The 2025 Intramural Open: Build Community, Retention and Profitability

Here's where the intramural idea comes from. I went to high school 30 years ago and my high school operated a lot like Hogwarts. If you're familiar with the Harry Potter series. So on the first day of school, you're starting high school and you're put into this big auditorium and you're drafted and you're placed on one of four teams. My team was called the Panthers.

And every single day for the rest of your high school career, which was five years back, then you would be visited first thing in the morning by somebody from your team. We called them Sticks because their job was to like force you to show up and participate in one of about 40 different sports.

And so on a Monday morning, the stick might show up and say like, okay Chris, you're playing floor hockey at 1220 against the Knights and I also want you to sign up for American Gladiators that starts next week. And they would peer pressure you into doing these activities and your team, my your house, my house. The Panthers would get points every time I showed up and participated.

We'd get a few more points if I won, but really it was all about participating. Now, the head of our house would give us this pep talk every year, be the exact same thing. His name was Mr. White. And he would say, you know guys, the Panthers are the biggest team. We have two more players than every other team. And if all we do is show up for everything every day, we are gonna win by attrition.

And that was our strategy. It was not put the best players first, it was draft the people most likely to show up and then beat it into their skulls that they had to. Because if you signed up for something and didn't show up, you would lose points. Well, fast forward years later, I've got a CrossFit gym, CrossFit announces, they're gonna do something that's called the CrossFit Open.

The first time we ran the open, it was a lot of fun. There was a small group of competitive athletes and everybody else, you know, and of course all the best clients were in the everybody else category. And so we ran this CrossFit open and we did like heat and it was like, Hey, here's the everybody Heat. You guys do your best. And then, oh , the real competitors are coming on now.

Everybody stick around and watch how fast we can go. And it , it was cool. It was fun. It was a lot of hype. You know, it , it looked like a battle, felt like your birthday party, you get it. But the reality is it , it never really brought that feeling of community into my box. It was kind of us and them and it really wore me out. My coaches were exhausted. It wore the clients out.

A lot of them took breaks after the open. Some of them got really inspired and they're like, I wanna get my first double under , muscle up , whatever. But a lot of them kind of started feeling like, Ugh , this is a competition now. It's not really for me. And it created this like bipolar effect in the gym where the competitors were more stoked than ever.

Some people wanted to become competitors, but the vast majority were kind of like, that was fun, you know what's next? It also kind of led to the belief that CrossFit was gonna be hard every single day. And I fit into that. I made the mistake of like programming harder workouts, heavier weights, et cetera.

We lost our way a little bit, but when the next year rolled around, I said, okay, well how can I do that again and keep all the excitement, the birthday party and lose the battle? You know, the the competitive part, the negative part, the exhaustion, the burnout, lost my voice every single week. Like how do , how do I keep the good stuff? And also I'm tired of asking my coaches to volunteer for this.

Like how can I make some money at it so that I can pay them because I'm putting in all these extra hours too, you know, suddenly. And now I've got like six weeks where I'm not taking a day off anymore. How do I make money at this?

And so in my brain, we married the idea of the intramural with the open and this became the intramural open and it was the first piece of content that was really popular that I published for gym owners well over a decade ago. And a lot of people started liking it, copying it, using it as their own, which I love. Thank you for doing that. You know, I don't care if you give me credit or not.

The reality here is like if this idea works for you, use it. Build retention, build community, build revenue in your gym and you don't have to say, this came from Chris or Two Brain business or anything like that. I'm gonna walk you through this guide and I just want you to get a sense of like the flavor and the purpose here.

If you're running a gym, be it CrossFit or something else where you're focused on competition, this might not be for you or , or you might want to tailor it.

But if you're running a gym, whether it's CrossFit, whether it's F 45 Fit Body Bootcamp, any type of like group fitness, semi-private personal training studio, the intramural Open is an amazing once a year event that pulls people in your gym, closer builds retention , builds community. It's a hell of a lot of fun and it's profitable for you too.

