In 2018 we ran our first-ever nutrition challenge in SugarWOD — the #800gChallenge® by OptimizeMe Nutrition. Since then, over 400 SugarWOD gyms have outsourced their nutrition challenges through the app and the results have been outstanding. Members experienced better health and performance and gym owners reported better community engagement. One gym generated more than $9,000 in revenue!
“The support received from OptimizeMe Nutrition is invaluable. All of the time-consuming tasks are done for you, which allows you to focus your efforts on your community’s engagement. Integration with the SugarWOD app has made this the easiest challenge I’ve ever run. I would 100% be on board to try anything this team puts together!”
Lindsay Andrew, CrossFit Voltage & Albemarle
The challenges offered by OptimizeMe Nutrition help your members succeed with nutrition without requiring ANY food eliminations or restrictions. Both the #800gChallenge® and Lazy Macros Challenge instill habits that should be continued indefinitely. They aren’t extreme challenges where everyone goes back to their old ways 30 days later.
And the best part is, they are plug-n-play using SugarWOD’s programming tools! All the content is delivered right to your calendar in SugarWOD, including point tracking, instructional videos, best practices, and more.
You know nutrition challenges are popular with members, but what gym owner has time to spend hours administering and managing all the details? Get all the benefits without the work by using SugarWOD to outsource your next nutrition challenge.
1) Reduce Your Work
From promotional and educational materials to scoring, it takes an estimated 10 to 20 hours a week to run a challenge well. Instead of burdening your coaches with those responsibilities, 85 percent of the work is done for you. We estimate you only need to spend two hours a week to run either challenge.
The materials included in the plug-n-play challenges include:
🔥 Promotional social media and emails to drive sign-ups
🔥 Daily educational content
🔥 Real-time live leaderboards
🔥 At-home no-equipment workouts upon request
2) Create Additional Revenue for Your Gym
Even at a conservative cost of $20 per member, you need just ten members to sign up to recoup the costs to SugarWOD. Any profit can go to the head coach who oversees the challenge.You can also personalize the materials as much as you want. At CrossFit Imperial Valley, more than 80 of their 275 members signed up for the #800gChallenge®.
By adding t-shirts, body composition testing, a closed Facebook group, weekly workout challenges, and a team competition, CrossFit Imperial Valley charged $109 per person and generated more than $9,000 in revenue.
This covered their additional costs as well as additional compensation for the organizing head coach.
3) Provide an Essential Service to Your Members
Instead of waiting for January, why not run a challenge in December? The average American gains one pound every holiday season between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve. That might not sound like much until you realize we don’t tend to lose it. One of the best things you can do is help your members manage their habits during the problem period instead of trying to fix it in January.
Challenges are a great way to do this at the gym level. They scale better than one-on-one consulting, are more cost effective for the member, and they provide that friendly competition that brings people together. Combined with SugarWOD, nutrition challenges become a great way to motivate change at the individual level while simultaneously building community.
4) Leverage a Nutrition Expert
The #800gChallenge® and Lazy Macros Challenge in SugarWOD are created by OptimizeMe Nutrition, which is run by EC Synkowski, who holds an M.S. in Nutrition and Functional Medicine and is a Certified CrossFit Level 4 Coach (CF-L4). She knows nutrition and she knows the CrossFit community. Leverage her expertise to provide relevant nutrition education to your members.
Even though nutrition challenges can be a win-win for you and your members, their success requires the on-site staff to be fully engaged. If there isn’t support from the owner and coaches, the challenge will not get enough interest or maintain member interest. Regardless of SugarWOD offerings, we encourage you to choose the challenges you and your staff will complete with your members.
Sign up to run the #800gChallenge® or Lazy Macros today!