WHOOP Podcast - CrossFit owner Eric Roza details how he made his dream of owning CrossFit a reality.

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

WHOOP is the now official wearable of CrossFit, and we’re celebrating our new partnership by welcoming CrossFit owner and CEO Eric Roza to the WHOOP Podcast. Eric shares his story and why he believes owning CrossFit is his calling in life. He explains how he’s changing the culture at CrossFit, his vision for the brand and the sport moving forward, and why surrounding yourself with good people is one of the keys to success in business and in life. He discusses making his dream to own CrossFit a reality (2:34), taking over a brand in crisis (6:36), the CrossFit economy (10:36), the WHOOP-CrossFit partnership (12:56), his vision for the sport (15:10), CrossFit’s worldwide reach (19:29), what sets CrossFit apart (31:41), elite drive and determination (39:13), improving sleep (41:50), keys to succeeding in CrossFit (46:36), and cultivating good relationships (50:58).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. We've got a ton going on right now. We've been announcing a bunch of partnerships. And I'm going to get to a very, very exciting one and the CEO of CrossFit in just a second. But first, a reminder, you can get 15% off a WOOP membership if use the code will omit that's w i l l a h m e d whoop measures everything about your sleep and your recovery and your strain uh the hardware is included in a whoop membership so check that out at woup dot com okay we just announced a multi-year partnership that makes whoop the official wearable of crossfit this is going to include whoop data integration into crossfit competition so if you're

watching like the crossfit open or crossfit games you're actually going to to see real-time whoop data like strain or whoop live during the broadcast, leaderboard, and competitions. I'm super excited about that. You may have seen some of the work we're doing in golf regarding whoop live, but this is something that we're looking to pull across a lot of different sports. We're also going to be creating content and educational materials for the CrossFit community specifically. So this is going to include everything around sleep and recovery as it relates to CrossFit training. We're working very closely with all the CrossFit affiliates and boxes, really to empower them to become a point of sale for WOOP memberships.

And lastly, we have added CrossFit as an activity in the WOOP app. So I know that's going to make many of you really happy. All right. And to talk more about this partnership, we are bringing on Eric Rosa. Eric is the CEO. of CrossFit, and we get into his journey to becoming the owner of CrossFit and why he believes it's his calling in life. What it was like taking over the brand this summer at a point of crisis, his vision for the future of CrossFit and why he believes 100 million people will one day be doing CrossFit. What sets CrossFit apart from other workouts and other sports, how Whoop and CrossFit will be working together, and why surrounding yourself with good people

is one of the keys to success in business and in life. Without further ado, here is Eric. Eric, welcome to the Woof podcast. Thanks for having me, Will. It's great to be here. So why CrossFit? How did you become the owner and CEO of CrossFit? Well, depending on the way you look at it, it was either the quickest thing you've ever seen in the most impulsive or a very deliberate lifelong strategy. So on the lifelong front, I think, I've been a kind of a fitness, health, nutrition, kind of nut my whole life, kind of obsessive about it since I was a little kid, really. And when I discovered CrossFit about 12 years ago, I had a running injury, I just immediately

kind of saw some magic there that I had never seen before. And I was, you know, I was already 40. And I'm like, wow, where's this been my whole life? I had a, it was a kind of an awakening moment. And so I immediately brought it to my company. And then within within a couple years, so about 10 years. years ago, I decided that after my chapter running the tech company, I was leading data logics, if I could do anything with my life, it would be to lead CrossFit into the future.

And I told a bunch of friends about that. So I kind of put it out there. And then the opportunity presented itself last June. So that's the long version. The short version is CrossFit got itself into a bit of a crisis last June. And I was at a point in my life where I was kind of looking for the, next chapter and to find some deep meaning that was more aligned with what was most important to me from a values perspective.

And with help from some friends and a little bit of magic along the way, we were able to meet with the founder and get him comfortable with the idea that I was the right guy to bring CrossFit into the future. And so in that version of it, from kind of the impulse to do it to meeting the founder who I didn't know took about four days. and then a few more days to a handshake and then a couple weeks to an announcement to the world. So it was kind of an insanely rapid, kind of impulsive thing if you look at it from that vantage point. This was Greg Glassman you're talking about who really found himself in hot water during the whole Black Lives Matter movement.

Is that correct? Correct. Yeah. Yeah, there was a compounding thing because the business obviously like so many businesses were struggling with COVID challenge. And then Greg, Greg put this tweet out that was very offensive to a lot of people. And then some articles came out about kind of longstanding, maybe toxic cultural issues within CrossFit. And the compounding nature of that was such that a lot of people felt like a change was needed. It's so amazing because like from the outside in, CrossFit really seemed like it was

up into the right and this rapidly growing business. And then you see all this information come out about the leadership. and the culture. And when I was reading that, not knowing you yet and not knowing where we would go, we had obviously done a fair amount of work with CrossFit. And I'm thinking myself, wow, like, this is a big opportunity. Like, this is such an important organization in CrossFit. So many people use it every day and love it. And wow, like someone's going to be able to really do a lot with this when they write the ship and make it a positive culture. And I imagine that's how you felt about the opportunity. I did. Yeah. It's interesting, right? What does a, I'm sure you think,

