Why is greg glassman out of shape

In the Glassman household, education trumped everything. Glassman's father was a rocket scientist at Hughes Aircraft and an all-around hard-ass who lorded math and the scientific method over Glassman, his younger sister, and their stay-at-home mom. Arguments with the old man inevitably required data sets, says Glassman--"Any point you made had to be measurable, repeatable"--and Glassman clashed with his dad frequently.

Glassman escaped into athletics and fell in love with gymnastics the source, he says, of his pronounced limp , weightlifting, and cycling. After dropping out of several colleges and junior colleges, Glassman began working in fitness full time, as a personal trainer at local gyms.

He developed wacky routines: He had clients race their way through repetitions on a weight machine, and at one facility, he had them scramble up a foot column in the middle of the room. Eventually, the owner of that gym welded disks to the pole to make him stop. He got kicked out of that gym.

He got kicked out of several gyms. In , as Glassman was burning the last of his bridges at local gyms, he got a call from a friend who worked at the sheriff's department in Santa Cruz. The department had heard about him and wanted him to train officers. Glassman, who was in the middle of a breakup with a longtime girlfriend, decided to go. He set up shop in a health center called Spa Fitness and taught his own brand of fitness training, which he had begun calling CrossFit, to officers and anyone else looking to buy 60 minutes of sweat.

The Santa Cruz mornings and evenings became packed with fitness clients. The stretch of day in between grew into a time of study and reflection.

He had a friend bring in printouts of fitness articles the friend had found using his newfangled Internet connection. Glassman began refining his approach. He favored gymnastic and powerlifting moves he knew from growing up, and functional calisthenics squatting, pull-ups that forced the body to use large muscle groups together, like in real life. He liked the idea of throwing exercises at clients seemingly randomly, believing it resembled the way early humans had to overcome daily physical obstacles.

To goose participants' natural competitiveness, he mandated that the workouts be for time, or for as many rounds or reps as possible in a set time period, so that no one slacked off. Glassman attracted a little flock. He went to Spa Fitness and was told he had his pick of two: "one guy who is really nice and not that good, and another guy who is really good but super-opinionated and arrogant"--Glassman, of course.

Glassman's crew was tight-knit. He even ended up marrying one of his clients, a hairdresser named Lauren Jenai. When the Spa Fitness owner inevitably showed the CrossFitters the door, and they leased a corner of a jujitsu studio, Lauren would manage the books and teach CrossFit classes herself.

Soon they outgrew that space, and the Glassmans took their motley little group of cops, jujitsu fighters, and tech-company commuters to a 1,square-foot truck garage on a remote road three miles out in Soquel. In , a number of clients asked if Glassman could put the WODs online so they could do them when they traveled, so he put up CrossFit. It seems unlikely, from today's perspective, that a rudimentary site featuring a daily workout, a daily link to other fitness sites, and occasionally a photo of an athlete could generate a passionate viral following.

But then you probably haven't tried a WOD. To a skeptical initiate, the commitment to the WOD seems odd: It might be just 10 minutes of alternating five reps of deadlifts with yard sprints. Simple enough, you think, as you picture yourself running around like a beheaded, powerlifting chicken.

In conventional gyms, CrossFit workouts draw stares. But when you actually do that workout, halfway through you hit the baptismal version of what early CrossFitters fondly called the mess-you-up moment--the recognition that there's devilish magic in this offbeat combination.

In a few minutes, you're the sorest you've been in years. You're not sure you will survive. It's an adrenaline rush. For anyone bored with standard weights routines or the elliptical, it's addictive. So, although Glassman keeps the CrossFit business model radically loose and open, he protects the brand name with an iron fist. An early client of Glassman's described the CrossFit experience as "agony coupled with laughter. It was as if his increasingly fit posse had a subversive secret: combinations of exercises that seemed strange and reckless and maybe dangerous to the ignorant.

When Elizer, who volunteered to build the website, asked Glassman if he had a logo in mind, Glassman thought about the idea of agony mixed with laughter, then thought about thumbing his nose at all the ho-hum personal trainers he had ever endured. He came up with a vomiting clown. He called it Uncle Pukie. Images of bulging CrossFit competitors were replaced with average people just trying to get in shape: instructional videos show older adults doing tricep dips off a vintage kitchen counter or raising bags of dog food off the floor.

Cain resigned from the CEO position for unexplained reasons during the reporting phase of this story.

