Education through Seminars
Many of your members are interested in learning more about a variety of topics, but don’t want to spend the big bucks, travel or time to make it out to a CrossFit organized seminar or certification. Finding ways to hold mini-seminars in your box is a great way to bring together your community.
When running a seminar make sure that it is short and sweet (2-3 hour max unless you have a once in a lifetime expert), and is held on the weekend. You can charge a small fee for your time or as a means to raise money for a project you have been meaning to fund – we wouldn’t suggest going over $50, and thats only if you have some big hitters talking on an important topic. I would say the norm we see is between $15-$25 for a seminar. Charging a nominal fee for the seminars not only gets people more serious about it, but also allows you to outsource the seminar to a coach who specializes in that area. Need some ideas for seminars? Check out our list below to get the gears cranking!
Seminar Ideas
Kettlebell Technique: Use this seminar as a way to work on both the Russian and American swings that athletes see often in their daily WODs. Once you have gone over technique you can go to each athlete one on one and help them perfect their form. You can beef up this seminar by adding in more advanced kettlebell movements like the clean, snatch and turkish getup. Make sure that you use this as a hands on seminar for your clients, really helping them with their form. At the end, finish off with a short workout to capitalize on the skills they just learned!
Nutritional Seminar: You can hire out people like Whole 9 to give a nutritional seminar for your members. Hiring out will certainly raise the entry fee (probably to the $50-$75 arena) so make sure to get an initial head count of people interested in the seminar and cost before actually booking with them. You can also host your own nutritional seminar either by creating a presentation to talk with, watch a movie or host a cooking class for members to get some new recipe ideas!
Olympic Lifting Seminar: This is a great idea that can be split over Saturday and Sunday to give more time to each lift – or you can hold a seminar for individual lifts on seperate weekend and make it an Oly themed month. Ideally you will want a model with impeccable form as well as some diagrams you can draw on the whiteboard explaining the mechanics of each lift and common faults. Then, break everyone up and give them one on one attention with their lift. A good addition to this would be to videotape each lift, then meet back together as a group and go over the videos, giving each member one thing they can work on.
Endurance Seminar: CrossFit Endurance training is a fantastic program to follow, and there is tons of information out there for your members to sift through. However, if you have a lot of members who are running marathons, participating in triathalons or doing other long distance activities, you might want to think about sifting through the information for them and presenting it at a seminar. You can include training ideas and potentially participate in a long distance activity (maybe the seminar fee includes a 5k race on the same day).
Goal Setting Seminar: Goal setting is imperative to athletes continuing to grow and improve. It is so important that CrossFit has recently created their own goal setting seminar to inspire and focus athletes of all levels. Teach members how to set short term and long term goals, have them write down their goals as well as an action plan of how to achieve these goals. You can then break into groups of people with common goals and give pointers on ways they can achieve them, potentially even breaking into some time to work on skill based goals.