2026 CrossFit Owners and Coaches Conference

Building an affiliate that creates meaningful impact, develops great coaches, grows sustainably, and can ultimately operate independently of the owner.

If you want to “work on” something, it’s important to know what it actually is. Starting with a simple and practical definition of mindset, Mark England is going to help every single person do some good work on the story they tell themselves about their CrossFit journey. This isn’t going to be a motivational speech or a lecture. Bring pen and paper to this workshop; it’s going to be participatory, valuable, and fun. You’re going to learn more about mindset in 90 minutes than most people learn in their entire lives.

Affiliate owners see CrossFit HQ marketing in action every day. This is your chance to hear how and why those decisions are made. In this candid fireside chat, CrossFit’s Chief Marketing Officer Jenna Hauca shares a behind-the-scenes look at how the media and marketing team operates, what we prioritize, and how we think about growing the brand while supporting affiliates. We’ll reflect on CrossFit Is the Cure, the return of Forging Elite Fitness, Open marketing, and how Games and long-form content tell a unified story rooted in the methodology, plus what’s next and how it supports you locally.

Great gyms are built on great coaches. Developing and retaining them is one of the toughest leadership challenges affiliate owners face. This session breaks down how to raise standards and implement clear systems without stifling creativity, ownership, or growth. You’ll learn how strong leadership creates clarity, how defined expectations enable creativity, and how to build real career pathways inside your affiliate. We’ll also cover the practical drivers of retention, including communication rhythms, feedback, pay models, recognition, and daily signals of value, so your coaches stay longer and grow faster.

Join us for a peer-to-peer discussion focused on real-world challenges and opportunities in coaching and affiliate ownership. Through shared experiences and collaborative problem-solving, you’ll gain insight, perspective, and practical strategies for growth. You’ll learn new operational or leadership strategies to implement at your affiliate, a broader perspective on challenges and creative solutions from your peers, increased connection and collaboration opportunities with other affiliate owners, and tools and insights that help you lead with clarity and community.

CrossFit affiliates have always been more than gyms. They are trusted community anchors. But what becomes possible when they intentionally evolve into health hubs? This session explores how to integrate diagnostics, lab testing, clinician collaboration, body composition, metabolic assessments, and lifestyle education directly into the affiliate environment without losing their identity or operational focus. You’ll learn the difference between add-on services and true health infrastructure, how to start small and scale responsibly, and how to expand impact and revenue while staying aligned with the methodology. This session will challenge how you think about prevention and show what’s possible when fitness becomes the front door to health care.

CrossFit affiliates have always been more than gyms. They are trusted community anchors. But what becomes possible when they intentionally evolve into health hubs? This session explores how to integrate diagnostics, lab testing, clinician collaboration, body composition, metabolic assessments, and lifestyle education directly into the affiliate environment without losing their identity or operational focus. You’ll learn the difference between add-on services and true health infrastructure, how to start small and scale responsibly, and how to expand impact and revenue while staying aligned with the methodology. This session will challenge how you think about prevention and show what’s possible when fitness becomes the front door to health care.

Most gym owners think sales is about what you say in the room. But by the time someone shows up, the sale is mostly over — or already lost. This session breaks down the full spectrum of the sales ecosystem, from brand positioning to conversion mechanics. You’ll learn how to connect your strategy, systems, and service in a way that drives consistent sales — without feeling like you’re just chasing leads or memorizing lines. If you’ve ever said, “I just need more leads,” this session will show you why that’s not the problem, and how to fix what actually is.

This live Q&A brings together affiliate owners who are actively building, scaling, and refining performance-driven businesses in today’s landscape. They’re navigating staffing, retention, profitability, market shifts, and long-term sustainability in real time. No theory. Just practical insight shaped by firsthand experience. Ask direct questions and engage in honest conversation about what’s working, what’s changing, and what it truly takes to build a resilient affiliate. If you’re focused on growth, stability, or your next season of ownership, this panel delivers grounded strategy you can apply immediately.