about this a lot with whoop well, but what does a brand mean? And notion of CrossFit, not just as a workout, but as this, you know, whatever you want to call it, a movement, some kind of a tribal membership that you're part of, so meaningful to so many people, including me, that, you know, we all just wanted CrossFit to be in a good place, like he said, and, you know, you could use the up and to the right term, but I don't even know people think about it in business terms. It's kind of this visceral. Like, I just love CrossFit. It's changed my life. It's, you know, where I met my friends, all this kind of stuff. It's what I believe in. And how can, how do I reconcile what I'm reading with what it is to me in my gym every day? I think there was a lot of that where you get

this cognitive dissonance kind of. And to me, yeah, it was absolutely, not that I didn't have doubts and self-doubt along the way, because, you know, I'm human and, you know, things. But it was as close as I've ever felt to a calling, like, this is what I need to do now. you know and and we'll come back to crosswood and half a second but your career i mean you've you've started and run businesses most of your life right you're you're really an entrepreneur at heart yeah yeah i've i've spent my career um predominantly in the tech space and i had moved to a new chapter um due to some some pretty big changes in my personal life um i kind of i in this in a very short time span. I lost both my parents and in my 20-year relationship with my wife ended. And so I

and then I decided to leave Oracle who had bought my company Data Logic. So it was just like a tremendous amount of. It's a lot. Yeah. A lot to process. And I had also turned 50, which obviously is some kind of a, you know, trigger. Like, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? And I felt like I still had, you know, had something to give and had an impulse to create. You know, I guess is a good way to put it. And so I was doing, I was investing and doing boards and I was an exec in residence with the big venture capital firm, General Catalyst, but I definitely had an impulse to be an operator again.

I mean, I'm wired for that. And so I think this hit me at the right time when I was thinking, you know, what's my next chapter? I need to be back on the field again. And my sense is you did a fair amount of diligence in the process of diving in. like you started to talk to a number of the top crossfitters in the sport, Katrin and others. I know we did calls together. Like what was that process for you kind of leading up to making an offer where you're really assessing this thing from a business standpoint, from your

background? Hey, is this the right fit? Well, it's interesting. The order of operations was I kind of wish it was the way you said. It was a little bit the other way around. So I basically I signed a term sheet with Greg that was just me without actually pulling investors in yet, saying that I was going to buy the company and that we were going to go through due diligence. And that's really when I started to reach out and meet athletes and affiliate owners and other community members as well as the team that worked for CrossFit itself. And I would say there were kind of two things going on there. Well, one was I was trying to learn as much as possible about,

what was going on and make sure this was something that we felt the ship could be righted and that people would come back in because, as you probably know, things were really splintering. There were a number of, kind of, I don't know if you want to call them factions, but a number of groups of people who were saying, hey, we're going to come up with an alternative to CrossFit. No one, I thought that nobody really wanted to do that. I thought that was out of necessity, but I didn't know for sure. And so I had to make sure of that. And then the other one is I wanted to start to establish rapport.

and, you know, you have this term you use in business when you come in as the new guy, which is called like organ rejection, right? And so I wanted to make sure that there would not be organ rejection. It's hard when you have a strong, you know, a very strong founder-led culture, kind of, regardless of the issues the culture has, when the new guy comes in, are they going to be accepted, right? And so I had to kind of see, are people going to accept me as the person who could come in, and write the ship here, or is there going to be some cultural issue

where people aren't open to that? And so what I realized was that people were very, in the first bucket, very much craving CrossFit to continue. So these weren't, I didn't feel they were opportunists who were looking CrossFit's weak,

so we're going to exploit the situation. It was kind of the opposite. It was like out of necessity. This is an amazing stat. So there were a hundred some people who were employees of, CrossFit itself, but I estimate 100,000 people who make their living in the CrossFit ecosystem. Amazing.

And only about half of those work at gyms, I mean, that's the amazing thing. You know, all kinds of companies, whether it be software, events, T-shirts, equipment, you name it, all publishers all over the world, and doctors, et cetera. And so they needed CrossFit to exist. It was part of their livelihood as well as their meaning. And so two things. one is they were fully supportive of CrossFit being redeemed, and secondly, it felt like I was going to get a chance to be the guy to do this. And so once I kind of got my head around

that and had those relationships and was in touch with a lot of the key influences, I mean, I talked to hundreds of people one-on-one. I really didn't sleep for about a month. I just said, you know, this is, I don't want to say this is going to work because I don't even know what that means, but like, this is something I'm going to go for, you know, unquestionably, this is something I got to do. the question was, was it saleable to investors? And I was pretty confident it would be. I thought that kind of the combination of the opportunity to take the, you know, the biggest fitness brand in the world, a bit imperiled, and then just, you know, some credibility I had with, with investors I knew,

some of them who I had known for a long time, some of whom I had partnered with in the past. I was feeling pretty good that people would back this, but I didn't know. And so, Once I got comfortable with that, I said, okay, let's go for it. And then we closed the deal in August. And it's been fast-paced since. You know, the thing that's amazed to me about CrossFit, I haven't been a Cross-Fitter personally, but I've just seen this- Yeah, well, I'm going to get there. But I've just seen the amazing pull that Woop has had in the space and just realizing that CrossFit is not a workout program as much as a way of life.

