From CrossFit Failure to Building a Competitive Lifting System

I tried CrossFit and failed. But I can’t dance either, so it really wasn’t much of a shocker.

I dropped the $300 intro fee, showed up to the gym motivated and ready to learn. I even had a great coach. But after a month of one-on-one lessons and a few group sessions, I was no closer to performing a respectable clean than when I started. I knew complex movements take time, but honestly, I wasn’t into the competitiveness within the gym either. People watched everything I did with an insatiable look in their eyes—sizing me up for conquering.

During my first group session, part of the workout incorporated ergs—rowers, as they called them. I remember sitting down between two women, both of whom spent the entire time looking at my screen instead of their own. Maybe because I was two-thirds their size and pulling splits a minute below theirs. But fuck’em. I did crew for six years, and my memory works just well enough to remember it goes—legs, back, arms; arms, back, legs. And don’t pull the handle into your face.

By the end of that overpriced introductory month, I was done. I didn’t feel like I could progress within the program without serious risk of injury, and the competitiveness cloaked in “community” rubbed me the wrong way.

I really wanted to do CrossFit, though, because I think CrossFit bodies look better than bodybuilder bodies—minus the turtle shell guts. Look at the big names like Mat Fraser and Tia-Clair Toomey. They look powerful. They look healthy. They look like fucking Spartans.

But I also knew I loved going to the gym as much as possible and planned to continue doing so for as many years as I could. That meant I needed a plan, and plans usually have objectives.

CrossFit was on to something by turning the entire experience into a competition. Competition fuels motivation. But when you look around a regular gym, everyone is in their own worlds. So how do you add competition to something people usually do alone?

From my time working in virtual reality, I was well aware of the power of gamification. People’s inherent need to beat their previous highest score bordered on addiction. During the chaos of 2020, I had the opportunity to stay home and do nothing but work on whatever interested me most. And what interested me most was creating a scoring system for weightlifting that made it easier to quantify and compare varying levels of training volume and workload.

At first, I just needed something to keep myself motivated. I had gone from having access to the best equipment money could buy to only having a pair of shitty dumbbells, resistance bands, and a pull-up bar. My reps went from 6–8 to 20–30. Without the proper equipment to train how I wanted, my motivation plummeted.

So I spent March tinkering with math. In April, I began testing. By August, I realized the only reason I was getting out of bed was to beat my previous scores.

I had created motivation for myself, but I still wanted competition. The scoring system allowed everyone performing a particular workout to see how they stacked up against anyone else doing the same workout. The natural progression was to implement leaderboards.

This is where The Lift League took shape. I wanted to build something that actually kept people motivated—something that made lifting feel less like a solo grind and more like a challenge you looked forward to conquering. The goal was simple: create a system that makes resistance training accessible, keeps it competitive, and pushes both beginners and experienced lifters to show up, put in the work, and stay consistent.