Why CrossFit boxes are adding saunas

Five years ago recovery meant a foam roller in the corner. Now your members track their sleep, take cold showers on purpose and talk about heat exposure the way they talk about programming. The demand side has already moved; the question is whether they do their recovery at your box or pay someone else for it.

A sauna on site answers that. It keeps the post-WOD hour inside your four walls, turns a training facility into somewhere members stay, and puts your box on the right side of a habit your community has already adopted.

Three things, in the order owners tend to feel them:

• Retention. Cancelling a membership is harder when it is also your sauna membership. The sauna gives members a reason to come on rest days, which is exactly when a box usually loses them.
• A new revenue line. Sauna access sells as a membership tier, a per-session booking or a recovery add-on, through the booking system you already run.
• Differentiation. Every box in your area sells coaching and community. Very few sell heat. It is a visible, photographable reason to choose yours.

The community effect matters as much as the money. The sauna bench does for rest days what the whiteboard does for training days: it gives people a reason to stay and talk.

We build three saunas: the horsebox sauna, the 10ft container sauna and the 20ft container sauna. For a box, the containers are the usual fit: they sit in a car park, yard or outdoor space, arrive built, and are made for high-traffic commercial use.

Financed through Johnson Reed, a sauna starts from around £1,000 a month. Most owners set that against a recovery tier on the membership: the maths is a short conversation once you know how many members would pay a few pounds a week more for heat.

There are two routes to a sauna at your box:

• Buy. From your own funds, or spread the cost from around £1,000 a month through our finance partner, Johnson Reed. You own the asset and keep everything it earns, from the month it arrives.
• Partner. For select opportunities, the no-capital route. We place and maintain the sauna, you provide the site and the members, and we share what it earns.

This is one decision inside the bigger picture for venues: our complete guide to adding a sauna to your business covers it in full.

Eastgate CrossFit added one of our container saunas to their facility. The unit went into space they already had, and sauna access folded into the box they already ran.

And they are far from alone in adding heat: our operator map shows the businesses running our saunas across the UK right now.

The first step is a 20-minute call. Tell us about your box, your members and where a sauna might sit. Before we speak, we send a revenue model tailored to your gym, so the call starts from your numbers rather than ours.

Everything you need is on our page for businesses, or start with the form below.