You described 100,000 people make their living off of CrossFit the brand. It just shows you how many different facets of life it touches for people. And that's why I'm so excited to be your partner on this journey too. Yeah, we're excited to partner as well. And I think where where whoop focuses around sleep and recovery and things like that are just so core to what we think about. As you said, it does become very much a way of life for people. And for me, there is so much personal alignment and authenticity.

As I said, I just came out of the womb obsessed with all this stuff. And so how, like, I just feel so fortunate that I get to make my living now kind of in this area. I loved what I was doing prior to this, but it wasn't, I didn't have the same passion for me. I worked in data and analytics for digital advertising, and I just didn't have the same passion around this. Here, every day, I just know what we're doing is making people. We talk about being the world's leading platform for health, happiness, and performance as our mission.

And so just knowing and keeping that in mind, are we doing something that's helping people to be healthier, happier, and higher performing feels really good, because I think those are the things that really matter in life. Absolutely. Now, you've come in and you've recognized, obviously, some blind spots potentially for the organization. What is your vision for where CrossFit's going in the next two years? I, you know, we've thought a lot about how to denominate kind of success. What does it look like? What's the, you know, what's kind of the atomic unit that we're looking for? And I think of it more in terms of mission than in kind of financial metrics. We obviously look at financial metrics. But I could tell you when I brought in investors, we used the same, I wrote kind of this two-page manifesto about what I saw as the future of CrossFit and how important it was to me personally.

And one of the things I said was I'm not, I will answer your question in two-year terms, but I kind of said in my manifesto, we're not talking in a couple-year terms here. I said, you know, if I have my druthers, you know, I'll be doing this for another 50 years. and we will find, you know, this was for investors, and we'll find a way to get you liquidity and financial returns along the way. But I think of this on a long-term time horizon, and my goal, and whether, I don't know whether this takes 20 years, 30 years, I don't know how long it takes, is that we end up with 100 million crossfitters around the world. That's really what we're shooting for.

And so I think of it in terms of, by the time there are about 10 billion people in the world, there's seven and a half now, I want 1% of them to self-identify as part of this group, this movement who prioritizes this lifestyle of health, happiness, and performance. And so that's the way that I would kind of define success for us. Now, in two years, I think the way that I think about it in that time frame is, well, you know, you almost want to knock on what even saying this, but that the pandemic will be in our rearview mirror two years from now. If you said a year from now, we'd be a little superstitious or something about saying that,

right? completely. But, and that we're seeing very significant growth in the number of gyms around the world. It's really important that right now, you know, the, if you look at the interactions that people have, if you look at the millions of people who would, who have had interactions with CrossFit or identify as being a crossfitter, it's happening predominantly in a gym. And so we, we think there's a tremendous amount of growth remaining in the gym ecosystem. And I know that's contrarian in a view when you have, you know, companies like Peloton and tonal and tempo and so on, mirror taking off. But I actually believe that a lot of people will train at home and will

continue to. And in fact, a lot of people who do CrossFit train at home. But there's something magic that happens when you get this incredible face-to-face hands-on coaching, a really warm, supportive community, meaning an in-person community, not just a, you know, a digital fist-bump kind the community. And then the hard work and the intensity that we put in and the complexity of the movements and the variety and all that. So we will see in a two-year time horizon, thousands more gyms than we have now, CrossFit gyms. And that might sound aggressive or optimistic, but let me give you an incredible anecdote. So last week, 18 new CrossFit gyms opened. And if you play that out, that may not sound like a lot, but we're in the middle of COVID. And if I look at,

January, and I kind of say that monthly run rate, how many new gyms opened up around the world, it was 750. And that's in the middle of COVID with Europe shut down, literally shut down. Yeah. And Europe's been our biggest growth market for the last four years. We have about 4,000 gyms there. So I think we will come out of COVID opening. You know, I think in 2022, there's a chance we could have 2,000 new CrossFit gyms opening up. So I think that's probably the most important metric to me is helping new gyms open up and helping them be as healthy and successful as possible. And that's a big, one thing I just said there is a big departure, I think, from the prior operating model, which is we're spending a lot of time thinking about tools that we can

provide to new gyms and to some existing gyms to help them run even better to have more impact, higher impact and be more profitable and create more jobs and all that. And, you know, it was a very less a fair situation across it previously. It was you can license the name and then, you know, good luck, you know, you're on your own. And there was a lot of, I don't mean that to be snarky. There was a lot of good that came from that and very rapid growth. But there was a, you know, there was kind of not the support and best practices sharing facilitated that I like to and that, you know, I recognize from my life in leading companies. And just to describe for people who are maybe less familiar with the business entity of

