ClassPass Confessions (Part 4)

Sweaty snapshots and exercise epiphanies from my years of fitness promiscuity

Mar 03, 2023

What did I actually learn from all of those classes?

Looking back on it now, the incredible variety of contrasting fitness experiences I had during my ClassPass era taught me a great deal. I learned not only how to tap it back, chaturanga, and do a kettlebell swing, but perhaps more importantly how to think deeply and critically about the nature of exercise as a whole. Over time, this allowed me to see behind the curtain of the business and practice of fitness and unpack what exactly was happening to my body and mind in any given class. The end result is my meta-theory or “the game within the game” of the fitness industry. It starts by answering this burning question: why did more ClassPass “classes” involve sweating and burning sensations than learning and teaching? Let’s peel the fitness onion and find out.

In any workout class there are really three things happening at once that are often smooshed together and presented as one singular experience: what the exercise does to your body, how it makes you feel, and how relevant it is to your training goals.

While the first and third are the most salient factors to track for you, the second is the most obvious, intense, and marketable for the studio. Therefore, it tends to dominate, whether you realize it or not. It’s not an accident why so many fitness personalities use phrases like “feel the burn” and fetishize sweating as a marker of success or a good class. It’s an easy way to signal to your clients that your class is hard, which is shorthand for good or worth the time and money. In our capitalist system, a boutique fitness studio is incentivized to deliver a class that feels intense, so a participant will feel that they got something for the high price of entry. Yet ironically, within the currency of exercise, sweat and “the burn” are actually the cheapest qualities to attain, requiring relatively little skill, care, or training. It’s much easier to make a client sweat and feel tired that it is to teach them good deadlift form or help them run a faster mile. This is one of the main reasons why far more classes burn than actually teach you information: it’s the easiest and cheapest outcome to deliver by far.

This gets at a key distinction: the difference between training and working out. Training has an intention, structure, and end goal, while working out is primarily supposed to feel hard and make a client sweat. Trainers (or coaches) structure exercises so they build towards an end goal: whether that’s winning a Super Bowl, increasing your deadlift, or just being able to play with your kids without as much fatigue or low back pain.

With this lens, most boutique fitness classes like the ones found on ClassPass are best thought of as work outs, not training. The main reason that workouts are more prevalent than training is economic. Fitness as an industry can more cheaply and efficiently deliver workouts that it could possibly deliver training. This is why gyms that offer training and truly coached classes are often much more expensive than gyms that merely seek to pack people into room and have them jump up and down or do speedy sun salutations ad nauseam.

Workouts are also on some level more marketable and palatable than training. They deliver a recognizable and appealing stimuli, which is part of the draw. The euphoric rush of a SoulCycle class or the signature post-Pilates burn are intense and easily identifiable sensations that will make an impression on a newcomer and then get them to come back repeatedly chasing the dragon of this strong (and therefore good/effective) feeling. While working with a trainer may ask you to be uncomfortable, patient, and consistent for months, workout classes give you a hit of endorphins early and often.

This distinction also comes down to what a class attendee is demanding. As a drop in from ClassPass like I was for so many years, the main thing I could possibly hope to get out of any of these classes was a good workout. If I sought proper training, I’d need to show up consistently, get individual attention from the instructor, and have clear goals that I could articulate as to why I was there. While this eventually happened at a few studios, I was mostly just another body in class, which was fine with me at the time.

In hindsight my athletic polyamory did have a few major drawbacks. These were part of the reason why I eventually left ClassPass. There was just no way a promiscuous vagabond like me who was simultaneously dating several studios at once could possibly achieve my training goals, in large part because my schedule and mindset never let me stop and figure out what they were. Additionally, going to so many different types of classes fast tracked me to a general level of fitness but likely prevented me from getting the most out of any one type of exercise because I lacked consistency. The ClassPass 3 class per studio limit actively prevented me from attending any one gym regularly enough to get results from them or develop a deeper relationship with the trainers. My “routine” if you can even call it that was paradoxically defined only by variety and inconsistency. I think it’s no coincidence that I started to notice changes to my body composition and sport-specific performance when I settled down and began attending one gym regularly. For all it’s flaws, Oakland Fitness Company had me consistently hinging, squatting, twisting, and pressing with different types of resistance. The results I saw came from consistently doing the movements that were most relevant to my goals, getting help and input from trainers, and increasing the load and difficulty over time. The most humbling and valuable lesson of all may be that it was consistency, not strength, that was the biggest missing piece in my exercise diet for years on end. To find true consistency and therefore meaningful results besides sweat and soreness, I had to leave ClassPass and join a gym.