This live Q&A brings together affiliate owners who are actively building, scaling, and refining performance-driven businesses in today’s landscape. They’re navigating staffing, retention, profitability, market shifts, and long-term sustainability in real time. No theory. Just practical insight shaped by firsthand experience. Ask direct questions and engage in honest conversation about what’s working, what’s changing, and what it truly takes to build a resilient affiliate. If you’re focused on growth, stability, or your next season of ownership, this panel delivers grounded strategy you can apply immediately.

This live Q&A brings together affiliate owners who are actively building, scaling, and refining performance-driven businesses in today’s landscape. They’re navigating staffing, retention, profitability, market shifts, and long-term sustainability in real time. No theory. Just practical insight shaped by firsthand experience. Ask direct questions and engage in honest conversation about what’s working, what’s changing, and what it truly takes to build a resilient affiliate. If you’re focused on growth, stability, or your next season of ownership, this panel delivers grounded strategy you can apply immediately.

Identifying faults during motion — not just in static positions — separates coaches who manage movement from those who truly improve it. Many coaches lack this skill and take years to realize it, limiting both their development and their athletes' progress. In this interactive 90-minute session, top CrossFit coaches will help you refine your eye through real-time feedback, hands-on practice, and peer collaboration. You'll explore dynamic faults across common CrossFit movements, working in small groups and rotating through roles as athlete, coach, and observer. Learn to predict challenges, deliver effective cues, and reflect critically on movement. A group debrief and Q&A wrap up the session, ensuring you leave with practical tools for immediate use.

Your members have wildly different nutrition needs — the competitor chasing PRs, the new member trying to lose 50 pounds, the shift worker struggling with consistency, the parent grabbing drive-through between kid pick-ups. Generic advice doesn't cut it. This highly interactive session uses real-world case studies and common member avatars to help you navigate nutrition coaching with confidence and nuance. You'll work through scenarios in small groups, learning to ask the right questions, identify realistic starting points, and deliver practical guidance that actually fits people's lives. From performance fueling to sustainable fat loss to navigating emotional eating, you'll practice coaching conversations that meet athletes where they are. You'll leave equipped to move beyond one-size-fits-all recommendations and deliver personalized nutrition support that creates lasting change.

The Pressure Drill develops a critical coaching skill: delivering effective cues when athletes move at “game speed.” While identifying faults in static positions is easier, real coaching happens under intensity. This drill simulates realistic conditions, where participants rotate through roles as head coach, athletes, and observers. The head coach corrects three to five athletes moving at game speed for 60 seconds while observers track all interactions. The drill progresses through four difficulty levels, from simply saying something to everyone to delivering multiple effective cues across various faults. Most coaches discover they interact far less with their entire class than they realize. This simple yet powerful drill builds both awareness and the habit of consistent, effective cueing essential for group coaching.

Comfortable coaching the nine foundational movements? The objective of this session is to expand your skillset to create and implement teaching progressions. During this improvisational, hands-on session, you’ll strengthen your confidence by teaching non-traditional movements in an engaging way using the reciprocal teaching approach. You'll rotate through roles as coach, athlete, and observer, so you get real reps breaking down atypical movements spanning push-up variations, squat and lunge variations, jump roping, and more. You'll have 30 seconds to plan a teaching progression, then 8 minutes to coach it while receiving live feedback. This is a gateway to developing a stronger toolkit and the confidence to break down and teach any functional movement.

The very best coaches can adapt movements for any athlete standing in front of them. But when your class includes an adaptive athlete, a pregnant member, someone recovering from injury, a deconditioned beginner, and a competitive athlete all working side by side, scaling becomes both an art and a logistical challenge. This session will equip you with practical frameworks for scaling any workout to meet any need while maintaining group cohesion and workout stimulus. Through real-world scenarios and collaborative problem-solving, you'll learn to identify the underlying intent of movements, create multiple scaling pathways efficiently, and manage diverse groups confidently. You'll leave with a plan that ensures every athlete gets an effective, safe workout, without creating chaos on the coaching floor.