CrossFit, what the relationship is between CrossFit headquarters, what you're overseeing directly, and then all of these different gyms across the world. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a, it's kind of a licensing or affiliate relationship. And the way it works is you basically, you can, you, when you affiliate, you have the rights to use the name CrossFit for your gym and to describe your gym and Google search and all that as well as your name itself. And then you agree to have your coaches and yourself trained by us. We're the biggest certifier of personal trainers in the world. We have about 150,000 credentialed CrossFit trainers around the world. And so those have been the two main data points. All the other things that those

who are familiar with CrossFit know about going to the whiteboard and you talk about the wad and you do this workout and you've got the rings and the bars and all this kind of stuff, all that stuff is really at the gym's discretion. So we don't prescribe exactly what the workout is on a given day. We don't prescribe how the gym set up, what equipment you should buy, how you should market yourself. And when I say we don't prescribe it, we don't even, as of right now, even provide best practices for a lot of these things, other than what you can find kind of on our website. So it's really these two things of using the name and then taking our trainer credentialing course. Well, I know when we were working on our deal together between Woop and CrossFit,

something that you said that was incredibly important to you was finding ways for the affiliates, for all the CrossFit boxes to also benefit from the partnership. So do you want to speak a little bit to how our partnership with WOOP is going to facilitate that? Yeah, yeah. And we haven't, you know, we haven't talked about this yet with our, with our community. But the way it's going to work is we're going to be, one thing that's really important with us with all the cross-it boxes is we don't, we, we, as much as possible, we don't tell them what to do, right?

So we always say like tools over rules. So we will be basically working with working with, the affiliates who are interested in doing so, and I think it will be a tremendous amount of them to give their members access to whoops at preferential pricing and so on, to help them with their sleep and recovery. And I think not to make them perform better in the gym, but also frankly to make them perform better in life as well and learn more about their own health and sleep habits and so on. And, you know, and I thought that was a terrific piece of the deal was this idea that we could incentivize CrossFit boxes to get their members on Whoop and actually have the CrossFit

boxes generate revenue themselves for getting other people on Whoop. And the benefit for us is that it also has the grassroots element of it too, where it's your local CrossFit trainer who hopefully is understanding the Whoop technology using it and can help educate a member who walks in the door on why they might want to invest more in sleep and recover. analysis to go with what is a pretty badass workout. I think you're exactly right. And whoops kind of on the cutting edge for this, right? We're going to have partnerships in other areas as well where we start to bring in the boxes

in these ways where there can be a financial incentive for the box owner and for the members to participate. And we're only going to do this with companies and products and services where we have a really strong values alignment. as well. And, you know, the CrossFit community, as you know, is rabid about looking for, you know, kind of both the self-hacking, if you want to use, you know, kind of that kind of term, but also just any angle they can get on learning more about themselves and finding ways to perform better and be healthier and happier. It's really, the community really, I'd say,

is very, very active in kind of areas around self-improvement and how can I learn from others. and leverage technology and best practices to be a better person. Yeah, I think there's two categories of Crossfitter that I hope WOOP will be able to benefit. The first category are your diehard crossfitters, who, to your point, have been doing it for a long time, and they're kind of testing all these other things in their lives, new diets, new supplements, their routine, right? And I think Woop can help them figure out what are certain aspects of their life that

they can dial up or dial down to be a more effective crossfitter, but also just a more effective human. And then I think the second group, which to your point may even be the faster growing group, is the is the CrossFit newbie, the CrossFit beginner, right? And I think if there's there's one thing that that person needs to make sure, it's that they can do CrossFit for the next 10 years, right, and not have it be something where they burn out in the first 10 days. And that's where, you know, measuring your recovery, getting a little extra sleep when you're putting that kind of strain on your muscles if you haven't in the past, I think WOOP can be helpful. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And there are, you know, in a typical year, I mean,

I have to estimate these things because we haven't, we don't have reporting systems yet in place with all the gyms to get the data. But I estimate that about a million new people seriously try a CrossFit every year around the world. Now, there are, I think, way more than that that try it, but that actually try it with an intent towards, hey, maybe I want to see if this is for me, not just a one-off with a friend. And so it's certainly in that order of me. I think it's way lower right now, given COVID, because it's been hard to, you know, going to gyms and try it as a new member. But so you've got a big cohort coming in. And to your point, I think that a lot of them will be innately curious about how, you know, what they can

learn about their sleep and recovery, how it relates to this crazy new workout they're doing. And those who are kind of thoughtful about it, I think a lot of them will see better results and more longevity and less fewer injuries and so on now there's a couple other benefits for who members listening to this who are into crossfit uh one we will now have crossfit as an activity in the woop app it's been a sacred word for some time so all of you who have been putting in functional fitness can now finally put in crossfit we're excited to have uh hit that milestone and then also we're going to be creating uh subgroup sub teams for lots of different competitions for different people at different CrossFit stages. So you'll be able to identify

with other Crossfitters who are just like you. I think it's, anyway, I'm overly excited about becoming the official wearable of CrossFit. Let's talk a little bit about the events space. Obviously, there's the world of CrossFit for the individual, for maybe the amateur, but it's also become really a competitive sport. What's your vision there? Yeah, well, I think you hit the two parts of it, and I think the fact that they're combined or that they're part of a continuous season is really exciting.

So you start with the CrossFit Open, which kicks off 2021, and that's the biggest participatory sport in the world now, hundreds of thousands of people around the world, competing in this virtual competition right at their home gym or even at home, this year where we have an equipment-free version of the CrossFit Open, so you can kind of do it at home, even if you've never done CrossFit before. And then you can kind of stack rank yourself against people all over the world who are doing these workouts, which is good.

