Reinvention Through CrossFit: Branded Transformation Documentaries

Abstract

This article analyses a set of branded promotional documentaries from the CrossFit YouTube channel, which depict new participants as they transition into a CrossFit lifestyle. These documentaries share narrative elements of reality makeover television’s hybrid entertainment/educational format, deploying popular tropes of reinvention and personal empowerment through guided consumption. In focusing largely on participants dealing with chronic health issues, the documentaries reproduce dominant neoliberal ideologies about personal responsibility for health through fitness and construct CrossFit as a socially engaged brand with an inclusive fitness mission. These documentaries may also mitigate dominant, intimidating media images of high-performing CrossFit competitors who embody the brand image, as well as CrossFit’s reputation as an extreme fitness practice. This article takes Dawson’s (2017) position that CrossFit is a contemporary reinventive institution, which makes omnivorous demands of its adherents’ lives in exchange for personal transformation. In these documentaries, participants’ successful transition into exemplary CrossFit membership hinges not only on capitulation to these demands but recognition of them as desirable steps toward self-making and health. Reinvention is depicted as willing conformity to CrossFit values and behaviours, rather than simply the achievement of physical fitness, and those who successfully transform are constructed as aspirational embodiments of the brand.