Dan Martell - September 12, 2016


Could CrossFit’s Training Methodology Be Applied To Business？

Topics
training modalities for business
Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Glassman Mike
How To Take Risk In Business Without Losing It All How To Scale Your Team In 5 Steps

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

182.97

Word count

1,536

Sentence count

87


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the podcast, I share a story from my experience with CrossFit and how it can be applied to business. I talk about how CrossFit has a lot in common with business, and how business can learn from CrossFit.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.080 Are you good?
00:00:01.800 Yeah, I'm born good.
00:00:11.800 CrossFit and business.
00:00:13.600 This is a call to arms, a feedback from the community video.
00:00:18.440 I'm going to share with you guys some, just a quick story and some lessons learned over
00:00:23.280 the last pretty much year, getting into CrossFit, understanding the philosophy behind it, and
00:00:28.760 and then trying to extract some of the elements
00:00:31.360 that make it so powerful that many of you guys
00:00:33.300 may not be aware of and how that might translate
00:00:35.400 to business and in the comments below,
00:00:37.340 I'm gonna ask you to share your thoughts
00:00:39.300 on where this could go but this, to me,
00:00:41.140 is the beginning of a thought experiment
00:00:42.780 that I've been running with in my mind
00:00:44.280 for the last four months.
00:00:46.080 Pretty much last September, I got into CrossFit
00:00:48.480 and what really got me hooked was studying the philosophy.
00:00:52.280 What is fitness?
00:00:53.920 What, and then there's Coach Glassman, the creator of it.
00:00:56.720 It was one of the fastest growing sports health fitness
00:01:01.220 franchises ever in the history of the world.
00:01:04.220 I mean, just the business approach to it,
00:01:06.760 pretty much run like a motorcycle gang.
00:01:09.500 The fees charge every year is minimal, essentially.
00:01:13.000 I think it's like a couple thousand bucks to own
00:01:15.240 a CrossFit box or to use a CrossFit box
00:01:17.580 that you pay to kind of HQ.
00:01:19.980 And the way they've used content and media
00:01:23.020 and documents and storytelling
00:01:25.820 and really the community to extract some of the beliefs
00:01:29.840 and strategies and best practices in the boxes
00:01:33.840 is really unique and that's what I wanna share
00:01:36.580 with you guys because to me there's a corollary
00:01:39.800 that could be extracted for business, right?
00:01:41.840 Where CrossFit is for fitness,
00:01:43.380 what's the equivalent for business?
00:01:45.200 So in CrossFit you have the definition of fitness
00:01:47.780 which I think is step one.
00:01:48.860 It's like how would you define business?
00:01:51.900 If fitness, from CrossFit's term,
00:01:53.780 is increase work capacity across broad time
00:01:57.180 and modal domain, which you'd need to understand
00:01:59.420 what CrossFit is to understand that,
00:02:01.680 what would be the definition of business?
00:02:04.260 Is it to create value for shareholders?
00:02:06.620 Is it to create profitable revenue?
00:02:08.860 Is it to empower the employees?
00:02:11.600 What are your thoughts on that?
00:02:12.860 I just wanted to kind of use this video
00:02:14.760 as an opportunity to talk about this thought experiment
00:02:17.180 because recently I was at an event talking to this guy,
00:02:20.240 Mike, who owns a CrossFit box and he was like,
00:02:21.940 yo, so how long have you been doing CrossFit?
00:02:23.380 and I shared with him my story,
00:02:24.780 and I just said, look, dude,
00:02:25.620 I've been getting nerdy on this stuff.
00:02:27.160 Like, just going, reading, watching every talk
00:02:29.820 that Coach Glassman's ever given,
00:02:31.620 reading all the business literature
00:02:33.600 around how to operate and manage a box,
00:02:35.420 looking at the philosophies.
00:02:36.500 I even got my CrossFit level one certificate.
00:02:39.560 Very important to use the word certificate.
00:02:42.300 Just not because I still have an immature squat.
00:02:44.700 I still can't do double-unders at scale.
00:02:48.100 I'm not, like, actually great at CrossFit.
00:02:50.700 That's not my goal.
00:02:51.600 My goal was really to obviously improve my fitness
00:02:54.840 in all areas of life, and that's what I love about it,
00:02:57.200 and really dive into the philosophies
00:02:59.780 because I think that there's a correlation to business.
00:03:03.520 So number one is how would you define business
00:03:05.720 like CrossFit's defined fitness?
00:03:06.980 Number two to me is what are the inspirations
00:03:11.620 that we could take from other industries
00:03:14.460 to create businesses?
00:03:16.000 So in CrossFit, they have kind of three,
00:03:18.500 what they call training modals
00:03:20.520 that they are inspired from.
00:03:21.820 Gymnastics, weightlifting, and metabolic conditioning.
00:03:26.260 So G, M, and W.
00:03:29.720 And pretty much every CrossFit workout
00:03:31.420 follows a pattern and kind of mixes and matches.
00:03:33.920 I mean the whole point is constantly varied.
00:03:38.160 I mean if you've never done CrossFit,
00:03:41.080 you gotta check it out just so you can understand
00:03:42.360 the context, but every workout is completely different.
00:03:44.680 But they're based on these three big buckets
00:03:46.880 of training modalities, and I really think
00:03:49.940 that there's probably an equivalent to business, right?
00:03:52.880 Because it's one part marketing,
00:03:54.860 it's another part operations, it's another part product.
00:03:58.320 So, you know, I've heard guys like Marcus Leonis
00:04:01.180 talk about product, process, and people.
00:04:03.620 Maybe that's it, I don't know.