And Eric, I think that's a great point. Where can people find that, what you just mentioned? Yeah, so if they go, if they just type CrossFit Open or CrossFit games into Google, it'll take you there. If you go to, you can also go to CrossFit.com, and it'll take you through. And you'll be able to kind of learn more about the competition. But in essence, over the last 10 years, it's become the biggest athletic competition in the world. And what's really neat is there are people from over 150 countries doing it.

There are people in their 90s doing it. There are people in their teens and maybe even younger doing it. For the first time this year, we have a separate master's category for 65 plus. We had a 60 plus master's category. But what happened was there's some incredible. athletes now, CrossFit athletes who are in their 70s, believe it or not, and they were upset because they were okay competing with a 67-year-old, say, but competing with a 60-year-old who does Cross-Fit is not really fair because if you're a 60-year- and you're doing Cross-Fit,

you're probably, you know, you're probably like a typical 35-year-old. And so, but by the time you're in your 70s, it's a little hard to compete with that. So we now have the 65-plus group, too. Well, I'm glad you appease that group, pissing off about your angry 70-year-old crossfitter, It seems a little dangerous. You don't have them coming after you. The other cool thing, or one of the other cool things this year is for the first time, we have adaptive divisions, and I think we have 10 different divisions for adaptive athletes. And so that's really interesting.

People who have loss of limb and other things are now able to also compete. And there was a, believe it or not, there's a very significant community within the cross-foot world of adaptive athletes. And so they're very excited as well to be part of this and be able to kind of have their own competition. It, on the programming side, when we talk about programming and crossfit, right, we're talking about what is the workout, it's, it's become incredibly complex this year because we have, we have kind of the standard workout if you have access to a gym. And then we have what we call the scaled workout, which is if you're not as expert, that is, I'd say if you've been doing CrossFit for, you know, six months or more, most people who are in the, you know, kind of prime of their ages will be able to do the scaled version. But that's, that's, you know, you know, still inaccessible to some of our athletes. And so there's now a level below that called the foundations level that really anyone can do. But you still need some equipment for that. So then we have the equipment free version. And then you have the, as you get into the master's athletes 55 plus, they have different versions of the workouts and they're male, female differences.

And then you have the 10 adaptive divisions as well. I don't even know if I've got them all. But just the programming, the different forks in the road for the programming are overwhelming, you know, hundreds of different permutations and combinations behind the scenes. And then the question is, how do you score them all and bring them together in a leaderboard and so on? So it's been a, there's some fun challenges there are behind the scenes, but it's really cool. And you said that essentially I could go do this online. Yeah.

And I'll be able to see how I stack up against all these different groups. And, Will, my only problem with what you said is you said, that hypothetically. You are able to do that. All right. Now that I'm in the fold, I feel like... I think you've got to do the equipment-free version. You can do it home.

And so what does that look like? Is that push-ups, pull-ups, bodyweight stuff? Yeah, I mean, one of the cool things about CrossFit is, which you probably know, but we don't tell you in advance what the workouts are. It's like a little Christmas present, right? Or a little turd wrapped in a present, you know, depending on you find it. But you will... The way it'll work is two of the best athletes in the world each week, starting in mid-March.

It's really fun, and it's fun to watch this, even for people who are not ready to do it yet. We'll compete. You'll be able to watch them live online. We'll announce the workout. Dave Castro will announce the workout. Then the athletes will compete. And these are some of the best athletes in the world, but we'll have some surprises in there as well. And then everyone at home and at gyms around the world over the next four days will get to.

we'll get to do the workout as well. And they'll find out. But to your point, the equipment-free version will have, you know, probably some, yeah, body weight calisthenic type stuff that are, a lot of the movements will be very familiar to people, but they'll be maybe in different combinations and they've seen. And then there'll be a few movements that are probably not familiar to people that they haven't seen before.

We have a good way to come up with new stuff. It's so interesting because you guys really, a good job, inventing exercise, but also managing it to keep it in a bit of a black box. I mean, one of the more fascinating things is your actual, you know, CrossFit games. The competitors don't actually know what workout they're going to do, right, until they show up. Yeah. And I think the things around, I've thought a lot about what makes CrossFit CrossFit, because to your point, people were doing push-ups and pull-ups, obviously, well before CrossFit,

and almost all of our movements, not all of them, but almost all of them had origins in gymnastics or Olympic weightlifting or calisthenics or, you know, other things. But there are twists on them and the way that they get combined in the time domains. And some of them are, you won't see this in the CrossFit Open, but certainly in the games where the competitive athletes are. Some of them are very, very technical movements as well, very complex movement patterns. And that's one of the magic things about CrossFit is some of these movements are just very neurologically taxing.

