The Problem with Facilities like F45
Now this may come across as the bitter ramblings of a business competitor but stay with me. This isn’t just an indictment on F45 or their processes, it’s an indictment on the fitness industry in general and F45 just happens to be growing in popularity right now. As a whole, we’ve strayed so far from providing beneficial and safe services to jam as many people into classes as possible to increase our bottom lines. Private training is expensive, and in an effort to cast a wider net and not box anyone out of increasing their fitness levels we’ve created a monster in the typical group fitness training class.
Crossfit Started it All
Now early in my career I used to go off on absolute rants about CrossFit and their practices. From relatively high overuse injury rates, to putting people in vulnerable positions, to their completely off the wall programming practices. Now there’s some GREAT CrossFit affiliates and coaches, but as a business model they grew entirely too quickly and it led to a lot of undesirable outcomes. From unqualified coaches, to under qualified facilities becoming affiliates there was entirely too much growth and not enough oversight.
So what did it take to become a CrossFit affiliate back during the boom? Well first you had to go to a weekend training seminar that would cost you roughly $1,000 at the time (I’m not positive what it is now) to learn how to do what strength coaches and a lot of personal trainers took 4-6 years learning at university along with years of experience in the field. Then you had to pay a $3,000 affiliate fee. So $4,000 and about 10 hours of “training,” that’s all it took to call yourself a fitness professional affiliated with what was at the time, the biggest name in fitness when it came to the general population. That’s an incredibly low barrier to entry and we all saw that flaw when it came to the actual practice and outcomes of CrossFit. Unqualified coaches, with unqualified business owners yielded the perfect storm of making TONS of money while providing a subpar service. It gave rise to a plethora of CrossFit Fail videos, and if you haven’t had a chance to watch the old Infinite Elgintensity and Exercises in Futility videos you’re missing out. This one below is hands down one of my favorites.
Now this video is meant to be funny and it is, but what you have to realize is that this is the Games. This is the BEST CrossFitters on the planet. This is the example CrossFit has to show to the general public of what you can achieve using their principles, programming and training. And this is a byproduct of trying to scale, while having zero clue as to how to do so because it’s happening so fast. However it worked for them, and they made a boat load of money. But it showed the general public the most bastardized, God awful form of fitness and tried to pass it off as a way to lead a healthy lifestyle. It was irresponsible and it set our industry back quite a bit.
Now CrossFit wasn’t always this way. In the beginning a guy by the name of Mark Rippetoe was in charge of coaches education, programming and he was for all intents and purposes the mind behind Crossfit. Mark is a legend in the field of strength and conditioning, and he’s written a book called Starting Strength that’s been read by every strength and conditioning coach who’s worth their salt. Here’s a link to his shop if you’re interested, I highly recommend starting here if you’re looking to get into weight training. He’s an amazing mind when it comes to training. Well a few years in, Mark saw the direction they were going in and decided he didn’t want to be associated with it anymore and bowed out. Enter: Dave Castro.
With Mark gone, they needed to put someone in charge of what he had been doing, and Greg Glassman (CEO of CrossFit) in his infinite wisdom decided a former Navy Seal by the name of Dave Castro was the guy. I mean you’ve gotta respect the guy for making it to THAT level of the military. You don’t stumble into being a SEAL, it’s a next impossible task. But, being a SEAL doesn’t necessarily give you an understanding of physiological adaptations, or movement proficiency. These guys are asked to essentially learn to suffer and put themselves in physically irresponsible positions in an effort to be the baddest MFers on the planet. Sound familiar? It’s a mirror of what CrossFit programming tends to look like. Almost like someone put a bunch of hard tasks on a dartboard and threw darts at it to decide what the WOD (workout of the day) would be for all the CrossFit affiliates. There’s no attention to detail when it comes to movement selection, volume, loads, etc.