The Freakonomics of ClassPass

I was originally going to conclude this piece with a list of studios that you can visit to recreate my journey, but in putting it together I realized that a shocking amount of them are now closed. Some good being on ClassPass did them in the long run, I suppose. Maybe running a gym is just a tough way to make it in the Bay Area.

Now would be a good time to address the fact that ClassPass’s business model hasn’t been unanimously praised within the fitness community. While it gave me a thrilling athletic speed dating experience in my 20s and became a VC darling for its unicorn status of a 1 billion dollar valuation by 2020, many gym owners openly resented and even hated the platform.

Gym owners were initially sold on the idea that ClassPass attendees like me, limited to 3 classes a month, would be potentially persuadable to become full time members. Being on the platform was therefore free marketing and exposure for fitness studios. The reality that unfolded over the years since that pitch was that ClassPass had an opaque at best, and at worst openly antagonistic relationship to the studios it relied on. The central tug of war was over control of the pricing and inventory of classes, with ClassPass continually working to pay studios as little as possible while exercising as much control over the inventory of available class slots as they could get away with. In ClassPass’s eyes this behavior was purely financial. They needed to be able to turn a profit on each student and have as many slots available to their members as possible. To studios it was an awkward, at times parasitic relationship. ClassPass was always attempting to extract as much value as possible while the studios did most of the hard work. So working with them was often an awkward dance between theoretical benefits and concrete drawbacks. As Amy Bond, owner of SF Pole and Dance put it in a thoughtful take on Medium

“studio owners agreed that there are some benefits to being on the platform (free marketing, exposure, etc.) but that they simply weren’t sure if the costs (i.e. a devaluation of the classes in the eyes of the customer, an emphasis on quantity over quality, etc.) outweighed those benefits.”

While ClassPass was a reliably good way to fill up empty spots in classes, it was far from a financial slam dunk for studios, often earning less than half of what a drop in student would pay. It was also an inefficient way to convert athletic nomads like me into loyal, paying members. According to Bond, during her time listing pole classes on ClassPass, only 1.5% of her ClassPass attendees eventually converted to members.

On a philosophical level, ClassPass is also antithetical to two of any gyms’ main goals for their members: achieving long term results via consistently following their program and building a community. ClassPass attendees are by definition inconsisent and transitory. The divide wasn’t just philosophical, however.

Over time, ClassPass become increasingly controlling of the inventory of spots in classes, repeatedly trying to wrestle control of scheduling away from gym owners. While they claimed this was to the studios benefit, since empty spots earned money for no one, some studios felt it was micromanaging and overstepping boundaries. ClassPass already didn’t have a great track record on respecting gym boundaries, facing a 2020 class action lawsuit for allegedly listing dozens of businesses as ClassPass partners without these studios’ knowledge or consent.

All roads in Silicon Valley lead to an algorithim, and ClassPass eventually implemented their own to have AI settle the fight over studio spots once and for all. They eventually forced studios to use their new algorithm, which automatically decided how many spots in which classes the studio had to list on ClassPass. While this may have helped ClassPass optimize their buffet of classes and user experiences, the gyms didn’t all see it as a victory. A CrossFit coach friend of mine recently tipped me off that some of her small gym owner friends were made to reserve 8/10 spots in their classes for ClassPass attendees, which ironically ended up forcing their paying members out into the cold.