They're very complicated. And I realized as an adult, you know, unless I were going to go learn kite surfing or something, which I want to learn at some point, but you're doing things, if you're running, if you're, you know, doing your peloton, whatever, you're doing the same movement pattern every day. And so the notion that you're kind of being introduced to new and very complicated movements is really good for your brain, too, in ways that I think it's hard for people to appreciate when you're kind of exhausted after a CrossFit workout. Some of it is just the physical intensity, but some of it is the complexity of the movements you're doing. And that's why the coaching is so key, but it's really fun and rewarding to master, say, a full squat snatch, which is an Olympic weightlifting movement, which I had never heard of until I started doing. CrossFit, right? I think I'd seen it in the Olympics, but I had never heard of it. And so that's

part of it, right, the surprise and the differences. And sometimes the workouts will last a few minutes and sometimes they might last 40 minutes. And that changes the way you, the way you work, too. And for the main event, right, where folks are competing to be the fittest man or fittest woman on earth. How do you envision that as a viewing experience changing? Well, it changed a bit in 2020 because of COVID. So, you know, I think two big changes we had. When we, when we acquired CrossFit, there wasn't actually a plan to do the CrossFit games yet. The date had been moved a few times. The world is, you know, freaking out about what can you even do, right? We're back in June. And the founder, I think, was open about this Greg Glassman, that he really had

become less and less interested in kind of a non-fan of the CrossFit games and the pro-athlete part of CrossFit. And I saw that as super important and intimately linked to what was going on in the gyms every day. I found it very aspirational and inspirational to see these incredible athletes. And so we were hell-bent on putting on the games no matter what. So the two big changes that we made last year from viewing experience and participation experiences. One is we had these 60 athletes, 30 women, 30 men. We said, you all do your workouts at your home gym. We can't make you travel right now.

Like, we just can't do it. And so we pushed it back as far as we could from a calendar standpoint and then sent judges and drug testing and all that and camera crews and all that out to the athletes and we're able to have them do stage one of the games in their local. gym and still have it be a really, you know, challenging and interesting and fun competition to watch. And then a smaller group, five women, five men, we then invited, who did the best there, invited them to come to California and do, we have a place called The Ranch that has kind of been legendary in the annals of CrossFit. And we had them come to the ranch in another location

and do a much wider array of things, you know, swimming and all kinds of biking and all kinds of other things to give them the full experience. And that was televised and, you know, was streamed on YouTube and Facebook and had about 11 million unique viewers, a little bit more than that. And so, but we didn't have an audience there. Usually we'll have a big audience and we tended the last few years that the games have been held in mass in Wisconsin and with a, you know, large live audience. We had to forego that.

So the goal, the goal with the games is to get that, both the games, and the semifinals in front of as many people as possible. You know, and we think the audience is going to be very large for these, including in 2021. So, you know, the goals are, yeah, you know, over 10 million people watching this. We think it'll be tens of millions in the future. And these semifinal events are really cool, too, Will. So we've got, we have 10 locations around the world.

I think four of them are in the U.S., and one in Canada, and then five in other locations around the world. and knock on wood, we'll be able to hold a number of them in person with audiences, but we'll see kind of how this goes as we get into the late spring and early summer, and the rest will be online. And those will be actually held by partners of ours, so we won't actually be running the event, but we're providing some common threads,

and they're all allowed to use the CrossFit name and so on, and those will qualify people for the finals for the games themselves. And so we look at it as kind of an event season. And you do the open, and then that's hundreds of thousands of people. And then for the first time this year, we have the quarterfinals. So 10% of the people doing the open will qualify for the quarter finals, which will be online again. Then a smaller group will go to the semifinals, which in an ideal world will be mostly in person. But again, that'll be pandemic permitting.

And then we'll do the games. And the games, I'm highly confident we will be doing in person. It'll just be a question of whether we can have an audience and how that will work. But there are, like everyone doing, you know, live sporting events right now, there are a lot of unknowns. So we've got to be, we've got to kind of be nimble and creative and also recognize that this is an investment year for us, right? It's going to be costly to put these events on. We will not get a return this year on that financially for sure. It'll be a loss. But it's really important to us to have to start from, you know, anyone in the world doing

CrossFit, even if the, even if the CrossFit Open is your first exposure to it, leading, to the fittest woman and fittest man on earth. And the thing to keep remembering here, it's so easy for us to forget this stuff as we're in the U.S. is this is a global thing. This is happening in Africa, in the Middle East, and, you know, in the Amazon, like everywhere, people are doing this.

And it's really fun to be part of it. It's so cool. And I think to your point, like, it is amazing that you can watch this event on television. And the stuff that you're seeing on TV, you could go try to duplicate in your cross-examination. CrossFit gym, or in some cases even at home. I mean, there's a level of accessibility to CrossFit that I think is really exciting

for you and makes it such a growth opportunity. It's really fun, yeah. You know, I'm at the Super Bowl a couple weeks ago. I'm inspired watching whatever, Tom Brady, H-43. I'm not going to go, like, you know, put on pads and throw a football around. It's not, that's not in the cards for me. But, you know, the Super Bowl of CrossFit, I think, is a very. accessible point of view and it's why I agree with you that connecting those dots from the very

best crossfitter in the world to the beginner is a it's a great aspirational story it's really cool and you know the the best athletes not only have you know some incredible genetics and drive and all that but they're you know their their life is built around training now right they would all tell you that you know Matt Fraser used to say to me you know I'm like what he's been up to he'd say what's going on in the early days across it are you doing okay i'm like yeah that's great what are you up to he said train sleep eat you know that's it right i mean these guys are four five six hours a day of super intense training that's not what most of us are up to but what's really cool like for me i'm going to do it an average week um you know probably three to four times i'm

going to do a crossfit workout um and i'm doing that because i enjoy it inherently um but also because I want to, you know, keep skiing bumps my whole life and keep seeing X, Y, Z my whole life. But I do get inspired by, you know, what the crazy, you know, the crazy high-end athletes are doing. And I'm, and I also try to have my ego in check and go, you know what, I don't have to do that. Because for most people, you know, three to four times a week is a really good sustainable level of CrossFit to be doing. Because what's really cool is for people, Within a few weeks, you start to see and see and feel, see your body and feel yourself differently. It's not a delayed gratification thing like a lot of other things.

