Is a CrossFit membership expensive?

On Vancouver’s West Side you’ll find a few CrossFit gyms and several personal training studios but no $20/month Planet Fitness or Steve Nash big box gyms.  There’s a simple reason why this is so: economics.

The price of a commercial lease on Vancouver’s West Side doesn’t make that business model feasible.  To pay the lease on our gym based on a $20/month membership we would need 500 members and that still wouldn’t cover utilities, equipment, coaches or other operating costs.  And good luck fitting 500 members into our space.  If even 25% showed up in a day we’d be forced to turn members away.

This is why gyms like Prime and Rep One only offer personal training at $100+ per hour.  And that’s why CrossFit, in this neighbourhood, is the budget option.  At only $250 per month (the price of 2 and a half personal training sessions) you can attend as many coached group classes as you want in a month.  It’s not one-on-one coaching but with classes capped at 12 people, you still get plenty of coaching attention.

Is $250 expensive?  It depends on how often you attend classes.  The average Empower member attended 12 classes in the month of January, roughly 3 per week which works out to $20.83 per class or $18.75 if you have the couple/family discount.  This is about the same as you’d pay for a drop-in yoga session and I’ve never heard anyone complain that yoga is too expensive.  But unlike yoga, our classes are capped at 12 attendees per session to make sure you get the coaching attention that you are paying for.

Want an even better deal?  16 Empower members attended 20 or more classes in January which means they paid less than $12.50 per class ($11.25 on the couple/family discount).  And Motor was the queen of getting-your-money’s-worth paying only $7.14 per class by attending 35 training sessions in January!

The more you use your membership, the more value you get for your dollar.  Our goal with the 20 in 2020 Challenge is to see you getting better value from your membership!  We want you to get more value for less.  All you need to do is attend 20 classes per month: if you’re not motivated by the fitness transformation that this kind of training consistency will deliver, maybe you’ll be motivated by the dollar value!