Now you’re probably sitting there thinking “but Connor, he’s a SEAL. The dude’s probably a monster!” Well, you’d be wrong. Here’s a video of Dave Castro performing a deadlift backwards hat and all. Watch this (it starts right at his deadlift, if you want to see his abomination of a squat you’re gonna have to rewind) and then tell me if this guy needs to be in charge of coaches education and programming for ANYONE. He’s out of position, the load is inappropriate, and he takes roughly 24 seconds to fail the lift after hitching like he’s on the dance floor. Now as a strength and conditioning professional, I completely understand that there’s an acceptable deviation from perfect when it comes to form. This particular deadlift is so far outside what we consider to be acceptable that it isn’t even funny. In an effort to create growth within the business, they put this guy in charge. You’ve got to question is CrossFit ever really cared about their clientele.
All that being said CrossFit did do some pretty positive things. You can credit CrossFit for getting A LOT more women comfortable weight training, and for a while you’d hear normal every day mom’s and dad’s talking about their deadlift PRs. That’s a pretty awesome thing. So while CrossFit set our industry back quite a bit, we actually can thank them for casting such a wide net with the general population and pulling so many more people into fitness. So what does CrossFit have to do with the title of this article? Glad you asked! It created an incredibly good business model with shitty individual outcomes for other companies to try to emulate, and gave anyone the ability to be a fitness instructor if you had the time and the money, experience be damned.
The Problem with Group Fitness Classes
I’ll be the first to say that group fitness classes aren’t necessarily a bad thing. We actually offer them here at The Lyons Den Sports Performance and are hoping to grow that side of our business. It offers people a cost effective training option that when coached by a good coach can yield incredibly positive benefits. The downside? Not everyone is cut out to be in a group when they’re training. Scaling can be incredibly difficult when you’re talking about the wide array of fitness levels that walk into a group training class. You can have fitness newbies and fitness vets all training under the same roof at the same time. Scale too high and you’ll more than likely hurt the fitness newbies. Like physically hurt them. Scale too low? It won’t be difficult enough to benefit your fitness vets. It’s a weird tightrope to walk and can be a super difficult task for someone who hasn’t spent 4-6 years gaining an education in addition to another 10-20 years gaining experience in the field.
Wanna know a sad fact? Facilities like mine can’t get by on private training alone. There aren’t enough people who can afford to spend that kind of money on their fitness. On top of that throw in the fact that there’s only so many hours throughout the day where people can make it into your facility (school/work/sports), and you find out you HAVE to offer group training or you’ll be boxing out a TON of people who would like to utilize your service. As an industry I feel like a lot of us have been trying to solve this problem, but not everyone’s cut out for group training.
In this section I’ve said that group training isn’t for everyone and the reason I say that is because some people simply require a higher degree of supervision when it comes to training and for various reasons. For example I have a former military member, former CrossFitter training in my facility right now. He’s a great guy, pretty proficient in his movement, and he works his ass off. The reason why group training might not be a great fit for him? Because he’s going to work too hard. It sounds a little weird but it’s true. He’s going to accomplish everything you put on the board or in his program and he’ll catch himself from time to time getting out of position to do so. He’s one of the few clients that I can say needs a higher level of supervision simply because he’ll push himself to the point in his head where only the work matters, and he’ll occasionally lose positioning to do so. On the flip side, I’ve had clients who jump into group classes in my career who just aren’t there yet. Their form’s rough, their fitness levels are incredibly low, and they just need someone to walk them through every movement. They need a teacher who has their eyes on them every rep or they’ll end up eventually hurting themselves. Group fitness isn’t appropriate for either of these clients even though they’re on completely different ends of the spectrum as far as ability goes. The problem? Facilities will continue to keep them in group fitness classes because they want their money, or they don’t understand the limitations associated with keeping them in the class.
This brings me to the reason for the title of the article: facilities like F45 aren’t for everybody, although they market themselves to EVERYBODY. I legit can’t get through my social media feeds without seeing a sponsored post from an F45 franchise, which is actually another issues with their model. But we’ll go over all of this in the next section.
Why Facilities Like F45 Aren’t for Everybody
Places like Orange Theory, F45, many CrossFit affiliates and other group training facilities provide a good service. They bring affordable fitness to the masses. We’ve discussed a couple of the issues associated with this in the previous sections but we’ll expand on them here.