You don't have to do the CrossFit open if you're doing the intramural open, we've got sample workouts this year for the first time that you can follow or you can build your own workouts, whatever you think is best for your community or if you're doing the CrossFit Open, use those workouts and just sub them right into this intramural open template that I'm gonna walk you through. And we're gonna start that

right now. This guide that I'm about to show you is available to you for free. Just go to intramural open.com, click the link beneath this video, or you know where you can find me, gym owners united.com and you can just send me a DM through Facebook and ask me for the intramural open guide. I'll give it to you.

I'm gonna walk you through it right now just to show you first like the timeline, but also kind of like what the rules are and how you can tie this into the CrossFit Open. If you're a CrossFit gym, whether you wanna do the CrossFit open or not, how you can put in your own programming.

I wanted to set the stage by giving you kind of what this should feel like it , it should look like a war, but feel like your birthday party. That was our slogan one year. I also wanted to show you some samples of how this has gone from my gym. I'm gonna scroll up here just a little bit because I wanna show you some pictures. This is one of my favorite years.

So this is 2017. This team is called the Chalk Monkeys. You'll notice like they've got their own homemade t-shirts. You can see at the bottom like there's a monkey swing from a bar. Amazing team spirit. This might have been burpees outbreak, I don't know, but like you can look at the points that they've got.

Okay. You can see there's a spreadsheet that I tracked it on and this is the banner for the Chalk monkeys from 2015 that we put up in my gym. And if you walk into my gym now, what you'll see is eight of these banners in a row.

It's amazing and I love it because we're not just celebrating, here's the team that went to the games that year, or here's the person that went to Canadian nationals weightlifting, or here's the person that won that triathlon. But like, here are the people in our family, here is our church, here are the , the people who you'll be exercising with and celebrating them, right? I love it.

Those are, those are huge banners around my gym. They look great. Let's talk about the timeline here. So first, the intramural open season really starts right now. I'm gonna shrink this down a little bit just so that you can kind of see like what this timeline should be and I can get it all on the screen. Starting today.

You should be launching pre-op programs and what that means is you should be thinking about the open and thinking about where there are opportunities to encourage people to improve really quickly. So this is above and beyond your normal programming. If somebody has a weakness, a double under these elbows, they can't land a snatch, they can't do an overhead squat, whatever that is, you can run a clinic for that.

You can run one clinic every Saturday. You know it's a small group session, they pay for it on double unders. You can run one clinic the next Saturday on snatching whatever it is. This is really done not to give people a competitive edge, but more to give them the confidence that they can do everything. Now , of course, they don't know what the workouts are gonna be.

If you're using my workouts or building your own workouts, you will know, but it's a great incentive for them to build their confidence and practice their weaknesses. So, you know, offering these things as one-on-one personal training sessions or as like small group extras will help people feel confident, comfortable signing up. And that's why we're really doing it.

You know, let's face it, I can, I can give you some tricks. Maybe I can give you your first double under in a focus session about double unders . I'm probably not gonna drive your clean and jerk up 30 points, but what I am gonna give you is a confidence to enter. Okay? And then between now and March 3rd, you wanna advertise the intramural open. How do you do that? You do that through your media.

You talk about it through your email list. You shoot videos like the one of me you just saw talking about my history. Um, you can talk about how you're doing it, why you're doing it this way. If you're combining it with the CrossFit open, using the CrossFit open workouts within the intramural open, great.

Like talk about that, talk about scorekeeping, talk about captains, talk about the draft, the selection, why you want people to sign up, why it's important to compete against yourself, et cetera. Okay? Produce a lot of media. Give people a hundred reasons to sign up. You can also start registration. So you should on a big whiteboard at your gym, just have a list of people who have already signed up.

This is gonna create social proof and hey, look at Denise from the new group signed up. That's amazing. She's great. You know, I was feeling awkward about signing up 'cause I'm not competitive, but if Denise signed up, I can't do you know, or my B fff Billy, he's, he's doing it.

I guess I have to before he texts me and ask me, so you put this in-house registration up on a whiteboard, show people who's signing up and that'll encourage others. Then January 27th you can select a scoring system. I'm gonna give you some examples of that as we go through the guide. On the 30th, you're gonna select some team captains. You're looking for the fun people, not necessarily the most competitive athletes.

