Four-time CrossFit Games competitor Peter Egyed is also the owner of CrossFit Fury, whose affiliate team he will be coaching at the 2011 Reebok CrossFit Games. Egyed shares his perspective as an affiliate owner and what has worked for him to bring in new clients.
Egyed said he experimented with different methods to introduce new athletes to CrossFit. He first tried fundamentals classes but found they were still insufficient to prepare athletes for classes where new members would be expected to keep up with others.
“It wasn’t safe for them. It wasn’t efficient for our classes,” he says.
Upon the advice of one of his members, Egyed decided to make it easier for new athletes to begin CrossFit, and he started the Basics program. CrossFit Fury offers Basics classes three times a week, and the program focuses on body-weight movements, mobility and nutrition—not barbell training or advanced gymnastics.
“It’s proven very effective for their results. It’s proven very effective for us as a business model because people are just joining left and right, and it’s very easy for people to join—they just start paying a monthly membership,” Egyed says. The effectiveness is in the simplicity of the program. “There’s no real, you know, on-ramp procedure that they need to go through,” he says.
6min 52sec
Additional reading: Second Chances—CrossFit Works, Part 2 by Peter Egyed and Kevin O’Malley, published Feb. 6, 2010.