Forging Youth Resilience Local Club Leader Summit

Earlier this month, CFMS founders Jenn Pishko and Dr. Tom McCoy had the opportunity to speak at the Forging Youth Resilience Local Club Leader Summit. Forging Youth Resilience (FYR) is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing resources to marginalized youth from lower socioeconomic communities. Through CrossFit classes hosted at local affiliates, FYR supports young people ages 13–18 — meeting them where they are and offering a space to build strength, confidence, and connection.

At the Summit, we had the chance to meet with organizational leadership and local club leaders — many of whom are volunteers — who lead and run these programs in their communities. Our task was to deliver lectures that unpacked the brain: what happens when exposed to Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs), and how repeated or chronic exposure can raise the risk of developing a wide range of chronic diseases, from obesity and depression to substance use disorder and beyond.

These lectures went beyond the science. While we shared the research on what happens to the developing youth and adolescent brain when exposed to ACEs, multiple ACEs, and ongoing high-stress environments, we also focused on something equally important: the way exposure to CrossFit, quality coaching, peer-to-near peer connection, and the affiliate environment can help reverse the negative impact of ACEs on the brain. The work being done by coaches day in and day out cannot be short-changed. Through education and validation, we hope to continue showing why CrossFit is such a meaningful health intervention.

Another lecture at the Summit tackled a reality every mission-driven program eventually faces: no matter how valid or noble the work, funding is required to sustain it. And let us be the first to acknowledge how challenging it can be to walk into a stakeholder meeting and, within a handful of minutes or slides, communicate everything that happens inside an affiliate that changes lives and improves health.

This is exactly why the affiliate needs to know — and actualize — its important role in public health. We define public health as the science and practice of improving health outcomes at the population level by addressing the environmental, social, and behavioral factors that influence health. Research consistently shows that social determinants of health shape over 80% of health outcomes, particularly those tied to environmental and behavioral factors. The affiliate sits squarely at the intersection of those factors. Not just through the work being done by FYR, but holistically as a community of affiliates, we want to continue pushing the validation of CrossFit as a public health initiative.

So we'll ask you the same question we asked the room: How are you shaping the conversations in your community? We'd love to connect on the work you're doing and share it with others who are also pushing the public health mission forward.

The work being done by FYR highlights something important. It can be easy to fixate on the size of the problem and feel paralyzed about where to start. But FYR's mission reframes that entirely. It begins with the opportunity to start with the one person in front of you. That's a mission every affiliate can align with.

Boston Health Integration Summit — HIS Class 02

The CFMS held its second Health Integration Summit in Boston in April, and HIS Class 02 was just as fired up as the inaugural cohort that met in San Diego back in February. Over two days, we gathered with affiliate owners, coaches, doctors, and other allied healthcare providers who all share one conviction: the future of healthcare belongs in the affiliate.

When we take a step back and reflect on the Level 1 kernel, we continually lean on its profound approach to fitness and to health. The workings of both are so intertwined that to truly achieve optimal fitness, one must also be on the trajectory toward optimal health. This is more than the paradox that exists between the sick-care system and preventative health. This is more than standing and shaking fingers at a broken medical system. We don't want to discredit the important work of practitioners who save lives and put people back together every day.

Instead, the conversation shifts to the Sickness–Wellness–Fitness Continuum and the failure of the current system to help people actually move from the left side to the right. The current system is structured to be reactionary. It's only profitable when procedures are done. This is not a knock on the practice of medicine. This is the reality of a system built around incentives that don't align with ours.

Attending a Health Integration Summit tells your community, and the greater community at large, that you believe in the efficacy of the CrossFit Methodology. It means you know you are in possession of the solution to some of the world's most vexing problems. Is CrossFit a solution to chronic disease? It sure is. But the solution runs deeper than that. The folks who attend a Summit are accepting the challenge to reframe the way healthcare should be done by empowering the individual, providing unbiased access to tools and resources, and creating opportunities for people to become informed decision-makers about their own health.

HIS Class 02 was an impressive collection of individuals who left renewed in their mission to change the world through CrossFit. This is grassroots warfare on systemic dysfunction. And it's just getting started.

Join Us at the Next Health Integration Summit

We want you with us in Denver for the next HIS, June 13–14, hosted at Koda CrossFit Iron View. The attendee list is already stacked with OG affiliate owners and coaches who are chomping at the bit to get their hands on the Health Hub Blueprint.