You're looking for the sticks, the people who are gonna get people to show up February 3rd, you're gonna run a draft. So this is all of the people who have already committed and signed up. You're either gonna let the captains pick them one by one in secret or you're just gonna open up your entire gym list to the captains and let them recruit.

Typically the way that we do it is there's a draft for the people who've already signed up and then the people who haven't signed up but who are members of my gym, they go on a big list and it's up to the captains to go out and try to recruit them one by one . Get them to sign up, get them on their team. My my favorite time ever doing this, I took the captains out for wings.

So we picked the captains, they were just really fun people. Uh , we went out to this wing place, we did the draft. We had maybe, let's say 70 people who were gonna sign up. And so we, you know, the draft is secret because you don't want anybody to ever feel like they've been the last one picked. But then after that draft, there were still another, you know, a hundred people on my client list who hadn't signed up.

And so I gave that list to the captains and the table at this wing place just went silent for 20 minutes as they all started friending the members, adding them, DMing them.

Lemme tell you something, if you're not an athlete and you've signed up to this gym and you didn't sc sign up for the intramural open 'cause it seems scary and you're sitting at home, you know, maybe with your husband it's 6:00 PM and you get a DM from a stranger, Hey, we'd love to have you on my team for the intramural open, and then you get a DM from somebody else.

We'd love to have you on my team for the intramural open. You feel pretty special. People are fighting over you. So it's not a question of are you gonna do it? It's which team should I be on? There's nowhere else in their life where people are fighting to have these people on their team. This is like a once in a lifetime experience that you can give to your clients who are maybe a little bit more nervous.

Then you can start with the workouts. Now in this guide I'm gonna give you some sample workouts. That's the programming that I'm gonna do at my gym. You can use them, you can use some of 'em , not all of 'em. You can change 'em. You can do whatever you want. You can use the CrossFit open workouts and just drop them right into this intramural open framework.

Use those workouts if you want to, and you're gonna release them one at a time with like maximum hype, you know, know, go on camera, do a Facebook Live or whatever. Here we are announcing the next workout, you know, just like Dave Castro used to do with the CrossFit open events. If you're a CrossFit gym, you really wanna hype up the big reveal, the announcement.

Here's what we're gonna be doing this week, you know, make it a really big deal for your people. So here you go. You've got basically the month of March to do workout 1, 2, 3, and four. If you wanna add another one, you can. And then at the end you can launch post open , um, programs.

So for example, if , uh, you wanna run a a six weeks clean and jerk program right after the open is a great time because people will have tested everything. They'll have identified some weaknesses and said, I really wanna get better at that. And this is just you striking while the iron is hot, giving them the opportunity to improve their weakest link while they're thinking about it.

It might come as a surprise to you, it often does to me, but most people don't think about fitness 24 hours a day like we do. And so while you've got their attention and their interest and their engagement and their excitement, you wanna say, okay, let's actually spend some time working on those double unders now. All right , so the key here of course, is we're creating an opportunity to celebrate our clients.

That is the number one thing. It should maybe from the outside to somebody that's not in your gym. It looks like a war, but it should feel like a birthday party. All we're trying to do here is create podiums that you can plop your clients on and celebrate them. Find excuses to celebrate them. Period. If you wanna give out spirit of the open awards, I love it.

If you wanna celebrate like team leaders, you know, have bios, have interviews, I love it. All the media is good media.

Let's start with setting up your pricing, selecting your captains. Now look, I've got some tips in here. I strongly suggest that you charge at least $50 for the intramural open. This does two things. Number one, it tells you clients that they should take this seriously, that they should prepare for it, that it's a big deal.

If they miss , right, like they've got some skin in the game as the saying goes, then what you have to do is make the event worth the price. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to go buy a Turkey dinner for everybody. What it means is that you have to hype up the atmosphere. What they're buying is an experience.

