SugarWOD: Bringing Software to Constantly Varied, High-Intensity Functional Movements
SugarWOD has brought personalized digital power to the CrossFit Box. This platform now allows you and your coach to better track workouts, analyze performance, and increase the sense of community. Fist Bump!
SugarWOD’s Value Proposition
After departing from a software company in Chicago and being introduced to CrossFit (CF), SugarWOD founders brought the power of data and analytics and created a platform with the goal of being “the heart of the box” [1]. Since its introduction as a free platform and digital tool in 2013, SugarWOD has quickly proliferated throughout the athletes, coaches, and gym (box) owners that are a part of the competitive, and often misunderstood, CF community. With the ability to harness data and the power of analytics, coaches and athletes can better optimize workout programming, performance, recovery, and communication.
The Platform – Creating Value Through Excellent Coaching and a Strong Community
SugarWOD: Raise Your Workout Experience [2]
Anyone familiar with CrossFit’s “constantly varied, high-intensity, functional movements performed across broad time and modal domains” know that success and failure within the gym hinges upon the coach’s ability to program workouts that push the athletes, without breaking them [3]. For the past several years, CF coaches and athletes have used countless notebooks, sticky pads, whiteboards, word documents, excel spreadsheets, and cameras to keep track of every one of their workouts. Since CF is really kaizen for your body and mind, coaches and athletes would have to flip through hundreds of pages of notes when programming workouts or deciding what weight is the right weight for the prescribed workout of the day (WOD). While there have been several entrants into the WOD tracking market (Train Heroic, WODBook, myWOD, etc), SugarWOD has captured the focus over 550,000 athletes and 2200 CF gyms [4].
Elements of SugarWOD
SugarWOD began as a means for coaches to better track the programming of their gym and gave them the option to create additional tracks (i.e. daily WOD, games preparation, endurance athletes, high school athletes, etc). The platform soon integrated library of named workouts (i.e. the girls and hero workouts), access to movement demonstration media, and expanded to athletes as well to track their own individual performance. What is truly innovative is that SugarWOD didn’t stop at just the coaches and athletes and the programming of workouts. SugarWOD made this platform an open API so it can be customized, while also integrating it into every aspect of the gym and fostering a stronger community. Even though SugarWOD is a mobile-first system, they also created “BoxTV” to bring the data, performance, analytics, and community to the big screen (or whatever size TV you have in the gym) [5].
As SugarWOD’s user base grew, they were quickly able to grow the platform and adapt it to the user’s needs. This includes the use of data analytics. The longer an athlete is on their platform, the more historical data is available for the system to analyze movement trends and performance, allowing the platform to recommend tailored warmups. Additionally, coaches can monitor individual athlete performance – including overall fitness assessments and progress, the overall gym’s performance and participation over time, while tracking the incorporation of the variety of functional movements utilized to ensure balanced programming.
Through the creation of a social platform, SugarWOD also allows athletes to interact with and support one another. SugarWOD doesn’t only help its athletes have the best work out of their life, every day, the platform allows the cohesiveness and comradery felt within the gym to continue outside of the gym.
Value Capture
SugarWOD has a demonstrated value creation for gyms, coaches, and athletes, but currently only captures value from the gym. As human performance data becomes more available, SugarWOD could capture additional value through expanding the lifestyle product to include nutrition and health products or partnering with university and institutional health research leaders to harness the power of the available data.
Sources
[1] “Our Story.” SugarWOD, 2019, www.sugarwod.com/our-story
[2] “SugarWOD.” iTunes App Store, itunes.apple.com/us/app/sugarwod/id665516348?mt=8.
[3] Classman, Greg. “Understanding CrossFit.” CrossFit, 2017, journal.crossfit.com/2007/04/understanding-crossfit-by-greg.tpl.
[4] SugarWOD, 2019, www.sugarwod.com.
[5] “The Best Workout Experience.” SugarWOD, 2019, www.sugarwod.com/the-best-workout-experience.