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CrossFit Built Something Nobody Had Built Before, Then It Fell Apart. Here's What Happened.

From 13 gyms in 2005 to 15,500 at its peak, CrossFit created an entirely new category of fitness and a culture so loyal it bordered on religious. The story of how it got there, and what unraveled it, is worth understanding.

Max Stephens

7/9/20267 min read

CrossFit didn't just create a new type of workout. It created a new type of gym, a new type of athlete, and a new type of fitness identity that spread to over 150 countries in less than two decades. At its peak in 2018, more than 15,500 CrossFit-affiliated gyms operated worldwide, making it the largest fitness chain in the world by location count, and none of those locations were owned by the company.

By early 2025, that number had fallen to around 10,000 paying affiliates. The CrossFit Open, the annual global competition that served as one of the clearest barometers of community health, registered 344,000 athletes in 2024 and 234,000 in 2025, a 32 percent drop in a single year, the steepest decline in the event's history outside of 2020.

Understanding how both things happened, the rise and the unraveling, requires going back to what CrossFit actually built and why it worked so well for so long.

What CrossFit actually created

Greg Glassman founded CrossFit in 2000 with a training philosophy that was different from anything mainstream fitness had offered. The methodology combined Olympic weightlifting, gymnastics, powerlifting, kettlebell work, and high-intensity cardio into constantly varied workouts performed at high intensity. The Workout of the Day, the WOD, became the organizing unit of the entire system, shared on the CrossFit website starting in 2001, when the internet was still an unusual place to find a workout.

The programming philosophy rejected the specialization that dominated fitness at the time. CrossFit's argument was that training for general physical preparedness, being competent across a broad range of physical demands rather than optimized for any single one, produced a more functional and durable human being. That argument resonated with a lot of people who had spent years doing isolation exercises on machines and still didn't feel capable or strong in a real-world sense.

The affiliate model was equally unconventional. Glassman essentially licensed the CrossFit name and methodology to gym owners for a flat annual fee, initially $500 and later set at $3,000 for over a decade, without taking any cut of their revenue. In exchange, affiliates got the brand, the community, the programming, and access to a growing certification ecosystem. There were no requirements on layout, equipment, or pricing beyond the basic coaching credential. The result was a decentralized network of individually owned gyms, each functioning as a self-funded marketing machine spreading the CrossFit brand through their own members and communities.

That decentralization was a feature, not a bug. Each affiliate attracted people who then moved to a new city and looked for another CrossFit gym. The brand traveled with its members in a way that a franchise model with location requirements couldn't replicate as easily.

The community as the product

The single most underrated thing CrossFit built was its community, and it was almost entirely accidental.

The format of a CrossFit class, a group of people doing the same workout together, suffering through the same movements, cheering each other through the last few reps, created a social bond that traditional gym environments almost never produced. People don't make friends on the treadmill, but they did make them in a CrossFit box, and those friendships became a primary reason people stayed.

The CrossFit Games, launched in 2007, added a competitive layer that transformed the community into something more like a sport with fans. Athletes competed to find the Fittest on Earth, and the spectacle of elite athletes doing extraordinary things with barbells and gymnastics rings gave recreational CrossFitters an aspirational ceiling and a shared cultural identity. You weren't just someone who worked out. You were a CrossFitter. That identity distinction mattered enormously for retention and for the kind of word-of-mouth growth that built the brand faster than any advertising campaign could have.

By 2013 there were 8,000 affiliated gyms. By 2016 there were 13,000. The growth curve was unlike anything the fitness industry had seen.

Where it started breaking down

The first cracks were structural, rooted in the same decentralization that had made CrossFit grow so fast.

Because affiliates operated independently, the quality of coaching and programming varied enormously across locations. A great CrossFit gym run by experienced coaches with solid programming was a legitimately excellent training environment. A poorly run affiliate with under-qualified coaches pushing intensity before athletes had developed competency was an injury waiting to happen. Both used the same name and existed under the same brand umbrella.

The injury perception problem grew steadily, fed partly by legitimate safety concerns and partly by competitors and critics with an interest in emphasizing them. The term Rhabdomyolysis, a rare but serious condition involving muscle breakdown that had been associated with extreme CrossFit workouts, entered the popular conversation in a way that damaged the brand's image with people who had never set foot in a gym. The safety concern wasn't entirely manufactured, but it was amplified well beyond the actual injury rate data, which peer-reviewed research consistently found to be comparable to other competitive sports when accounting for training volume.