00:04:05.100 And really that's, the video, again,
00:04:07.060 is for you guys to leave comments with your thoughts
00:04:09.060 on where do you think at a higher level,
00:04:11.480 at the 50,000 foot view,
00:04:13.120 people should start thinking about business.
00:04:15.000 Because to me, this is an opportunity for us
00:04:17.420 to get really clear on kind of scientific approaches
00:04:20.080 to understanding where as an entrepreneur
00:04:22.000 should I spend my time?
00:04:23.200 How should I think about building my business?
00:04:24.920 What are the skills I need to upgrade
00:04:26.800 to increase my throughput or output?
00:04:29.940 Or business acumen.
00:04:32.860 And a lot of people have different programs out there.
00:04:35.640 I'm really thinking about how would you create
00:04:37.480 an open source framework for entrepreneurs
00:04:40.780 to understand business that's not tied to a university,
00:04:43.420 is not tied to an individual,
00:04:45.140 is there for the world to use.
00:04:47.280 So the training modalities and the equivalent for business
00:04:49.940 is an interesting area that I think a lot about.
00:04:51.920 The third is, and there's many,
00:04:55.520 but is the 10 kind of components of fitness, right?
00:04:58.900 So CrossFit's got things like agility and speed
00:05:01.520 and strength and flexibility and balance.
00:05:05.020 And again, there's 10.
00:05:06.680 And that, I believe, was inspired by somebody else,
00:05:08.500 but Coach Glassman brought that into CrossFit
00:05:11.100 as a foundational element to CrossFit.
00:05:14.060 You know, they have a prescription for diets.
00:05:16.620 But when you think about those 10 skills,
00:05:18.620 what would be the equivalent for business?
00:05:20.460 Would it be financials, marketing, sales,
00:05:24.500 leadership, et cetera?
00:05:25.960 If you have any literature ideas on that,
00:05:28.140 again, leave a comment below, link it up.
00:05:29.860 If you have a book, I'd love to hear from you.
00:05:31.840 I'm really, you know, I've been studying business now
00:05:34.740 for, you know, 20 years.
00:05:36.640 I've read over a thousand business books
00:05:38.440 and personal development books and leadership books
00:05:40.380 and psychology and all these different areas.
00:05:43.120 And what I'm doing now is I'm re-reviewing
00:05:45.820 all the material to kind of pull out the things
00:05:49.000 that I believe are patterns, are patterns of principles,
00:05:51.820 are best practices when it comes to business.
00:05:54.260 And the inspiration, the reason for this video,
00:05:57.700 is CrossFit because if you look underneath the covers,
00:06:00.600 there's some really incredible thinking,
00:06:03.000 science-based, physics-based thinking that went into it.
00:06:06.640 And I think we need the same quality of thinking
00:06:09.140 and community around business.
00:06:10.980 So that is the motivation for this video.
00:06:13.320 So if you want to, you know, leave your thoughts
00:06:15.220 on the definition of business,
00:06:16.640 if you want to talk about what are the different areas
00:06:19.520 of a business at a high level that we can be inspired from
00:06:22.220 to kind of start looking at the different buckets,
00:06:23.960 or even what would be the top eight to 12 or 10 skills
00:06:28.620 or kind of departments within a business
00:06:31.920 that need to be understood.
00:06:33.300 And then the big question that I want to leave with you guys
00:06:35.980 is, and this is why I think that that training fitness
00:06:40.200 modality of CrossFit is so interesting,
00:06:41.960 is the compete every day.
00:06:43.500 It's every day you can run through a series of movements
00:06:47.840 to get a number to give you a quantifiable feedback
00:06:52.040 into how well you did compared to your peers in the group
00:06:55.400 and also how well you've done compared to previous
00:06:58.140 historical performance.
00:06:59.440 And I think that feedback loop is what's missing in business.
00:07:03.280 So if you had to measure and create a set of tests
00:07:07.660 for an entrepreneur, how would you define that?
00:07:10.620 It may never, it might not be something
00:07:12.780 that could be figured out,
00:07:13.780 but if it could, I think it's powerful.
00:07:17.180 And personally, I think it's worth exploring,
00:07:20.820 investigating, and trying to define
00:07:23.080 for the rest of my life.
00:07:24.560 As an entrepreneur, I think that this is probably
00:07:26.620 the most interesting area that I continue to study
00:07:30.700 as a lens, as a filter for all the content information
00:07:33.780 that comes into my world.
00:07:35.240 This is kind of where I'm like,
00:07:36.660 okay, what would be the equivalent?
00:07:38.020 How would you define this?
00:07:39.060 Can we get some consensus on these areas?
00:07:42.300 And I would love to get your feedback and thoughts on it.
00:07:45.160 And if you haven't done CrossFit, go do it.
00:07:46.740 I'm not one of those crazy dudes with tattoos
00:07:48.780 and cult following.
00:07:49.940 I just think that there's some really interesting
00:07:52.940 philosophies that you guys should be aware of
00:07:55.180 and how that translate into business and entrepreneurship
00:07:57.720 and creating value in the world.
00:07:59.280 As per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
00:08:02.680 and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
00:08:05.180 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel
00:08:07.380 to get other tips on how to start and grow your business.
00:08:10.100 I'd also suggest you join my newsletter
00:08:12.460 for exclusive invites to events,
00:08:14.600 community contests, and other free training.
00:08:16.920 And if you want more content,
00:08:18.820 be sure to check out these videos.
00:08:20.720 As per usual, I will see you next week.
00:08:23.080 Have a great day.