Abstract
Branded as ‘the sport of fitness’, CrossFit is a burgeoning exercise regime that has surpassed the growth of well-known fitness franchises. In addition to its comprehensive fitness regime, it claims to offer a supportive community, which aims to ensure that people do not exercise ‘together alone’. The tight-knit—almost insular—nature of this community, as well as some of its more extreme practices, has led followers and detractors alike to characterize CrossFit as a cult. This chapter argues that the ‘cult’ label is too parochial and, instead, applies Susie Scott’s notion of ‘reinventive institutions’ to explain why CrossFit is so polarizing. With its emphasis on voluntarism, performative regulation, and mutual surveillance, the concept of the ‘reinventive institution’ offers a more useful and expansive theoretical tool that allows us to understand how power, identity construction, and self-transformation operate in CrossFit.
This chapter was previously published by SAGE Publications as Dawson, M. C. (2017). CrossFit: Fitness Cult or Reinventive Institution? International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 52(3), 361–379. The content has not been changed but the chapter has been formatted to match the style of other chapters in the current edited collection.