It doesn't mean that you have to include T-shirts, but you can, if you wanna include t-shirts from our friends at Forever Fierce, you can do that. But what it really means is that they're buying a memory. They're never gonna have this experience in their life of peak health, peak fitness celebration of, of what their body can do. That is what they're buying.

And so it has to be notably different from just showing up and doing a normal wat on a Friday. There has to be hype. Put up some balloons, play the music louder, invite their family to come in, invite their friends , uh, you know, stream it live , make it different from their normal experience, okay? Make it a peak experience of peak memory in their lives.

Second , um, I've got some good rules here about the right captains. I've done this a million ways before I explain like I screwed this up by selecting the best athletes as captains more than once. That's a mistake. You wanna select the fun people, the people who have a strong affinity to your other members. They're the magnets, they're the spark plugs. Chris, will you please be on my team?

Like you want the person that you can't resist saying that to you. Okay? Then you can set up your scoring. Now on page 11, I've got some templates here that you can use. You can use a Google sheet or there's lots of apps that are out there for competition too . Use your gym's existing software platform if you can.

There's no need to add like a brand new app for this, but if you're thinking about trying out a different app, this is a good little like bullet to test it before you fire the big cannonball of , of um, switching entirely. Okay? You might wanna create divisions. I've got some instructions here, like maybe you want a competitive division.

That's cool sometimes at your clients like seeing like the more competitive people go , uh, as Greg Glassman used to say, you know, we're all mountain climbers, but these are the people. Summit summiting Everest. It doesn't hurt anything to have athletes competing, okay ? But it also doesn't inspire people to stick around your gym longer if that's what they see.

And if you give the athletes the big priority, the hype, the live stream , you , everybody else is gonna feel like a second class citizen. So think very carefully about the divisions that you set up. You can also have an RX and a scale. I'm not doing that anymore. It's one division because most of the points are gonna be awarded on attendance.

There are some points at my gym for like winning, but you have to be doing RX to win the workout anyway, everybody else is is there for participation points. Intramural open should take over your gym. Here's some tips for open registration. How to do the draft day step by step . Okay, you can read it all. Okay, so here you go. How do I even do the draft peak moment opportunity stream the draft on Facebook Live.

We did this, I'm gonna say 2019, it was amazing. So much fun. Lots of people showed up at the cafe where we were doing the draft just to watch it hear their name called. We called 'em up on the stage. We held up a little whiteboard that said like, team burpee outbreak.

You know, when they take their picture with it, peak opportunity moment, like get on your media, you can create enough media in the four weeks of the intramural open to last you the entire year. If that's what you want to do. When I say like, create ways for your clients to win, create peak moments, that's what I'm talking about is creating media. Find reasons to brag about them. Here's your recruitment period.

Okay, here's your pre-op programming. Here you go. What to do? Exactly. Here's how to score. Here's how to run events, okay? Have an announcement party, step by step instructions are all here.

Now let's talk about the workouts because hey, if you're watching this, if you're a gym owner that owns 12 gyms, I know you're still an exercise nerd and that's why you got into this. Like me, when I broke out these workouts for my gym , what I wanted was kind of like diversity, a good sampling across all energy systems.

But more than that, I wanted something where each person in my gym could feel like, oh , that's my event. That's for me. So the first one is a super meet . The super meet is a two hour strength competition. It's a combination weightlifting meat and power lifting meat with like a kind of a vanity lift. The weighted pull up in there too. That said, I don't want it to take all day like a power lifting meat does.

So what you're gonna do is open up a two hour window. You can do this twice in one day if you want to like noon till two or six till eight or whatever pm or you can do Saturday morning. That's what I do.

You've got a two hour window, the coach brings everybody in, starts the clock within that two hour window, everybody hits a max in snatch, everybody hits a max in clean and jerk press back squad , deadlift, weighted , pull up, be as strict as you want to. I've got a link here with like the rules from my gym in 2009 on the super meet in general, people can approach this in any order they want to.

So they can do their best left first. They can spend all their time like warming up whatever they've got two hours. I strongly recommend that you're strict on the judging. It's better to hurt somebody's feelings a little bit today and have 'em come back next year and smash it then to be inconsistent and have a moving target from the day . We too , I wanted something very anaerobic.