Behind the endless war for control of class pricing and inventory was, of course, an existential crisis for ClassPass: how could this service eventually make money? Like innumerable startups before it, the unit economics of all of this innovation were never sustainable and something had to give. According to Vice:

“ClassPass paid studios at low rates, but was charging customers even less, leaving the startup to find investors to pick up the tab. In 2014 and 2015 alone, the company pulled in $86 million in funding, according to CrunchBase.”

As we saw with the "too-good-to-be-true” disruption of the taxi cab industry with Uber and Lyft, the artificially low costs that early adopters like me got hooked on eventually shot up as the economic reality barged into the gym. It turned out that we had all been enjoying heavily subsidized rides, AirBnbs, deliveries, and HIIT classes all along. Someone eventually had to pay the piper and pick up the full tab.

I experienced this firsthand via an inevitable price hike part way through my tenure. When I first joined, I could attend as many classes as I wanted for $99 a month. This of course did not cover the full cost of the classes I was attending and VC funding could only recoup so much of the money they were hemorrhaging to keep me as a loyal member. So about a year or so in, they unveiled new tiered pricing. To get unlimited visits I’d now have to pay $180 a month. To attend 10 classes I could pay an increased $120 per month or to attend just 5 classes I could pay $65 per month.

Pricing for VC funded enterprises is more of a slippery moving target than that poor fish Gollum was trying to catch in Two Towers.

Since I left the platform for Oakland Fitness Company (and later CrossFit, we’re getting to that), ClassPass has has since changed its pricing, again, likely because the earlier variant still didn’t solve their investors’ financial woes. Today, ClassPass operates on a fairly confusing and opaque credit system where for between 50 and 200 dollars per month, you can get between 23 and 100 credits. What these credits actually get you is unclear because their website is now comically vague as to what the service actually entails anymore. In their own language “After signing up, you’ll be able to see the credit price for a class or appointment, which varies by things like popularity, time and reservation type.” Huh?

Having worked in content marketing, my heart goes out to the marketing team that had to redo all of the language on their app and site when they totally overhauled not just their pricing, but the very idea of what your credit card is actually paying for each month, introducing a heart-breakingly vague credit system. What a messaging nightmare that must have been.

My hunch is that classes at popular times now cost more credits to create incentives that prevent bottlenecks. I’ve also heard that you can now book nail appointments and even massages through the service. Clearly the ClassPass has grown and changed a lot since I left, though perhaps not for the better.

ClassPass’s ever-changing identity is emblematic of a tension I’ve seen and experienced and multiple startups I’ve worked at. What is simplest and most palatable for the human being you’re desperate to convert to a paying member is often what is least doable financially and logistically, while what is most profitable for you and your investors is probably as appealing to your potential customers as Poison Oak. Since both poles are a form of business suicide, the end result is a series of awkward, grasping compromises that often please no one.

At this point, I truly have no idea if ClassPass is a sustainable business model and less certainty still about if it is a net good or evil for the fitness industry. The jury seems to be still out on all of this.

Epilogue: The Road to CrossFit

The only thing that’s certain to me now is that change is a constant of life and of fitness. To stay strong, you have to adapt. So it should have come as no surprise to me in the fall of 2019 when I learned that my beloved Oakland Fitness Company was moving. Instead of a 10 minute walk from my new apartment in South Berkeley, it was going to be a 30 minute bike ride to West Oakland. We hadn’t yet bought a car, so this long commute was a dealbreaker for us. After more than two happy years, Alexis and I were fitness orphans. Time to go back to the drawing board.

After shopping around a few different gyms, we narrowed it down to the (now-shuttered, sensing a theme here?) Urban Fitness on San Pablo and CrossFit Oakland on 67th Street. Ever the creature of familiarity, I was leaning towards Urban Fitness since it was almost a carbon copy of OFC, just with different trainers, newer turf, and slightly harder classes. Alexis favored CrossFit since it was much more challenging. She thought it could take both of us to the next level after we’d clearly plateau’d on OFC’s “multi-vitamin” or “jack of all trades, master of none” approach to interval training. After some debate, I saw the wisdom of her argument and we settled on CrossFit. Once we completed the beginners onramp series to learn proper form for the basic lifts, we started attending classes in January of 2020.