Technical knowledge gets athletes through a workout, but presence and attitude bring them back tomorrow. This session explores the relational skills that transform coaches from programming deliverers into community builders. You'll learn to command a room with authentic presence, create an atmosphere of safety and focus, and bring empathetic energy that makes athletes feel seen and valued. Through self-reflection, case studies, and role playing, you'll develop the emotional intelligence to read personalities, connect meaningfully, and customize experiences for each individual. Great coaches don't just correct movements; they create relationships and environments where athletes thrive. This session challenges you to examine how you show up and provides tools to become the coach people actively choose to train with every day.

Getting kids through the door is one thing; making them beg their parents to return is another. This session shows you how to design, build, and nurture CrossFit kids and teens programs that create genuine excitement and lasting engagement. You'll learn how to scale movements appropriately for developing bodies, structure classes that balance skill development with fun, and connect with young athletes in ways that build confidence and community. Through practical programming frameworks and youth-specific coaching strategies, you'll discover how to manage energy levels, maintain safety, and create an atmosphere where kids feel challenged but not overwhelmed. Whether you're launching a new program or refining an existing one, you'll leave with actionable tools to build something kids genuinely love and parents trust.

This is your chance to tap into the collective wisdom of some of the world's best CrossFit coaches. In this candid Q&A, bring your toughest questions about coaching technique, gym ownership, career growth, difficult member situations, or anything else keeping you up at night. Our panel of master coaches will share hard-won insights from years in the trenches — lessons that only come from experience, mistakes they've made, and strategies that actually work. Whether you're finding your footing as a new trainer or leveling up as a seasoned affiliate owner, this is your opportunity to learn from those who've walked the path before you. Come ready to ask and listen, and leave with actionable wisdom.

Your members don't fail because of workouts; they struggle in the other 23 hours outside the gym. As coaches and gym owners, we know nutrition is often the missing piece that drives lasting results — but building a program from scratch takes time most owners don't have.With over a decade of experience helping CrossFit affiliates build and scale habit-based nutrition coaching programs, Nicole Aucoin will share proven strategies to integrate nutrition and lifestyle coaching into your gym. You'll learn two models: How to leverage HSN technology to better support clients and generate passive recurring revenue, with no added coaching hours. How to build a fully customized health coaching program inside your gym. Top-performing gyms have increased revenue by more than 30%, improved retention, and fast-tracked results by addressing nutrition, sleep, mindset, and lifestyle habits. These strategies have been proven across challenges, one-on-one coaching, employee wellness programs, and healthcare partnerships, helping owners create lasting impact while building sustainable businesses.

Imagine your gym being the one people talk about. The one they're proud to represent. That's what a strong brand does. Most gym owners focus on programming, coaching, and retention. All essential. But there's one layer that multiplies everything else: brand. Not your logo or your colors. Brand is the story people tell about your gym when you're not in the room. In this talk, Matías Hernández, CEO of Velites Sport, shares a practical framework built on four layers, story, values, processes, and results, to help you build a brand that makes members stay longer, recommend you more, and buy from you naturally. You'll also get five retail strategies you can implement in the next 30 days. Because retail done right never feels like selling. It feels like helping. You don't need to be unique in the world. You only need to be meaningful in your city. Come with a notebook. Leave with a plan you can start tomorrow.

In today’s competitive fitness landscape, your box needs to be more than an affiliate, it needs to become a brand. Building that brand starts with understanding the people you serve: their goals, motivations, challenges and expectations. This session will explore how to identify what your members and athletes truly want, then translate those insights into a stronger experience, clearer messaging and more effective marketing. Participants will learn how to think about their box like a product: what makes it unique, who it is designed for and why members should choose it, stay with it and recommend it. Whether you are looking to grow membership, improve retention or strengthen your community, this session will provide practical strategies for positioning your box with purpose. Join us to learn how to move beyond simply being “a CrossFit Affiliate” and start marketing your box as a distinctive, trusted and memorable brand.

