Backstage at the 2011 CrossFit Games, Coach Greg Glassman spoke with Fast Company about the origins of his approach to training and how it developed over time. As a teenage competitive gymnast, Greg discovered that incorporating barbells and dumbbells into his workouts made him stronger than other athletes in his sport. This experience shaped his belief in building broad, general physical capacity rather than specializing in a single discipline. Instead of striving to master just one activity, he embraced the idea of being “pretty damn good at everything,” arguing that well-rounded fitness prepares people better for the wide variety of physical challenges they might face.
Coach also described how his coaching practice evolved from one-on-one sessions into group training. While working as a trainer in Santa Cruz, he began pairing clients together to fit more people into his schedule while lowering the cost for participants. He soon found that small groups created better energy, interaction, and accountability, improving both motivation and performance. As the classes grew, the social atmosphere made workouts more engaging, and many of his most dedicated clients eventually became trainers themselves, helping expand the training community and the model he had developed.
This video, by BSI’s co-founder, was originally published in The CrossFit Journal. While Greg Glassman no longer owns CrossFit Inc., his writings and ideas revolutionized the world of fitness, and are reproduced here.
Coach Glassman named his training methodology ‘CrossFit,’ which became a trademarked term owned by CrossFit Inc. In order to preserve his writings in their original form, references to ‘CrossFit’ remain in this video.
Greg Glassman founded CrossFit, a fitness revolution. Under Glassman’s leadership there were around 4 million CrossFitters, 300,000 CrossFit coaches and 15,000 physical locations, known as affiliates, where his prescribed methodology: constantly varied functional movements executed at high intensity, were practiced daily. CrossFit became known as the solution to the world’s greatest problem, chronic illness.
In 2002, he became the first person in exercise physiology to apply a scientific definition to the word fitness. As the son of an aerospace engineer, Glassman learned the principles of science at a young age. Through observations, experimentation, testing, and retesting, Glassman created a program that brought unprecedented results to his clients. He shared his methodology with the world through The CrossFit Journal and in-person seminars. Harvard Business School proclaimed that CrossFit was the world’s fastest growing business.
The business, which challenged conventional business models and financially upset the health and wellness industry, brought plenty of negative attention to Glassman and CrossFit. The company’s low carbohydrate nutrition prescription threatened the sugar industry and led to a series of lawsuits after a peer-reviewed journal falsified data claiming Glassman’s methodology caused injuries. A federal judge called it the biggest case of scientific misconduct and fraud she’d seen in all her years on the bench. After this experience Glassman developed a deep interest in the corruption of modern science for private interests. He launched CrossFit Health which mobilized 20,000 doctors who knew from their experiences with CrossFit that Glassman’s methodology prevented and cured chronic diseases. Glassman networked the doctors, exposed them to researchers in a variety of fields and encouraged them to work together and further support efforts to expose the problems in medicine and work together on preventative measures.
In 2020, Greg sold CrossFit and focused his attention on the broader issues in modern science. He’d learned from his experience in fitness that areas of study without definitions, without ways of measuring and replicating results are ripe for corruption and manipulation.
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