While my brother had been doing CrossFit for a year and had nothing but rave reviews about it, to be honest, I had my doubts for months. It took me a while to get comfortable in this new and unapologetically challenging setting. While many ClassPass gyms had put my comfort first, CrossFit didn’t, at least on the surface. First, my fragile nervous system needed to acclimate to the all of the loud noises. For a while, I was very rattled by the loud music, grunting, and dropping of weights I’d predictably hear as the class before us wrapped up. Nothing made me quite as apprehensive about what I was about to do as seeing how sweaty, frazzled, & exhausted the class before mine looked as I nervously filled up my water bottle.

There was also confronting equipment and movements I’d long avoided. After a traumatizing two years on a crew team where I didn’t fit in during high school, I was worried about how much they involved the torturous rowing machines in classes. While I’d done barbell deadlifts and squats a few times before, CrossFit demanded that I learn new barbell movements for the first time in years. Now I had try to master intense compound lifts with rigorous form requirements like the clean, snatch, and front squat. Then, my ego took a huge bruising early on when I realized that I could only move a fraction of the weight of my classmates. Moreover, there were some movements, like the overhead squat, I was literally physically unable to do because of shoulder mobility constraints I didn’t even know I had.

It was a truly humbling first two months, but by early March of 2020 I had a few breakthroughs. First, I realized that no one cared how much I was lifting, and that was actually a good thing. On the contrary, I’d always get a “good job” from my classmates and instructors, even if I was just lifting the bar or a pair of dumbbells that day. Nobody seemed to notice if I had to modify a move like elevating the bottom of my deadlift or doing ring rows instead of pull ups. I then realized that not all the workouts were the same. While I predictably struggled on days with heavy olympic lifts, I could do surprisingly well on cardio focused days that involved running or, ironically, my old nemesis the rowing machine. I had one class that involved rowing and burpees where I finished with the best time of the class, which gave me a much needed boost of confidence.

I also noticed how the architecture of the CrossFit workouts was more thoughtful than most other HIIT classes I’d done before, allowing them to be infinitely adaptable. All of the movements had a variety of scaling options, meaning that if you couldn’t or didn’t want to do what was written on the board, the coach had 3-5 other options that you could do based on where you were at that day. Also, the design of the workouts was such that they were predictably hard, but doable, no matter what your current level of fitness was. If you were new to strength training, or just starting out like me, you could move less weight than your classmates, but the way the workouts were written meant that you’d often just end up doing more reps in the time allotted. So a workout that for a huge, jacked classmate of mine might involve a slower but heavier 3 rounds of deadlifts, might involve 5 quicker, lighter rounds for me. To their credit, to this day I have yet to attend a class that I’d describe as objectively easy and similarly have never been at one that was impossibly difficult, despite my internal trepidations when reading the diabolical workout of the day on the whiteboard. The programming has been consistently thoughtful and balanced. If my quads were wrecked from heavy squats, the next day we’d focus on a different muscle group to give our legs a chance to pull a Biden and build back better.

With fitness, as in life, timing is everything. After two solid months of figuring out CrossFit, COVID hit, the gym closed, and Alexis and I took two months off exercise entirely. During that time we discovered that BevMo delivered and also realized that not exercising consistently was terrible for our mental health and our relationship. Thankfully CrossFit had instituted Zoom classes, but scaling the workouts to our tiny in-law unit was challenging to say the least. We quickly learned that our 2 kettlebells and laundry detergent jugs were not sufficient home workout gear, our kitchen was too small for the two of us to safely do burpees in, and that we had literally no idea how far a 200 meter run was in our neighborhood. Just as prolonged working at home began to feel more like living at work, flattening the barriers between home, gym, and office was just not a sustainable strategy for our physical or mental health. So when our gym started running classes in the parking lot in the late summer of 2020, it was a breath of fresh air for both of us, literally and figuratively. Finally, we had a reason to leave the apartment at the end of the workday and could use real equipment again.

