A story of how one box owner runs his affiliate.
Element CrossFit, located in Mississauga, isn't run like the “average” CrossFit box. And that's just the way Alex Cibiri likes it.
Cibiri isn't an average guy. He has a huge frame with a booming voice and personality to match. Every affiliate owner in Canada East knows Cibiri, if not for his presence, for his renowned events.
“I played basketball in University, got the standard desk job, did all the things you're supposed to do,” Cibiri says. "I was working out at a globo gym, but kept getting in worse shape. I was spending two hours working out everyday and just slowly regressing.”
Then he saw the movie “300.” “It sounds like a cliché now, but I watched videos of the actors training and I thought, ‘I totally want to work out like that.’”
After trying Fran on his own, Cibiri went to CrossFit Mississauga. “They were still drilling the whiteboards on the walls when I came in for a demo,” he says. “I got absolutely destroyed. I pulled in everyone I knew right away.”
Soon, Cibiri quit his job and began to look for locations to open his own box. “I didn't know exactly what I was going to do, except that I wanted to do CrossFit,” he says. “My mom thought it was a terrible idea. I had to fly to California for the [Seminar course] back then.”
Element CrossFit became an affiliate in August 2008.
“I thought, ‘This is my chance to make a gym run the way I would want it to run if I were an athlete,’” he says. “I was too independent to work at everyone else's pace. Some days, I wanted to spend more time on some things than others. I always wanted to hang out with people afterward. That’s always been a big part of the experience for me, staying and messing around. Play time is always where the best stuff happens."
For instance, at the original Element location, Cibiri built his own pull-up rig out of four-by-fours and sprinkler pipe. They were spaced at different heights to keep the rig stable. "We were doing bar muscle-ups before they were popular, trying to kip from one bar to the higher bar,” he says. “I don't like the traditional hour-long model. It takes away the volitional piece of the athlete. I don't want people to turn their brains off.”
In the Element system, the gym is loosely divided into three areas: a lifting area, a met-con area and a warm-up area. Athletes cycle through each area in 20-minute increments, allowing Cibiri to start a new class every 20 minutes. "Twenty people per hour would be big in most boxes," he says. "I can move 30 to 40 people through in the same hour."
Though his system is more trainer-dependent, it also allows for his coaches to spend more time coaching their strengths. A coach who loves the back squat, for instance, can find himself at the rack for hours at a time as groups rotate through.
The model is also very popular with Cibiri’s athletes. “I am my customer,” he says. “I could make the 5 p.m. group today, but tomorrow I can’t come until 6:15, and the next day I get called into a meeting that lasts until 7 … I couldn't commit to always being around at 5 p.m.”
Now, his athletes can show up and start with the next group rotation, waiting a maximum of 20 minutes.
A notoriously hard worker, Cibiri routinely spends 60 to 70 hours per week working on his business. It shows, especially in his events. Starting with a team challenge in 2009, Cibiri has grown from 23 teams of six to 100 teams of six in the same event, three years later. “I think it's the biggest CrossFit event in Canada,” he says.
His calendar includes the team challenge in September, an individual challenge in June and another in January to help people prepare for the CrossFit Games Open. His events don't allow for scaling, but do allow for limitless creativity. Cibiri runs his events through a separate website that streams live scoring results and allows for hands-off registration.
The big man just opened a new Element facility in his hometown of Mississauga. Element keeps getting bigger and continues to follow a non-traditional route.