Like it's happening within a week or two. People are like, wow, this is so weird. I didn't know I had this muscle or I didn't know I could, you know, jump to a box this high or whatever. And if you, you know, you find a great coach who really fits for you, kind of some magic stuff happens incredibly quickly. it's still a lifelong pursuit but you don't have i'm not i'm not good at delaying gratification so like for me it's like no no i want to see results now you know well i'm glad you called

out matt fraser's point of view which is like train sleep eat the sleeping and the eating are probably just as important as the hardcore training and so that's where again this sort of 24-7 way of life mindset comes in and i and i think it's it's why wupa is excited to be partners with you yeah and i was you know this is one thing i was really excited about um when we when we first got connected to will was i think everybody would tell you that right trained sleep eat stress management you know there are a few key things you know you're getting you know you want community in your life and crossfit provides it but you need it elsewhere as well but i don't think on on sleep we haven't been very um as a as a overall i think as an overall crossfit um movement

and philosophy, we haven't been very vocal around specifics on sleep. And so for me, that was like a nice gap to fill out, you know, with more, and you and I have talked about, you know, whoop helping us with more education and people understanding the differences between, you know, REM and deep sleep and other kinds of sleep that, you know, have some benefit but don't have the same benefit. And what are the differences and what hygiene do you need and so on? So I'm eager to be more helpful in that area to members and affiliates. And I'm actually eager to, you know, frankly, whether or not, you know, there's, you know, everyone involved is, is throwing on a whoop or not.

I think we have a lot to teach them and help them on their path, right, which is very exciting to me. I think even in nutrition, we have a lot more we can do. You know, CrossFit has spawned and been, you know, I think integral to the growth of, almost every kind of new nutrition philosophy that's come out in the last 15 years, right, whether it be paleo or keto or, you know, there are now a lot of vegan crossfitters and so on. The zone, you know, counting macros, all these things have been really voraciously adopted in the CrossFit community. But we have, as CrossFit, haven't provided probably as much education and resources and tools there as we can in the future. So,

I'm excited, you know, about all those aspects kind of to get, you know, do more for people. Well, that's an exciting piece of our partnership together, too, is to help create content together around sleep and recovery. Yeah. Really, I think the main goal of it is around education. Yeah. You know, help people just better understand information on their sleeve, some general practices that can help improve their sleeve, general practices that can improve their recovery.

So that's another nice piece of the partnership for those of, you listening who are kind of thinking about ways that you're going to be able to engage with CrossFit and Woop together. What's next? You're building out your team. You're racing through COVID-19 and hopefully we're coming out the other side pretty soon here. So we're thinking a lot, as I said, like the gyms around the world and the health of the gyms is so important. We've had over a thousand CrossFit gyms come back into the fold since October. We've had a really kind of the most intense kind of outreach effort in CrossFit's history to come back to people who were kind of, I'd put them in a lapsed category. They hadn't officially said they were gone,

but they weren't paying. They hadn't signed their contracts. And we've had over a thousand of those rejoined the fold as they've kind of seen in spite of COVID. They've seen kind of what we're trying to do. And what we're telling everybody is, hey, we're going to work really hard here and we need your help. You know, but if we believe we're kind of stronger together, is this thing like come back into the fold so that's been really really cool um we're working on more and more kind of uh classes than other resources to help um to help uh athletes to help coaches to help uh gym owners to be better at what they do and one of the things that we um that we just announced to our community um is called the uh the crossfit on ramp and that's really cool um

and so that basically lets you learn crossfit at home and so we've never done this before. So it's our first kind of direct to consumer offering. And it's 12 sessions that take you through workouts, but also teach you all about CrossFit. They're like 50 hours of supporting videos and other content. So you learn 30 to 40 of the CrossFit movements. You can do it at home without any equipment. You can buy some equipment or you can do it without any equipment. And it's just to, if you've been curious about CrossFit, but you're like, I'm not quite ready either because it's COVID and I can't or don't want to go to a gym or I don't feel like I'm ready for this yet. I have to get more fit or something first. This is to kind of give you

a baseline level of knowledge and experience to give you the confidence to go into a gym. That's kind of a, that might sound obvious, but it's pretty revolutionary. Yeah, I think that's exciting. We've never done anything like this before. And we were able to take some of the best coaches in the world and get like, how would you teach a newcomer to come to CrossFit, whether they're 14 years old, whether they're 85 years old, and give them a sense of what we do, give them a good workout, but really a big part of this is just give them a familiarity with what CrossFit is, what's it going to be like to go into a gym and get them started on the path to kind of changing their lives in that way. I love it. Well, I think you got a bright future

with CrossFit. I think CrossFit's lucky to have you at the helm, Eric. Talk for a second about your own kind of personal lifestyle. You know, you've been a long time. crossfit or what are some of your tricks to getting better at this sport yeah well i would say kind of nutrition is key um so for me i've really tried to eat well you know eat what they say you know kind of in a clean way and i try to learn a lot personally about it and i change my knowledge or i change my practices as there's more data out there um you know so one example i'll give you on the nutrition front is um i've learned via um a great medical practice that I've become part of that looks at your genome as well as as other things.

