst comeback story on this podcast about a year ago. And so, I found myself without a GM and jumped back in and gradually broke the GM role up into six different roles, and one of those was programming. And I hired people to take all five, but decided I wanted to keep the programming too, because success in the gym means that you have time freedom. It doesn’t mean that you have gym avoidance. Like you’re not—I love my gym, I want to be involved in my gym, but I don’t want to be chasing people for membership dues, et cetera. I don’t want to be managing the coaches’ schedule. I do like the programming, and one thing that’s evolved in my 30 years of coaching is a better understanding of what actually gets people results. A large percentage of my clients want to burn fat.
Chris Cooper (12:57):
A large percentage of my clientele now is also over 40, and they’re thinking about their health span; they’re thinking about their lifespan. They’re listening to Peter Attia; they’re listening to the Huberman Lab podcast, and that’s great. I’m glad they’re that aware of their health, but they also recognize and understand the need for us to be separating things out a little bit differently. They can’t go hard every day anymore. They’re not trying to make the CrossFit Games Masters competition. And some people are, and God bless them. Good for you. In my gym, nobody really wants to make the CrossFit Games. They watch it. They like it; it’s interesting, but they want me to tell them how to get healthier and fitter, and part of that prescription is going to be more aerobic steady state zone 2 work. Now, I’ve tried this a few different ways over the years to bring this into group classes.
Chris Cooper (13:49):
When you have a one-on-one client and you say, “I want you to spend 40 minutes in an aerobic state, zone 2. Here’s your heart rate monitor, go,” no problem. That’s assigned as homework. In semi-private, again, no problem. Assigned as homework. But the reality is, if you’re in a big group class, it’s actually harder because the workout might feel boring. It’s harder to coach an easy workout, isn’t it? If you’ve got a very spicy workout, like the workout is the entertainment; the coach just has to crank the music and high five and say, “Go, go, go,” and that’s it. It’s easy to coach it. It’s almost like assembly-line coaching. If somebody’s doing something wrong, you pull them out of the assembly line, and you fix the problem, then you put them back in the workout. Whereas this type of coaching doesn’t lend itself to that because you can’t really do zone 2 wrong.
Chris Cooper (14:38):
“Uh oh, you’re not breathing through your nose, Mike. Breathe through your nose,” right? Like it’s not a fix-the-flaw type of thing. And so, it is actually harder to coach. You have to be an engaging coach. You have to be exciting. And so, we had to level up our coaches. We also had to spend more time explaining, “Here’s why you’re doing this today.” So, for example, today we have a 20-minute zone 2 block at the beginning of our workout where people are doing fairly easy movement. They’re breaking a sweat, they’re raising their core temperature, but it’s not a warmup. They’re actually metabolizing fat better, and then they’re going to get into some strength work. And then they’ve got a very simple HIIT workout from crossfit.com 2001 that they’re doing at the end. And the reason that we break that up is because we want to optimize each of the metabolic pathways instead of lumping them all together and kind of hoping for the best.
Chris Cooper (15:29):
And I can dig into that, and I can talk about this stuff all day, but a lot of gyms right now, CrossFit or no, they understand that we need more zone 2 in our programming. They just don’t know how to do it. And unfortunately, CrossFit’s not going to adapt. They’re owned by a private equity company. They’re not going to change the formula now; they’re not going to pursue change it. It’s really up to us, and luckily the affiliate agreement with CrossFit allows us to do our own programming. But also, if you’re running an F45, bootcamp and you realize like, “Wow, these clients need more than HIIT every day if they’re going to actually burn fat and achieve their goals, the outcome that they’re paying me for,” then you need to become aware of how to bring this into your own programming. So, I shot a short video of how I do programming for Catalyst right now, but the programming is less important than how I present it. Back to the haircut analogy, if I tell you, “Here’s why we’re doing this,” and I make it as fun as I can, that’s where you get client buy-in, and that’s why I want to do the programming myself.
Mike Warkentin (16:32):
Yeah, and we’re going to, in the blog this week, we will talk about exactly this. So, I will show you that video that Chris is talking about where he walks through the programming at his gym, and we’ll talk about how that thing works. So do check the Two-Brain blog where you’re going to see how Catalyst is programmed, and Chris walks you through it very quickly with a simple template that you can use at your gym if you see fit, so don’t miss that. So, Chris, you touched on this a little bit—these hard workouts like Helen, Fran, some of these really tough workouts, it’s kind of fun. You crank the tunes, you just say, “Go,” and you kind of step back and you yell, “Pick up the bar and keep running,” and all this other stuff. That doesn’t necessarily push trainers to be better coaches, right? So, that’s more cheerleading. How does different programming that shifts into, you touched on this, but how does that shift push coaches to be better trainers as opposed to cheerleaders?