He declined requests for comment. While Glassman projects confidence about his ambitions, the initiative seems to lack a clear objective. But what exactly does that mean in action? But in the world of health care reform, CrossFit Health has barely made a splash. When I reached out to three health organizations to get their take, most had not even heard of CrossFit Health, and all declined to comment. The elegant and optimal solution is CrossFit—its workouts; its preferred diet of meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar; and a commitment to unearthing the truth behind mainstream medicine and health research.

According to a Harvard study , nearly half of all American adults will suffer from obesity by Another study , published in , found that 70 percent of deaths in the U. But is CrossFit the superior workout, better than all the rest?

The same goes for the CrossFit-approved high-fat, low-carb diet. Jedidiah Ballard, an osteopathic emergency physician at the Augusta University Medical Center in Georgia, has said it is, at the very least, better than the standard American diet. But like the workout, it might not be great for everyone. But Glassman is not about to reconsider his beliefs.

One of the tenets of CrossFit Health is the total distrust of mainstream health research, which makes it easy for him to dismiss any scientific evidence that counters his views. Over breakfast in Santa Cruz, he cited a well-known essay from Dr. John P. Ioannidis at Stanford that claims the overwhelming majority of published research findings are false. Hackenbruck, a hulking yet gracious man, coached me to proper form and then provided me with workouts to do on my own.

I am ashamed of you. The next day, during a Zoom call with a group of affiliates, an owner in Minnesota asked why corporate headquarters had remained silent during the national unrest over racial injustice. Within forty-eight hours, a reported three hundred CrossFit boxes had pledged to de-affiliate. Two days later, Glassman stepped down as C. He handed over the chief-executive role to Dave Castro, his longtime lieutenant.

But many people in the CrossFit community think that Castro can be as abrasive as the founder himself. Commenters on social media called Glassman a racist and Castro who is Mexican-American complicit.

They demanded that Glassman sell the company to save CrossFit. Soon, the Times published accusations of workplace sexual harassment by Glassman. I have no regrets. A row of standing desks is flanked by a kitchen and a mini-gym outfitted with new Rogue equipment. A conference room has a view of Mt. Sanitas, a popular peak named for the sanitarium, an early health resort, that once sat on its lower slopes.

His introduction to CrossFit is a familiar story. It was such a dramatic, world-changing discovery that Roza started to think about buying the company. Instead, in , Roza opened a CrossFit gym in Boulder with his now ex-wife. At the time, he was the C. Now, Glassman was open to selling. He said that he had a number and that, if Roza could meet it, he would consider selling. The founder sent his chief financial officer and his private plane to bring Roza and Woods to Santa Barbara, where, for nine hours, Glassman pontificated, describing the business environment and what he felt CrossFit should focus on.

That night, in his hotel room, Roza felt that he was letting the opportunity slip through his fingers. Roza followed up over text with an offer. What does he know? Zero-point-zero would be the right answer.

This was late June , and major sports were starting to come back in pandemic-altered ways. Holding the Games, Castro believed, would be a first step toward reuniting the fractured community.

The Games launched in late October at the ranch in a pandemic--conscious format. Army, Whoop, and Rogue. Roughly , people tuned into the CBS broadcast, part of the Bigger than the UFC. Roza has an objective of his own. The competitions, already global, with the top 30 men and 30 women representing 15 countries, serve as an annual, international reminder that the WODs really work.

Building the competitive side of CrossFit, the two think, can also serve as a launching pad for a longer-term goal: pulling more people from different backgrounds into the fold. For the first time, the Games will include adaptive categories for people with disabilities, like the Paralympics. But Roza will face a few business conundrums. The goal is million people in ten years. High-intensity, functional-training gym chains like OrangeTheory and F45, Royse says, are gaining ground on CrossFit by delivering customers a predictable experience in all of their locations.

But taken to the extreme, it ignored many opportunities. Affiliates will be networked so they can swap advice. When running CrossFit Sanitas, he found that mothers bring in the most new members, whereas most CrossFit coaches try to attract amazing athletes. Brazil, for example, saw its number of affiliates rocket by more than 50 percent in , to 1, But all these changes are happening in the context of a pandemic that created a massive ripple in the gym model.

More people are now doing CrossFit at home and will be in the future. And any paid apps would have to offer a better product than what can be found online for free. WODwell, a free searchable database of thousands of CrossFit workouts maintained by the community, for instance, has seen more than double the traffic to its website during the pandemic. But is a religion a religion without the church?

Soon after his trip to the ranch, Roza called on another person. I can hire and have access to a more diverse collection of coaches. But I need to see the systemic changes.