Then came the pandemic. Roughly 20 percent of CrossFit affiliates worldwide closed during COVID-19, around 25 percent in the US. Some of those came back. Many didn't. The affiliate count that had reached 15,500 in 2018 fell to around 9,400 by early 2021.

The Glassman implosion

CrossFit was already navigating a post-pandemic recovery when Greg Glassman, the company's founder and chief voice, made a series of comments in June 2020 that accelerated a departure of affiliates, sponsors, and athletes in a matter of days.

In response to the death of George Floyd and the protests that followed, Glassman posted a dismissive comment on Twitter that was widely condemned as racist. Within days, Reebok ended its sponsorship of the CrossFit Games, numerous affiliate gym owners publicly announced they were deafiliating, and Glassman resigned. He had already sold a majority stake in the company to private equity firm Berkshire Partners in 2017. The transition of leadership that followed proved difficult to navigate.

The gym count fell further and the brand entered a period of unclear direction. New ownership struggled to articulate what CrossFit stood for beyond the existing methodology, which competitors were increasingly offering in alternative formats without the CrossFit name and the affiliated fee attached to it.

An athlete dies at the 2024 Games

The most damaging single event in CrossFit's recent history happened in August 2024 at the CrossFit Games in Fort Worth, Texas.

Serbian athlete Lazar Đukić drowned during an open-water swim event in the first day of competition. Criticisms immediately focused on the decision to hold an outdoor swim in Texas heat, the water temperature, and what athletes and coaches described as inadequate safety personnel. Athletes and coaches also said CrossFit had ignored safety concerns expressed over several years.

CrossFit's response compounded the damage. The company's sport director Dave Castro made a public claim, later disputed, that the Đukić family wanted the Games to continue as a tribute. Many athletes chose to withdraw. Both 2023 champions, Laura Horvath and Jeffrey Adler, did not compete. CrossFit declined to publish a third-party investigation into the death and established its own safety advisory board rather than working with the athlete-led organization that had been pushing for independent oversight.

In the 12 months that followed, more than 1,400 affiliates deaffiliated. CrossFit Open registrations fell 32 percent. The 2025 Games prize purse was cut by over 30 percent. Several prominent athletes including Patrick Vellner and Annie Thorisdottir announced they would not participate in the 2025 season.

What filled the space

The functional fitness category CrossFit created didn't shrink when CrossFit did. It grew, and other formats moved into the space.

Hyrox emerged as the most direct competitor. Combining eight 1km runs with eight functional workout stations in a standardized competition format, Hyrox offered the community and competitive angle that CrossFit had pioneered, with a race-day structure that attracted both existing CrossFitters and endurance athletes who had never touched a barbell. The event format scaled internationally faster than most fitness concepts had managed and drew a wave of gym owners and athletes looking for a brand without CrossFit's recent baggage.

Orange Theory, F45, and various functional fitness gym models continued absorbing the market of people who wanted group training intensity without the competitive culture. DEKA and Spartan's functional fitness events attracted the obstacle and endurance crowd. Running clubs absorbed the community-seeking athlete who didn't want to lift weights at all.

The broader fitness industry grew throughout this entire period. Global fitness revenue grew an average of 8 percent between 2023 and 2024. The demand CrossFit had tapped into didn't disappear. The people who wanted to move intensely with other people in a competitive community context were still out there. They were just spreading across more options than had existed before CrossFit showed the industry that kind of community was buildable.

Where CrossFit stands now

Around 10,000 paying affiliates remain as of 2025, down from a peak of over 15,000 but still a significant network. The CrossFit Games continue on ESPN and ESPN+. Women now make up 45 percent of Open competitors, the highest proportion in the event's history. The methodology still works. The research on functional fitness outcomes continues to accumulate.

The core problem CrossFit faces isn't the workout. It's the brand, and specifically what the brand currently stands for after several years of compounding controversies, a leadership transition that never fully resolved itself, a pricing decision that cost it 13 percent of affiliates in a single year, and the handling of an athlete's death that damaged trust with the competition community it depends on most.

CrossFit undoubtably built something that changed the fitness industry. It proved that a workout could be a community, that a gym could feel like a team, and that ordinary people would train harder and stay more consistent when they were doing it alongside people they knew and cared about. Every functional fitness format that exists today owes something to what CrossFit figured out in those early years.

Whether the company can find its footing again is a different question. The model still works. The culture it created still exists in the best affiliates around the world. The question is whether the organization at the center of it can earn back the trust of the athletes and gym owners who built it into what it was.

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