Chris Cooper (17:17):
Well, workouts that are hard to perform are not usually that hard to coach because you have to stay focused on the hard workout. When I’m doing Fran, I don’t need somebody beside me telling me to work hard because it is hard. And all of my attention and focus is on that workout, right? And there’s definitely a time and a place and a lot of value to that. When I’m doing a 40-minute zone 2 block, I am easily bored, easily distracted, and if the coach is not keeping me on task and keeping me focused and explaining what we’re doing and telling me a joke or encouraging me to keep up my pace, that I’m doing perfect, that I’m staying in the right zone—if the coach isn’t very engaged, I’m not going to be engaged, and I’m not going to want to do it anymore. I’m going to get bored.
Chris Cooper (18:07):
And a big reason that people are not getting results is not like that they don’t know what to do. It’s that they get bored, and they quit. Every coach knows this. The reality is that every program works if a client stays on it, and the hard part of coaching is keeping the clients on it, and if you add in what the client needs, sometimes it’s even harder to keep the client on it. But the result or the outcome is the point. And if we want to get the best outcomes for people, it’s our job as coaches to become better coaches, to get people what they need to do instead of just what they want to do all the time, and sometimes that means coaching harder things, and sometimes that means coaching exercises that are easier but require more coaching. So, I get it.
Chris Cooper (18:56):
I went to this site called WOD Generator because I was actually looking for a specific CrossFit-style bodyweight HIIT workout that I couldn’t find. And somehow, I clicked on this WOD Generator thing, and it’s obviously AI. So now we’re in this era when you can have infinite hard workouts that are hard for the sake of hard, but you should be able to look at every single workout that you’ve given your client in the past year and answer the question, “What is this for? What result am I trying to produce here? What is the outcome that this workout is built for?” And if you can’t do that, then you should outsource your programming, number one. But number two, you should work on becoming better at programming. If the point of this workout is, “It’s spicy,” or “Well, it’s really hard,” or you say something like, “Well, the point of this workout is that it builds resilience,” you really need to ask yourself like, “Am I programming to get the client to the outcome that they’re paying me to get?” because nobody’s walking in the door saying, “Beat me up.” Nobody’s coming in the door saying, “I’m here to build resilience.” That doesn’t happen. And so, this is kind of a call to really examine, like, “Is your programming producing the outcome that people are buying from you?”
Mike Warkentin (20:11):
And I’ll reiterate, if you don’t know a client’s goals, you can’t even answer that question. You need to figure out: What are your people doing? Because I assumed everyone wanted to do Fran with me because it’s awesome. A lot of people were at my gym to lose weight, but I didn’t know that because I didn’t ask them, so if you’re listening right now and you want to start evaluating your programming, you’re going to need to make sure that you ask all incoming clients, “What are your goals?” and make sure that you write them down and have a plan for them. Give them a plan and provide the accountability they need to hit them and then backfill with your current clients and say, “Hey, we’re going to start doing goal review sessions,” and gym owners, when I speak to our top entrepreneurs in Two-Brain and they’re doing goal reviews, their retention is better, their average revenue per member is better, their revenue is better—everything goes up as a result of goal review sessions.
Mike Warkentin (20:53):
So start doing that. That’s a huge step to use to evaluate your programming. Chris, some of the best coaching I ever did, I think was in warmups and little skills and drills kinds of things where, you know, snatching or cleaning jerk or even muscle ups or whatever it was, we did these drills. It was low intensity. Everyone was resting; they were fresh. I feel like I got results. I felt like when we started workouts like, Fran, Helen and Cindy, people kind of went back to their old patterns, and you couldn’t really make a lot of changes because they’re half blacked out. But in those initial intro periods, you could make things way better and then they marginally improved during the hard workouts. And if you kept that pattern up, then things got better at intensity, but it’s very difficult to do that level of coaching when people are just blacking out.
Mike Warkentin (21:34):
That’s just a thing. And here’s an interesting one that I’ll throw at you and see what you think. One of the things, Hero workouts on crossfit.com, those were always a struggle. And let’s be clear, these are people who fell in the line of duty and served their countries and so forth, and they should be honored. Let’s be super clear about that. However, sometimes you get something where this guy’s favorite workout was or movements were like GHD sit-ups, and you there was like a year attached or a month and a date. And so, you’d kind of get into these situations where you’d have to end up doing like 18 rounds of 12 of these plus this and these favorite workouts of, “Wow, these are hard.” And honestly, they were supposed to be hard for the sake of paying tribute to fallen soldiers and service people.