Can't make Denver? We just added a new location: Cincinnati, OH on August 15–16, hosted at Queen City CrossFit.

What does this tell us? There are plenty of folks out there ready to spend a weekend together and dig into this work — and the momentum is building.

A few important details:

• Denver registration deadline is May 20, and we're already more than 50% full as of today.

• Don't wait to sign up — we begin onboarding the cohort with the Health Integration Guide in a couple of weeks.

• Plus, we need your t-shirt size!

Why We're So Convicted: The Affiliate Is the Answer

If you haven't read Dr. Deborah Cohen's recent op-ed in the New York Post — or her book Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health — add them to your list. Cohen names something we've all felt but haven't always had language for. She writes: "those selling us control over our health may, in fact, be the ones making us sick."

Her argument is uncomfortable, and it's correct. Health advice now sits alongside entertainment on TikTok and Instagram, curated by opaque algorithms and shaped by industries with unprecedented access to our personal data and our wallets. It is, in her words, a vast, uncontrolled public-health experiment. And the people running the experiment are not the ones who took an oath to "do no harm."

Pause and look at the landscape honestly:

• Insurance costs keep climbing while access to actual care keeps shrinking.

• Some patients can't get an appointment at all. Others wait 45 minutes in a waiting room for a 7-minute conversation.

• Many are bypassing doctors entirely, buying the drugs they want from someone willing to sell them — without a physician who knows their history weighing in at all.

• And everyone, regardless of income or zip code, is drowning in information. Having access to information is not the same as being an informed decision-maker.

So when Cohen asks what's needed, her answer reads like it was written for us: "a model of care that values a patient's time and experience as much as their test results." A model that offers the connection and validation people are currently buying from influencers and tech startups. A model rooted in relationship, accountability, and trust.

That model already exists. It's the affiliate.

This is exactly why we're so convicted in the work happening inside affiliates every single day. Look at what these spaces actually are. A member walks into a room where a coach knows their name, knows their history, and shows up consistently. That coach knows when something is off — when sleep has been bad, when stress is high, when a movement that was easy last month is suddenly hard. They notice. They ask. They adjust. They are interrupting trajectories that lead to chronic disease, depression, isolation, and decline — not with a screen, not with a supplement, not with an algorithm, but with presence, structure, and a methodology built on intensity scaled to the individual.

The affiliate is one of the few remaining spaces in modern life where someone is genuinely paying attention to you. Not your data. You. The conversations happening before class, between sets, and in the parking lot afterward are doing as much for long-term health as the workout itself. Members are building the kind of consistent, embodied relationship with their own bodies that no wearable can manufacture and no influencer can sell. And it's all happening inside a community that holds people accountable in ways the healthcare system simply isn't built to. This is the opposite of a public-health experiment run by algorithms. This is public health practiced in person, one class at a time, by humans who have skin in the game.

Cohen names the problem. CrossFit affiliates are the elegant solution.

That's a strong word, and we use it on purpose. Elegant because it's simple. Elegant because it's already built. The infrastructure exists in every neighborhood with an affiliate. The methodology has nearly two and a half decades of practical evidence behind it. The coaches are already there, already doing the work, often without realizing the full magnitude of what they're delivering. What we are doing through CFMS — through the Health Integration Summits, the Health Hub™ designation pathway— is naming it, validating it, and giving affiliates the framework and credibility to step fully into the role public health has been waiting for them to fill.

This is not a marketing position. It is a conviction grounded in the science, in the lived experience of our members, and in the failures of a system that was never designed to deliver health in the first place. The current model is reactionary by design. It is profitable when something breaks. It cannot — and will not — offer the connection, consistency, and behavioral change that the affiliate offers every single hour of every single class.

We have a responsibility here. If we know what we know — and we do — then we owe it to our communities to show up with every tool and resource we can put in their hands. Not to compete with the noise. To offer something better than the noise. The affiliate is not a gym that happens to be good for your health. The affiliate is a public health intervention that happens to look like a gym.

So whether you joined us in San Diego, came to Boston for HIS Class 02, are heading to Denver in June, registering for Cincinnati in August, or doing the work quietly in your community right now — you are part of the answer to the question Cohen is asking.

Keep building. Keep showing up. The work matters, and the timing has never been more urgent.