CrossFit recently rolled out a new marketing push with the bold headline: “Fck the Quick Fix. CrossFit is the Cure.”* It’s splashy, it’s aggressive, and it’s… uh, complicated. Sure, I like some of what it’s trying to do. At the same time, I think it does little to re-center CrossFit from their decade plus of wandering in the wilderness.
What They Get Right
The campaign highlights one of the things boutique gyms like CrossFit affiliates genuinely excel at: building a supportive community that makes fitness central to people’s lives. When you show up consistently to a gym that cares about you, you don’t just get stronger—you get accountability, connection, and a framework for treating movement as medicine. That’s powerful.
There’s good research backing this up. Regular strength training reduces risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and depression (ACSM, 2009; WHO, 2020). And social connection itself is one of the biggest predictors of health outcomes—loneliness is literally as harmful as smoking a pack a day (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015). In that sense, gyms are preventative medicine, and affiliates deserve credit for creating spaces where people keep coming back.
Where It Misses the Mark
Here’s the problem: fitness coaches are not doctors. I’m a really good coach, but I’m not diagnosing you with hypertension, adjusting your medication, or running labs. The idea that the way to fix the U.S. healthcare system is to decentralize it to coaches is, frankly, absurd.
The issues with our healthcare system aren’t about doctors failing to tell people to work out more. They’re systemic: inequality, a profit-driven insurance model, and a pay-for-play structure that leaves millions without access. Blaming doctors—or positioning coaches as the frontline replacements—is missing the mark entirely.
You want real change in the medical system? Don’t set up a pseudo-scientific parallel “alternative.” Make the system better. Pass universal healthcare. Make sure people aren’t so crushed by medical debt they can’t afford to join an expensive gym like mine. Fix infrastructure that would allow them to travel to their gym and their doctor’s office. The myth of “personal responsibility” can only go so far in a deeply inequal system- it’s too easy for some to be “responsible” and too easy for them to dodge the consequences when they are not, and the converse is true- for too many being “responsible” is nearly impossible, and the punishment for falling behind can be deadly.
The Glassman Echo
The whole thing feels like déjà vu for those of us who’ve been around CrossFit for a while. The voice is very Glassman-ish: relentlessly critical of the “establishment,” casual and brand-focused when talking about itself, and dismissive of scientific evidence when it doesn’t fit the narrative.
The campaign demands hard data from the medical system, then turns around and offers only anecdotal success stories as proof of CrossFit’s efficacy. Don’t get me wrong—those stories are real and important. People do get off medication, lose weight, and rediscover their health in affiliates every day. But those aren’t data. They’re case studies. If you want to claim prevention, show prevention: long-term, peer-reviewed studies that track outcomes in people doing CrossFit versus other approaches.
The section called “Prevention That Actually Prevents” offers no such evidence. Just rah-rah language and more stories. It’s inspiring, sure, but it doesn’t pass the same standard of proof they’re demanding from everyone else.
Timing, or Coincidence?
The eerie part is the timing. This push is happening right as the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) crowd starts to circle—an echo of the paleo-libertarian CrossFit zeitgeist 10–15 years ago. Back then, I’ll admit I fell for a lot of it: the anti-establishment swagger, the “we’re the only ones telling the truth” vibe, the blending of politics and barbells. But I’d like to think that in the last decade, I’ve learned to separate fitness from ideology.
The Wellness Grift Problem
This is also where CrossFit risks straying into the territory Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker describe on their Conspirituality podcast: wellness grifting. That’s when health and fitness communities overpromise, underdeliver, and often slide into conspiratorial thinking to position themselves as the only “real” solution.
The playbook is familiar: paint “Big Pharma” and doctors as villains, claim your method is the hidden cure, and back it up with personal testimonies instead of evidence. Sound familiar? It’s the same strategy used by supplement hucksters, biohacking influencers, and “detox” gurus. It’s not the same as leading with real, measurable health outcomes. It’s marketing dressed up as medicine.
If we’re not careful, this rhetoric doesn’t just undermine trust in healthcare—it erodes trust in fitness itself. And the last thing our industry needs is to be lumped in with snake oil salesmen.
Inviting Your skeletons back from the closet
Oh, and apparently they’re bringing back Pukie the Clown as a mascot. Yes, the cartoon character vomiting from overexertion. Because nothing says “preventative medicine” like glorifying exercise-induced nausea. It’s a throwback to CrossFit’s early punk-rock days, but it feels out of step with what people actually need in 2025. Most people don’t need to be told to push until they puke. They need to be told: start, stick with it, and celebrate sustainable progress.
In fact, this whole rebrand feels like a step back toward Glassman-ism. For newer folks, Greg Glassman was CrossFit’s founder: a brilliant and brash figure who grew the company into a global phenomenon, but was also a pretty solid scumbag. He stepped down in 2020 after making shockingly racist remarks, which quickly ballooned into evidence of larger trends of sexism and other misconduct. For much of his reign, it felt like the company was run by a brilliant teenager- undeniably smart but juvenile, tone-deaf, and defensive to a fault.
Many affiliates—including mine—de-affiliated during that period, unwilling to be tied to that brand of personality and in hopes that it would spur the company to modernize its approach. So why now, years later, is CrossFit HQ digging up Pukie and the anti-establishment swagger that’s so clearly tied to Glassman? To me, it feels like self-pulling the skeletons out of the closet: taking the ugliest and most controversial elements of the brand’s past and trying to polish them as part of its future.
The Hard but Necessary Truth
If we believe the way to get people healthy is to get them into a gym consistently—and I do—then it is our job to make that on-ramp as easy as possible. By making fitness look exclusive, by shocking people with puking clowns and images of people writhing in agony, by framing it as “us versus them,” we are not doing that.
Yes, there’s some ego sacrifice involved here. We can’t be “hardcore” and hugely impactful at the same time. The evolution of CrossFit, the de-affiliation of gyms (like mine), the mainstreaming of functional fitness as a universal good—these things require trying to understand and engage, not to shame, lecture, or dismiss.
Don’t throw down the gauntlet. Open your hands in welcome.
References
- American College of Sports Medicine. (2009). Progression models in resistance training for healthy adults. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 41(3), 687–708.
- World Health Organization. (2020). Guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour. Geneva: WHO.
- Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: a meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237.