Mike Warkentin (22:18):
But I think sometimes as CrossFit programmers, we looked at those workouts and then stepped back to our own affiliate level and started putting together some weird stuff because it’s the 12th day of the 12th month, and we’re going to do 12 workouts, and things got really ugly, and I’m super guilty of this. I’ll give you one more confession. I wrote workouts not for my clients and not for—I wrote them for other gym owners because I wanted other gym owners to see that I was clever and creative and thought of different things that they hadn’t thought of yet. Shameful, and I wish I could go back and erase some of that stuff, but I did it, and the other reason that I did some workouts was I wanted my clients to do hard stuff and feel the intensity, and I didn’t want them to look at other gym workouts and say, “I should go try that hard one.” And so, I felt pressure to over-program. Have you ever dealt with that too?
Chris Cooper (23:01):
Yeah, yeah. And there is something to be said for achievement. Like once a month, we will program a challenge, and Murph is a great example of a challenge that you would program once a month, and people would think about it, and they would stress about it, and having that challenge on the horizon would keep them coming into the gym more often. I get it, but just like you don’t have a test in eighth grade English every day, you don’t have a test in your programming every day. And so, the story that I got from Greg Amundson, who was the Original Firebreather really, was at the end of the month you look at the programming and you say, “Huh. Nobody did a really great job on those rope climbs. Next month we’re going to be doing a lot of rope climbs on purpose. We’re going to address that weakness.”
Chris Cooper (23:48):
And I think, like I’m the worst for this. The initial intake program for Catalyst was like, “Come in and try this hard workout, and if you throw up your first day, you get a free hat,” right? I thought that’s what I was selling, that I was selling intensity. I’m not; I’m selling outcomes, results, and chasing people off the first day does not get results. If I was going to do one thing to fix everybody’s programming right now, it would be: Start getting consistent with goal reviews. Your clients will tell you in those goal reviews what their priorities are, and you, as an expert coach, will know what your priorities are for programming based on your client’s results. So, if you only do 10 goal reviews this month and you look at, you put them all in the InBody or you take your tape measure and you also say like, “What’s something you’d like to improve right now?” you will get to amazing priorities that can guide your programming next month. Number one, “Oh crap, everybody is concerned about weight loss, and nobody’s making progress there. I need to add more zone 2,” or, “Maybe I need to carve out 10 minutes three days a week where I talk about nutrition,” and then everybody says they want to improve their deadlift. “Hallelujah. Let’s put the deadlift in a few times a week.” And gradually, you just get better and better at programming because you get better at getting clients’ results.
Mike Warkentin (25:09):
Well, listeners, to reiterate, those are your steps; when you leave the show, you are going to do as many goal reviews as is feasible for you. More is better, honestly, but do as many as you can. Find out what your clients want to do, write those things down, then you’re going to program to accomplish those goals. Then you’re going to evaluate the results of those workouts and say, “Did my programming accomplish those goals?” And you’ve got to be objective here. You can’t just say, “Ah, my program is great. They didn’t do the work.” You have to say, “Did it actually get the result that it was supposed to?” And if it didn’t, you didn’t do good programming. And I’ll give you this too, if your clients didn’t show up to work out and do the workouts and skip things, you are not serving your clients properly.
Mike Warkentin (25:47):
So you need to work on retention. And you know, Coop has said this many times: The best workout is the one the client will do, right? So, you have to find a way to get clients in the gym. and that requires soft skills and all these other things. So, I won’t get into that whole ball of wax, but again, goal reviews, program to accomplish goals, evaluate. I’m going to tack on one bonus thing: If for example, in goal reviews, you got 15 clients who all said, “Man, I want to get better at a 5K run time,” or, “I want to get better at long-distance running.” Oh, that sounds like a specialty program that you should then sell. “You know what? We’re going to do an eight-week ‘Couch to 5K’ specialty program, and we’re signing up for the Fun Run in September, and everyone’s going to do it together. It’s going to be a blast. Do you have any friends who might want to do this with you?’” OK, all of a sudden I’ve got 30 people, and I have a specialty program running. You might end up doing that every single year because it works really well. That’s just something you can do with regard to your programming. Chris, you’ve done that, correct? Like that literal plan? Was it the Maple Fun Run or something like that?
Chris Cooper (26:46):
A thousand times. Yeah, Mountain Maple, literally. Yeah, and we’ve done that with other events too. I mean, there’s so many opportunities, and when you plug a challenge into your programming every month, another side benefit is that you get people who really, really, really want to do well at that challenge. So, like our monthly challenge in November is called the Super Meet, and it’s six lifts. You have a two-hour window. It’s a powerlifting meet plus weightlifting, plus a weighted pull-up, and people really take it seriously. And so, we’ll have a specialty program for eight weeks leading up for people who want to specialize because our group programming is broad, general and inclusive. So, it does open up all these opportunities. Some of these things, so for example, like our challenge last month we called the Smoke Jumpers, and it’s basically a benefit for wildland forest firefighters.