It's this great medical group called Wild Health that we're actually working on a CrossFit Partnership right now. And they look at your whole genome and I learned that I have a high sensitivity to saturated fat. And this is just a few months ago. And I've, you know, I've been for the most part eating a ton of red meat, you know, probably my whole life, but certainly since I started to do CrossFit. And there's a lot of good that comes with that. But if you have the SNIP that I have in your genome, it's actually risky to have a lot of saturated fat.

So I've changed my diet to reduce saturated fat as an example in the last three months. That's something that I would never have thought of doing in the past. Interesting. Yeah, really interesting. And frankly, if you look back five years ago, there wouldn't have been, people wouldn't have known that you could look at your genome and learn that you should be, you know, and I should need a ton of carbs either, which I already kind of knew. I don't think most people she did it on carbs. And so it's just been very interesting or trying intermittent fasting or whatever. So I'm kind of, I try to keep learning and try not to be religious about these things. So as new data comes out, I tested

on myself, I talk to others. So I think that's been really important to me. Paying attention to how my body feels. You know, I don't want to be, I don't want to be broken and sore all the time. I want to be high performing in life. So that's kind of what I choose to do. And I want to be ready at any point to do something crazy. And it's not necessarily in the gym, right? If, you know, when a friend reaches out, like, you know, a friend reached out a couple years ago and said, hey, I want to do this 52 mile hike in the Grand Canyon in a month. And, you know, rim to rim to rim.

And it's like 16,000 feet of vertical. I'm like, I haven't really been hiking or running, but sure, let's go for it. And I just felt like my baseline level of conditioning and my mental state that I could actually enjoy that, you know, not have it be, you know, hell or whatever. So I try to do stuff like that. Sleep, I will be honest, is still an area that's a work in progress for me. Like, I don't sleep super well. And I'm not, I'd say one of the basic things is I'm not good enough at going to bed at a standard time. I think I violate one of the key things. That is a key. That is a key Whoop principle.

Yeah, yeah, Will, what, yeah, what should I be doing better, man? I got to get to bed at a decent hour. Quick, quick, sleep consistency, same bedtime, same wake time. Try not to eat within three hours of going to sleep. Three hours. Yeah, much darker bedroom, much colder bedroom. Try to get off your phone or wear blue light blocking glasses. You're a hard driving entrepreneur.

I bet you're on your phone until you go to bed. Get blue light blocking glasses. what I do and it kind of gets you a get out of jail free card you can I really try to not do that because it's to not be doing work stuff before bed not just because of the blue light which I know but just because my mind's racing it's it's for sure so like my thing is if I can yeah if I can if I can if I can be done eating I've been shooting for two hours like in an ideal world if I'm done eating and done doing any work stuff by eight o'clock and then I go to bed at 10 or so or 10.30, that feels like a good target, but I don't hit it enough. And then I guess there's the

alcohol thing too, right? And I don't drink very much typically. But if I'm like, I'm up in the mountains right now with friends and we're going out to dinner every night. Sure. And you know, and then, you know, if there's that, you drink two glasses of wine or three instead of one and it's closer to your bedtime, that's obviously a disaster on your HRV and everything else, right? That's right. That's right. And And lastly, what advice will you give to entrepreneurs who want to have a career like Eric Rosa? Boy, well, I think have a lot of luck. That would be my advice. Cultivate a lot of great people in your life because I think then, you know, kind of

the, I always call it magic, right? The external magic comes in from unexpected sources and people can, you know, conspire to help you. So a lot of the magic that's happened and CrossFit coming together, literally people have had relationships with for 30 years. So you never know when things are going to come up. So I think that's really, that's really important, right, to have people who can help you. I think alignment with what really matters to you. And, you know, Will, you're obviously doing this yourself with Woop, right? I mean, I just really, really care about this mission. I just, it's all I can think about, right,

is it feels like such a sacred trust to be part of it. And that's, that's a great way to get out of bed in the morning versus how you know i've never been wired by making a like driven by making money um it's great but it's an outcome whereas i think the the alignment about working with people i love on something i really care about that's intellectually challenging and where there's a lot of learning and so on and working with partners like whoop where i really you know like and respect the people i'm working with like i think those are for me those are the foundational principles to success and happiness as an entrepreneur and of course you got to kind of never give up as you know that's good advice yeah well uh look man i think uh i think this has been great uh i know i speak for everyone at

whoop when i say we're thrilled to be partners with crossfit and uh congratulations to you on on the fresh vision for crossfit and where you're taking it thanks well it's it's uh it's really uh privilege to be working with you all and getting the new frontiers around sleep and recovery and I think it'll take the sport a long way into the future. So thank you. Thanks to Eric for coming on the WOOP podcast, pumped to be his partner. A reminder, you can use the code Will Ahmed

to get 15% off a W-WP membership, W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D. You can follow us at WOOP at Will Ahmed. And if you want to learn more about the WOOP CrossFit Partnership, check us out at WOOP.com slash locker. Stay healthy, folks. stay in the grin.