19 Feb 2025 6 min read

CrossFit

Intro

From a gym full of scrappy kids doing bizarre movements to a billion-dollar empire of Instagram models and cultish megaphones. How they made it to the top? Not today. This is about how they built a world people never want to leave. And how they convinced the world to suffer willingly.

This is experience design 101.

The challenge

The trick was to snatch people from Coca-Cola and make them voluntarily suffer, at dawn, before or after work.

To take a below-average Joe and have him clean and jerk 100kg, bounce back like nothing happened, walk 20 meters on his hands, and run 2km. Repeat it five times. Then show up again tomorrow. And the next day. For years.

But here is the kicker, all leads to nowhere, and the finish line is always moving out of r e a c h .

How do you take someone who can’t even spell these movements, let alone on steroids, and get them performing Olympic lifts and gymnastics? Why CrossFit has taken so many people inside the gym that no other sport could ever do?

CrossFit: Engineered, Manufactured, Monetised Misery

Look at what modern life lacks.

Real, raw emotions

Most joyful things have been stripped down and mass-produced. Food is now fast. Sex is divide and conquer algorithm (this happens when a bunch of nerds design your experiences). Travel, once an adventure, is now a Ryanair boarding gate.

The euphoria of having these things has been long gone. And that void? Even those born after 2000 feel it. They don’t know a world before Tinder and Uber, but they sense what’s missing. It’s a hunger built into us, an absence we can’t name.

CrossFit offers a path to fill that void. You turn your numb mundane life of screens and comfort into pain, all to feel something. The true art of CrossFit is to manufacture the pain, but it feels so raw. And the highest emotional arc? It's the moment you step outside the gym, and reality rushes. You realize how good you had it to live away, even in pain for a while, and that alone is enough to make you come back.

Deep focus

The modern mind is scattered. CrossFit hijacks attention, forces you into now. CrossFit isn’t about fixing the past or building the future. It traps you in the now. And the now is all there is.

Soldiers in war, monks in meditation. They live in the now because they have no choice. CrossFit offers the same escape, but with one difference:

you don’t have to be alone.

The Power of Community

If you’re standing at the bottom of a hill with friends, it will appear less steep and easier to climb than if you are alone.

Lisa Feldman

The design of the workout is social, but also it’s psychological reinforcement. You see people struggle, push, adapt. You see them hit milestones, but never finish.

It proves that the next level exists.

You show up because they show up. You suffer because they suffer.

The illusion is strongest when it’s shared.

No matter how shredded you are, you suffer. No matter how weak you are, still suffer. They democratized suffering.

It’s the purest form of justice.

It's Mecca's ritual where everyone else is running in desert for the mirage times and again, seriously they monetised Abraham's story. Viva Corporate America.

CrossFit forces strong ties through shared suffering. And that’s not new. The heavy weight of the cross in Semana Santa. The hunger of Ramadan. The mirage run of Mecca.

Meaning

This isn’t the 1950s. No war to survive. No ruins to rebuild. Just climate control, Uber Eats, and another meaningless Zoom call. And yet, we still crave struggle. CrossFit gives it back to us.

You might not do CrossFit more than a couple of years, but for sure, you will reflect on it someday.

The friendships you build. The escape from real life. Your heart races, when you accidentally cross a gym and see people working out.

You don't know them, you have never been in that gym, but you know, you'd be familiar. You'd be accepted.

Religion faded. Purpose is fuzzy. CrossFit gives people a ritual, a struggle, and an identity.

Competence

Sure you might progress physically, but wait, there is more to it. Someday you'll leave the gym forever. You start something new from scratch, and you find yourself less scared, more confident.

Autonomy

A few months in, you could train anywhere. New town, new gym, it doesn’t matter. The system is in you now. Remember, you start from zero, now you are independent and get the job done.

The magic of CrossFit isn’t just getting people started, it’s keeping them stuck in the loop. Scaling doesn’t just make workouts accessible, it ensures there’s always another level. A new skill, a heavier lift, a harder WOD. The moment you reach a milestone, the game resets.

It’s Fogg meets near miss lottery and casino game effects. Diabolically brilliant.

This isn’t progress in the traditional sense. It’s a treadmill disguised as a mountain. The Fogg model explains how people take action, but CrossFit ensures the action never feels complete.

CrossFit as a Perfectly Engineered “Near-Miss” System
• In casinos, a near-miss (almost hitting the jackpot) is more addictive than losing outright. It keeps you pulling the lever.
• In CrossFit, every workout is a near-miss. You almost PR’d. You almost got the muscle-up. You almost finished unbroken.
• The thrill isn’t in winning. It’s in almost winning. And just like a slot machine, the moment you fail, the machine spits out another chance.
• There’s no jackpot, just the next pull. The next lift. The next WOD.

The result? A global tribe united by sweat, pain, and the promise of progress. Love it or hate it, CrossFit is a masterclass in making people addicted to misery, and profiting wildly from it.

Conclusion

CrossFit is not an athletic discipline. It is an experience. Curated, magnified, and monetized. It’s a world.

Not a gym. Not a sport. A parallel universe where suffering is the only currency, and progress is an illusion.

A slot machine rigged for near-misses.

CrossFit is fitness turned into a perfectly gamified casino, except instead of losing money, you lose yourself in the loop. But wait!

The truth about it, nothing stands between you and CrossFit, absolutely nothing. Age, race, gender, sexual orientation, CrossFit is an ultimate place for the souls, free.

Addendum

If you are more of a framework than emotions then I have a section for you too. Take a look below.

Yes, this thing again, like CrossFit, this theory is everywhere these days, but it fits here like a glove.

Fogg Behavioural Model

BJ Fogg explains for an action to happen we need [make a reference here to ref-1 ]:

1 - Motivation (high and low points)

2 - Ability

3 - Trigger or Prompt

Then he plots a graph and calls the red curve the action line, area above it make the action to happen and area below it, the action probably not going to happen.

Here is an example:

CrossFit for average persons lies in the left lower section of this chart, Ability (Hard) and Motivation (Low).

The challenge is to take our Joe from this point to the exact opposite, where he feels competent and motivated.

But how ?

Scaling (Fogg's Tiny Habits)

First day, Joe (average) shows up, we give him a roadmap to his ideal self. This roadmap is called 'Scaling' in CrossFit. Scaling is breaking down a complex movement to less complicated form, until it feels doable for a complete beginners. What does it mean from Fogg's perspective? Take a look at the graph below, the red dot's are actions we won't perform like complex gymnastic movements or going to a local competition, and green dots represent actions we are actually doing or have recently done, buying a right shoes, signing up for a class, being in the class.

Scaling gives people autonomy, and builds competence.

Scaling takes you from the lower part of the graph to the upper, where you can perform complex movements and even doing some local competition. Scaling works inside the gym. But outside? That’s where most people fall apart. And CrossFit knows it. That’s why they keep you coming back—to control the only part they can

An Example

The work-out of the day has pull-ups, but Joe cannot do a single pull-up. The program scales the movement to ring-rows, jumping pull-ups or banded assisted pull up.

How does scaling helps ?

We didn't let Joe down, the opposite, we made him an active participant pushing his boundaries. Our Joe is now motivated.

Charles Duhigg explains in the Power of Habits:

Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.” Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.