Chris Cooper (27:35):
And the workout was the wildland firefighter test from the U.S. I won’t go into the whole thing, but people were told, “If you want to bring a friend to this, you can.” It’s a weighted walk basically. And so, there’s opportunities for that too. On the other hand, when we’re doing Murph, we do not allow drop-ins. We close the door. I mean, it’s usually done on a holiday, so there are visiting people who want to come into town and do Murph with us, but I don’t know what kind of shape they’re in. Some of them want to bring their cousin who lives locally and wants to try Catalyst. That’s not a good day for them to come in, right? Like we don’t have any more free hats for people who barf. Yeah, I mean the challenges are big, and they have their place, but that’s not it every day. You can’t test every day; you have to train every day.
Mike Warkentin (28:26):
And these challenges and goals, like we’re talking: How many people quit when they’re signed up for a challenge or a goal? You know, it’s not very many, right? You get built in retention for stuff like that.
Chris Cooper (28:34):
Yeah. None. It’s a magnet. Look, if you don’t know where to start with programming and this is all overwhelming, go to crossfit.com, 2008. To me, in my mind, and we all have our favorite, but that’s peak CrossFit programming.
Mike Warkentin (28:49):
That’s when I started. It was cool stuff, simple.
Chris Cooper (28:51):
That’s—Greg was doing it. And you’d have a benchmark just about every week, and you wouldn’t see the workout until a day in advance, but you’d be checking that at 12:01 a.m., and “Oh my, here’s the Filthy Fifty. I’m not going to go back to sleep now.” And you’d get excited, and that’s what got the core of CrossFit affiliates addicted was just a beautiful balance of novelty with occasional testing. And I think you’ll remember this too. Sometimes in that programming, a 5K row would show up, a 5K run. And the reason that it got sussed out and affiliates stopped doing it was it’s like, “Well when I program a 5K run, nobody comes to the gym that day.” Well then you have to become a better coach and tell them why they need to be there and make the run fun, like that’s the key.
Mike Warkentin (29:43):
I talked about this exact stuff with Jason yesterday, so please, listeners, subscribe, you will hear the rest of that show. But I’ll tell you the quick story, Chris, I remember those tests showing up, like the Filthy Fifty, and wow, we stayed up all night, and it was hard, but it was just that; it was one workout, and you could get back to business and were fine. Eventually things got so extreme that Jason told me he used to do Filthy Fifty once, then he would do it a second time back to back, and then he would do the actual workout that he was training for because that’s the level of volume and extreme—he was training at the top level of the CrossFit Games. But that CrossFit Games programming trickled down to the affiliate level, and we all thought it had to be super hard, and no longer was Fran or a five-by-five back squat enough. It was, “This plus this, plus this, plus this, plus this, plus my client is injured and leaves,” right? And that’s what happened to a lot of us because we didn’t stick to the original plan, and we got into the whole spicy meatball thing that you were talking about where it’s like, “This is so hard.”
Chris Cooper (30:33):
No, that’s the paradox with CrossFit Games. And we’ve talked about CrossFit, but this applies to any coaching business, this whole episode. The paradox with the CrossFit Games, though, is unique to CrossFit, and that is that we started confusing the competitive with the outcome. So, if your goal is to make it to the CrossFit Games, then yeah, you want to train like an athlete. But if you look at any sport, the top athletes are not the healthiest, sometimes they’re not even the fittest athletes—they’re not going to have the best longevity. In cycling, we have a saying that, “You are a bike rider and not a bike racer.” Bike racers have a different set of skills. If you look at the guys who were just in the Tour de France, by the end of that race, they are sickly looking. They look like they’ve been on a starvation diet or they’ve got an eating disorder or something. They’re at the top of the sport. But other cyclists who train as bike riders can be enormously fit and healthy. And it’s the same in CrossFit; it’s the same in fitness. The pursuit of competition can actually pull you out of health and fitness. Most of our clients are here for health and fitness, and you have to be programming toward that outcome, and if you’re not measuring their progress toward that outcome, you can’t say that your programming can deliver that outcome.
Mike Warkentin (31:46):
I can’t close it out any better than that. Chris, thanks for talking about this. Where can people go after the show to discuss stuff like this more and chat with other gym owners?
Chris Cooper (31:55):
I’d love to have them in gymownersunited.com because while this is kind of a coaching topic, let’s face it, we’re all owner-operators. We opened our gyms because we love coaching, and we also often love programming. And so, we talk about this stuff too.
Mike Warkentin (32:09):
Gymownersunited.com: You can hang out with a bunch of really excellent gym owners in there. Chris and the Two-Brain mentor team are also in there all the time answering questions and giving advice. It’s a great place. Please go there, and my second request is hit “subscribe” on the way out the door. Thanks for being here, Chris.
Chris Cooper (32:21):
Thanks buddy. Take care.
Mike Warkentin (32:23):
Alright, see you next time, listeners.