In the 2 plus years since then I’ve enjoyed CrossFit and gotten more out of it than I imagined possible. I’m currently learning more about exercise than I have in years, which is part of what inspired me to write this essay series. While my 20s were about the breadth and experimentation offered by ClassPass, my 30s now seem to be focused on exploring the depth of fitness, which has been surprisingly invigorating thus far. I’ve been reminded that I still have a lot to learn about fitness in my 30s, which is actually great news. In embracing a beginners mind once more, I’ve been humbled by the types of changes I’ve seen in my mobility, strength, and performance. I can now confidentially do explosive lifts like a snatch or clean and jerk that used to scare the shit out of me. After being unable to overhead squat with just a wooden dowel, I can now do so with a (lightly) weighted barbell. I also recently deadlifted 275 pounds for the first time in my life. More important than the weight, was that I could finally relax and feel good about this achievement, because it was a personal best for me even as others were deadlifting much more. This all took nothing more or less than consistency, curiosity, and openness to new knowledge. This reframe has taught me to embrace the ongoing, lifelong journey that fitness is.

My latest chapter has done wonders for my strength and (perhaps) visible muscles, but most importantly, my many invisible hangups around my self-consciousness and ego. I used to prefer anonymous ClassPass workouts to actively coached classes because workouts were unchallenging acts of consumption. In a true class, being stopped and coached on something used to make me feel inadequate, weak, and self-conscious. It was easier to just show up, sweat, and leave. Yet while a younger me wanted to be right all the time and therefore not need any feedback or coaching, CrossFit has taught me that coaching and feedback are pretty much always a good thing. How great is it to have a knowledgeable and thoughtful someone looking out for your form, caring about your progression, and pushing you to get stronger? Instead of being another interchangeable spandex body in the room, at my gym I am now a protagonist with his own unique backstory, limitations, and goals. I’m also once again enjoying the connectivity and support that a gym can provide. For me, CrossFit is as much a social & emotional community as it is a physical place to workout. With the sweaty, athletic anonymity of ClassPass now firmly in the rearview mirror, I’ve honestly never been more excited about the challenges and contours of the road ahead. Sometimes I even daydream about dropping in on a SoulCycle class to see if I’ve still got it.

Appendix:

This series was a true lengthy labor of love. Thanks for reading the whole thing, or perhaps hopping around to get what you wanted out of it, or just skipping to the CrossFit chapter because you too do CrossFit. If you’re still hungry for more, below are some of my favorite follow ups to learn even more about exercise:

Books:

Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery by Christie Aschwanden- A fun tour through recovery modalities that answers many questions like “does foam rolling do anything?” “Why did Tom Brady create recovery pajamas?” and “is the placebo effect really what it’s all about?”
The Sports Gene by David Epstein- A Gladwellian “info-tainment” tour through the world of athletic performance.
The New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess by Lou Schuler- Alexis recommended this to me and I enjoyed its empowering message and no-nonsense approach to resistance training. Spoiler alert: it’s something we all should be doing no matter our gender identity or fitness goals.

Podcasts:

The Fittest Podcast in Oakland- Ben and Robin, the owners and head trainers of Crossfit Oakland (now Community Fitness Oakland) share valuable lessons about training, nutrition, mindset, and more.
The Industrial Strength Show with Joe DeFranco- Self-described meathead and fitness legend Joe DeFranco shares his experiences, hot takes, and best practices from training elite athletes like wrestlers and NFL players for decades.

Resources I’ve benefitted from for self care and recovery:

Tom Merrick’s 5 Minute Morning Mobility Routine- This delightfully short and effective Youtube video is a great way to start the day or limber up after a workout. The rest of his content, focused on bodyweight fitness and mobility is similarly delightful, but this video is by far my favorite one of his.
Berkeley Deep Sports Massage- Yes the acronym is BDSM, deal with it.
Emily Noe Physical Therapy- A very skilled physical therapist who has helped me through multiple hamstring pulls, achilles pain, back pain, and rotator cuff issues.
Reboot Spa- Offers float tanks, sauna, and cryo, all of which I’d recommend if you’re curious—the latter of which is like the worlds best cold plunge!

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