And so , um, what we did was, Fran, now I love Fran. It's a very hard workout. If you're pretty fit, you're gonna get that done in four minutes, three and a half , you know, maybe three if you're a real crazy athlete. The problem is that a lot of people are gonna take 15 minutes.

I think it might've taken 30 my first time and I eventually got that time down to like a 4 0 3 or something and I was really proud of that. But you don't want people in one heat finishing in four minutes and the last person in their heat finishing in 12 or 13 or 15 minutes, they're gonna feel, you know, out of place. So what you wanna have is predictable heat schedules.

And so what we're gonna do is as many reps as you can in seven minutes of 10 barbell thrusters and 10 pullups, this is gonna get really anaerobic. Your athletes with the big VO O2 max, they're the ones who are probably gonna do the best. Um, and that's what you're testing here. So, you know, day one you're testing strength. Uh, week two, sorry, you're testing anaerobic. Week three, we're gonna get more aerobic. Okay?

So week three we're gonna be doing a time trial. And this is row a thousand meters. Okay ? Do 200 feet of a dumbbell farmer carry a hundred feet of burpee broad jumps, 200 feet of dumbbell lunges, and then 50 wall balls. Okay? We call that a time trial. And then event four is called Haiti. Now we are partnered this year with Brace for Impact who fund the creation of schools in Haiti.

They have an event called Brace for Impact, which is a 24 hour event. I strongly recommend you go to their website and check it out. You can participate in Brace for Impact 46 Mentor , uh, on from br . Corey Lewis runs this event. It's enormous every year. You feel so great. What we wanted to do is take one of their events and we're gonna put that in the intramural open this year.

So Haiti for us is amrap in 12 minutes of 10 dumbbell push presses, 10 dumbbell front squats, six burpees over the dumbbells. Now I also made this the fourth reason workout for a reason. If you want to run a Bring a Friend event as part of your intramural open, here's your opportunity. Do it. You can have somebody bring in a stranger. We're not gonna do complicated lifts.

They're gonna feel like they're part of this super fun birthday party type environment. Their goal is just finish . If they get through one round, that's great. They can work out with their partner. You can do it as like a I go , you go type thing. Whatever you wanna do. It's an amazing workout to do with part of a Bring a Buddy.

Of course, every person who comes into your gym to try a workout during this period is gonna see the best gym that you've got for one day. They should also fill out a waiver. You should also screen them. You should have a conversation with them beforehand to make sure that they're ready for this type of intensity. And you should talk to 'em about their fitness goals and turn that into an NSI.

Okay, let's talk about prizes. Hey, our grand prize a week of lunches. We've got a cafe next to the building, next to the gym. It's amazing. I just go to the the cafe and say, start a tab. The winning team gets lunches on me for a week. Okay? You can do anything you want, like a social event seems to work the best. Hang up a banner, go to Forever Fierce and they can set up your banner for you.

They do this for us. How does this make revenue for you? Look, this is a fun event and I know that it's something that if you're a CrossFit gym, you feel like you should do it to be part of the CrossFit community and you're, you're doing this service. I get that.

But the reality here is like, this takes up a lot of your time, your energy, your resources, even if you don't make money on it, your coaches deserve to get paid for it. And I think like charging for it gives your clients an incentive to do their best to take it seriously. If not, you run the risk of like, oh, it's four weeks of harder programming at our normal classes. Like, charge for this and make it worth it.

You should also look at running things like gymnastics prep course individual sessions for people who wanna get better and build their confidence. These are all great things for your gym and for the client and for the coaches. The other, the other thing here for individual sessions is like, let's say that you've got one day, okay, it's gonna be Saturday when we're running the intramural open event.

Somebody says, I'm out of town, I can't make it. Should you ask your coaches or yourself to volunteer more time for them to do the event? You know, we used to do that, but you would, we'd wind up getting like five different people saying, I wanna do it at this time, that time. And you feel like if you do it for one, you've gotta do it for each of them .