For starters, they’re not geared towards the masses as much as they say they are. Most people can’t just jump into a fitness routine that’s been created with such broad brush strokes. Put aside orthopedic and cardiac issues that our population is currently plagued with we’re also a population with HORRIBLE movement patterns. From pushing to pulling, lunging and squatting to hinging and even running, we’re a nation chock full of adults AND children who move like shit. Now we’re going to put these people who can’t move into a group training setting under loads creating even further movement dysfunction. I’m sure your orthopedic surgeon will be pumped but while that fat seems to fall off, you’re wearing out your joints and creating movement dysfunction that will bite you in the ass a few years down the road. A lot of movements within group training classes just aren’t appropriate for everyone and it honestly takes a special coach to be able to scale it for everyone.
Secondly, the franchise model when it comes to group fitness is a poor one no matter how you do it. We’ve talked about how hard it can be to coach 15 different people with 15 different levels of fitness and 15 different sets of movement dysfunction at the same time, can you imagine programming for 100 different gyms each with 100 plus members each?? It’s not only impossible, it’s incredibly irresponsible. It’s actually one of the main reasons CrossFit gets made fun of so often. CrossFit fail videos are full of people who were put into positions and under loads that they just can’t handle. It just can’t be done so the franchisees just have to hope that their marketing gets directed at the appropriate audience to bring the appropriate clientele in. Think of this situation like a federal government vs local government. The federal government making mandates for the entire country is usually not a great thing and doesn’t always work for everybody. Wesley Chapel, FL is not New York City and mandates that are appropriate NYC don’t always make sense for Wesley Chapel and vice versa. But the federal government will mandate certain things via laws and now people both in NYC and Wesley Chapel are effected in completely different ways via the same laws. Now in this scenario the franchisees are much like local governments, and they’re given instruction from the corporate headquarters who act like the federal government. It’s next to impossible to provide appropriate training for vast swaths of people all across the country and it leads to inappropriate training for a good portion of their clientele.
Thirdly, this training is in no way shape or form geared towards increasing on the field performance although they may tell you that it will indeed help you with it. It’s apples and oranges. Training for general fitness is merely exercise, while training for sport involves incredibly calculated monitoring of workload, recovery levels and movement proficiency among other variables. You can’t do P90X and expect for it to carryover to your play on the field outside of increasing your general work capacity. And this is unrelated, but muscle confusion is a made up word.
Fourth, if your goal is anything other than increasing your general fitness levels you’re going to have a bad time. Now increasing your general fitness levels is a good thing! But that isn’t why everyone trains. Some people want to get stronger, some want to become more agile, some want/need to increase their mobility, some may want to drop body fat while others may want to increase muscle mass. It is next to impossible (without volume, movement, and load variations for the clients) to accomplish all of these things at the same time while creating a safe environment for your clientele. And most of these classes are about high volume, low intensity work that’ll get your heart rate up, or for general fitness. If you have specific goals, these classes are more than likely not for you.
Fifth on the list goes along with graphic for this article. They’re like PE was in high school. Some kids could absolutely CRUSH it in PE, but when it came time to play dodgeball there was always some unsuspecting kid that can’t keep up and ends up eating the ball when it gets tossed at his head every game. PE isn’t designed to help everyone, it’s created with very broad brush strokes and inevitably some of the class get’s left behind.
Lastly, you can figure half of your clients are going to have desirable outcomes, and more than likely half of them will get hurt. Now when I say hurt, I don’t mean you’re going to break your leg or roll your ankle in the moment. What I mean is that you’re going to further exacerbate whatever movement dysfunction you currently have, and you’ll end up with overuse injury down the road. Maybe even years down the road. I had a mentor in college named Frank Wintrich (one of the best human beings I’ve ever met and an unbelievable mind when it comes to physical preparation) who told me that you can measure your success as a strength coach by looking at your athletes roughly three to four years down the road. How many of them have had soft tissue non contact injuries? The movement dysfunction seeds you plant (or correct) as a coach won’t rear their ugly head until about that long. The same thing happened to CrossFit, although they were also responsible for some broken bones in the moment for a while there. Movement dysfunction is one thing, but placing that dysfunction under a load will oftentimes have catastrophic outcomes much later down the road. I’d actually be really interested in someone compiling this data over time, because the class action lawsuits against some of these gyms who hire morons to coach would be fun to watch and a nice little bit of vindication for the coaches who do the right things.