Running a CrossFit affiliate means you're never just a coach; you're also HR, accountant, vendor manager, and business owner, all before your 6 a.m. class. For most affiliate owners, the financial side drains the most time and energy. This session is a practical walkthrough of how to use modern financial tools to automate the work that slows you down: managing employee spending without chasing receipts, paying vendors without spreadsheets, and getting real-time visibility into your gym's finances. No bookkeeper required. Ramp, CrossFit's Official Corporate Card and Expense Management Platform, gives affiliate owners a single system for cards, expense management, bill pay, and accounting integrations, all working together automatically. More than 70,000 businesses use Ramp to cut busywork and run more efficiently. You'll leave with a clear picture of where gyms lose time and money on financial admin, and exactly how to fix it, so you can get back to coaching.

This session explores how affiliates can create pathways for athletes who want more than a one-hour class experience without losing the foundation of great coaching, culture, and community that makes affiliates successful. Drawing from his experience leading PRVN Fitness Affiliate Programming and working directly with gyms around the world, Dwight Upshaw breaks down how coaches and owners can develop scalable systems for progression, retention, and performance inside an affiliate model. Upshaw will dive into coaching standards, class structure, athlete development, competitive ecosystems, and how to build a competitive gym environment while still creating a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere. Attendees will leave with practical tools to better serve both the everyday member and the aspiring competitor, while building stronger communities and a more sustainable affiliate.

In the pursuit of elite fitness, we often obsess over the extremities while neglecting the midline. Join Kyle Young, Business Development for 2POOD and former Team USA Head Coach, for a hands-on workshop designed to overhaul your athletes' stability. We're starting on the floor. You'll learn how to optimize breathing and bracing mechanics through internal pressure before progressing into gravity-dependent movements, then how to properly reinforce that pressure using a belt to maximize force production. This session provides practical, class-ready warm-up drills to address the most overlooked element of the standard CrossFit warm-up. If we cannot transfer energy through a rigid midline, power output is lost. We'll explore elite-level troubleshooting drills, debunk common misconceptions about core training and equipment usage, and close with a Q&A, so you leave with a concrete toolkit to build stronger, more resilient athletes. It's time to stop "doing core" and start engineering a midline that can withstand any metcon.

Your CrossFit box is more than a gym — it's a brand. Your members wear your logo with pride, rep your culture, and tell their friends about it. So why leave that brand equity on the table? In this session, we'll show affiliate owners how to launch a fully automated, print-on-demand merch store that generates revenue without inventory, upfront costs, or fulfillment logistics. Whether you're a seasoned affiliate or just getting started, this is a plug-and-play solution built for the CrossFit community. What you'll walk away with: How print-on-demand works and why it's the smartest merch model for affiliates. A step-by-step road map to launching your branded store in days, not months. Strategies for driving member engagement and repeat purchases. Real examples of affiliates turning their brand into a meaningful secondary revenue stream. No design experience. No warehouse. No risk. Just your brand, your community, and a new way to monetize both.

Begin your day with a workout, followed by registration and coffee, before the conference starts at 9 a.m. Sessions run until 6 p.m., with lunch provided and built-in networking opportunities throughout the day. Follow your curated schedule of actionable business presentations, practical coaching sessions, product workshops, meaningful roundtable discussions, and panels led by industry leaders. Join us in the evening for a networking social to close out the day.

Kick off the day with a morning workout, then settle in for conference sessions from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. You’ll start with a keynote and move through a thoughtfully curated schedule featuring actionable business talks, practical coaching sessions, product workshops, roundtable discussions, and panels with industry leaders. Lunch is included, with plenty of opportunities to connect throughout the day.

Join us at the Games! Join us Friday through Sunday at the Affiliate Lounge, at the EDU booth, and around the arena for exclusive affiliate-owner workouts and activations to connect with CrossFit HQ and other owners. Also, don’t miss the Affiliate Appreciation Party on Friday night.