So you wind up volunteering a ton of time that you don't really have. Instead you tell them like, if you can't make this session, you can make it up at a personal training session. Boom. Done. And then those people have the choice of either making it up on the Saturday or coming in and doing a personal training session to get tested. People who are really serious don't have a problem with the personal training session.

Of course, they're gonna pay for that too . Retail, I , I really think like is super duper smart to let people design their own t-shirts and have you print them, but in many cases, they're gonna wanna make up their own t-shirts for their team. That's cool. You can have a souvenir t-shirt from Forever Fierce, you know, just like the samples that we've got right here, underdog, barbell, intramural open 2025. I love that.

I would want that shirt. It's also really smart to do like , uh, uh, supplement tasting night. Okay? So in the spirit of making it feel like a party, you bring out some sample supplements from, you know, bio ed or Driven or whoever you are using. You have a signup sheet. Hey, did you like it? You know, you're playing some music.

Hey, try the banana protein, you know, try this, see how you feel, how did you like the taste of that multivitamin? And then just put their name on the preregistration sheet. Like, this is a very easy way to make a thousand dollars in revenue and help your clients at the exact same time. Registration fees, you know, definitely charge 'em . I talks about that. Then you can have other activities that can get you points.

So you can't just earn points from doing the thing, but you know, maybe you can earn your team some bonus points by leaving a Google review. You know, maybe you earn your team two bonus points by booking a personal training session. You know, maybe you earn some bonus points by leaving a Facebook review or a five star review somewhere else, or doing a testimonial video.

You know, you don't wanna overwhelm people with this, but adding a one-time bonus point, especially toward the end of the intramural open, like if the points race is close, guys, it's so close, it's too close to call. Here's an idea. One bonus point for every person on your team will lose a five star Google review for my gym. You have between now and 5:00 PM go.

This is just a great way to serve as a tiebreaker and get your gym some cred . Two , but look, if you've got this whole like, matrix, bingo card of other ways to earn points, it just gets too complex. Most of the points should be earned from the competition, but you can add one more thing that they can do to get extra points for their team if you want. Okay?

Now, there's other ideas that have come up in the years that didn't come from me first to a kids' heat during the intramural open. It's such a wicked idea. You know, Hey, bring your kids' day event three or event four or whatever. We're gonna set up an obstacle course. It doesn't have to be the same workout, but like bringing your kids means they're also gonna bring their spouse. Their kids are gonna love it.

If you've got a kids program, amazing. Even if you don't have a kids' program that is so photogenic, you're gonna get amazing media and your clients are going to love being able to bring their kids into the gym. Next, after the intramural open, you really need to sit down and do goal reviews with your clients. Talk about what they loved, what they wanna work on next, make them a new prescription.

If that means doing something different from what they're currently doing, tell them that. Tell them the price. If it means doing more of what they're currently doing, tell them that. Tell 'em the price. If it means doing less, you know, taking swimming lessons, tell them that, even if you have to refer 'em out. The point here is you've gotta make this about them. This is not about you. It's not about CrossFit hq.

It's not about the CrossFit games. It's about them . You want them on the , on the podium. You want them on the media. You want them feeling like it's their birthday party. They're being celebrated, they're bringing their kids, they're bringing their friends. The prescription that follows from this should be about them too .

Now, if you've done the intramural for the last decade as I have, there's a couple ways to make it feel fresh and new. Um, a lot of people at my gym will just sign up as soon as they see the open sign. And you know, already it's December now, like they're asking when is the intramural open sign up coming ? They see the banners in the gym every year. It gets easier to recruit them, but you can still refresh it.

You can still make it different and new. You can have weekly themes. You can change the point structure. You can have more teams, fewer teams, different team captains every year. You can have different divisions. You know, you can, you can have people get like promoted to the RX division, right? Just some ideas. Um, but the, the key is like, involve the whole family.

Invite them to bring their friends , um, have bigger parties, do more media than you've ever done before. The key though is it's, you have to make it about them, and that means elevating your clients. So I've got this whole section of the guide here, sections about media, sections about highlighting your clients.

But finally, whether you do the CrossFit open and you don't charge for it, you wind up doing all this extra work and exhausting yourself and your staff for free. And, you know, CrossFit HQ makes money on it and you don't, or the other end of the spectrum. You do only the intramural open events.

You charge for it, you build the client experience, you build a community, you build a retention, you build your revenue or something in the middle. It's gonna be a lot of work and it's more work than you're used to. And if you're already almost burned down already, you need to plan to share the load. The way that you're gonna share that load is not by asking your coaches to do more for free. They do enough for you.

They volunteer. Yes, they wanna support the community, okay? Pay them something. Even if they don't wanna pay, buy them a rogue gift card. But that's another reason to charge for this. If you don't have the guts to charge for it, just because it's valuable, charge for it so that you can pay your staff. Okay? So schedule some extra time for coaches.

Don't schedule all of them to work every single Saturday during the intramural open. Bring in backups, you know, backups can judge. Um, if you're doing the CrossFit open, pay for some of your members to do the the judges course.

You know, or if you're doing the intramural open and you wanna judge the super meet , like really strictly, you know , bring in, bring in some volunteers, bring in some coffee for them the week before and teach them how to judge so that you're consistent. That kind of thing. Okay? Get as many judges as possible. That's huge. Set up a heat schedule.

Now, look, I, I've never been a fan of, you walk into the gym, you see the warmup, you do the warmup on your own, and we all gather around the , the whiteboard. This was common practice like 2014 in CrossFit and other hit chips. You can't do that. But during the open, I suggest having a written warmup on the whiteboard because people are gonna show up early. They're gonna be milling around.

If you've gotta start a class by warming everybody up every single time, this is really gonna take a long time. What you can do is have a written warmup on the board for the next few weeks. When people are doing the open, they come in, they do the warmup on their own, they sign up for a heat time, and they're ready to go at that time. That's what time the heat starts.

I really recommend doing this because then things just flow. The hype stays high. Nobody's standing around the gym for three hours trying to be excited while they're starving. Okay? I've got this all step by step for you in the guide, and again, you can get this guide just by going to intramural open.com. It's a free download. We do this every year. We've done it for a decade.

It's one of my favorite things that we do every year. We gift it to every gym owner this year, more than ever. You don't have to be a CrossFit gym to do this. Whether you've ever done a competition at your gym or not, this is still a great way to do something that feels really fun. It builds affinity in your box. It, it builds trust and excitement. Your clients feel like they've really accomplished something.

It's a win for everybody. If you're a CrossFit gym, you don't have to choose one or the other. All you do is plop the CrossFit Open workouts into this intramural open framework as you've been doing for the last 10 years. And boom, you've turned the CrossFit open into a qualifying for regionals event or whatever it's called now, trying to make the games into something that really is a true community builder.

You know , uh, we were a CrossFit affiliate for 14 years or something like that, and we did the CrossFit Open within the intramural open framework for every single year, and people loved it. Now, this year, we'll have our own events that fit my community best. You can do your own programming. You can borrow programming from other people.

If you want to go back in the crossfit.com archives and, and pick open workouts, that's cool. If you wanna use the CrossFit open, use the CrossFit leaderboard. That's also awesome. Like go ahead and do that. My goal, though, as always, is to help you build a better gym. A better gym means more revenue. It means more profit. It means less burnout.

It means opportunities for your coaches, but more than anything else, it means a meaningful, memorable event that people in your gym will never forget, that they will use as a foundation to inspire themselves and their friends and their kids later that they use as an example of themselves at their best, but also an example for the next generation of who you should be, man, when you see a kid look up to their, to their

dad in my case, and , and just kind of go like, that was awesome, or stand beside them as they're doing burpees and, and cheer for them , as my daughter did when she was about eight years old and I was doing a seven minute test of maximum burpees. That's a memory that they're not gonna get anywhere else. They , they , you are giving them, you are adding to their story.

And this can be a peak moment in that story, www.intramuralopen.com. Use it. Thank you for your service. Enjoy Happy open season .