STOP SELLING “OCR”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after watching countless gyms that proudly advertised themselves as an OCR gym shut shut their doors, or seeing every CrossFit gym who used to “add on” OCR classes now “add on” HYROX classes. Every time something like that happens, everyone starts asking the same questions. Is OCR dying? Is the sport dead? Is nobody interested anymore? Personally, I think they’re asking the wrong question. I don’t think people stopped wanting what obstacle course racing actually provides. I think they stopped wanting what the acronym represents.

That’s an important distinction.

I’ve spent the better part of fifteen years building athletes around obstacle course racing, coaching it, racing it, dragging people into it kicking and screaming, and watching complete beginners become people they never thought they could become. OCR changed my life. It built a business. It introduced me to lifelong friends. It gave me stories I’ll be telling until I’m old enough that nobody believes them anymore. So this isn’t coming from someone who wants to distance himself from obstacle course racing. It’s coming from someone who loves it enough to admit we’ve done a spectacular job of confusing everyone about what it actually is.

Think about what happens when you tell someone you own an OCR gym. Half the people ask if that’s like American Ninja Warrior. The other half immediately picture Spartan Race. Somebody inevitably asks if they have to crawl through mud or get electrocuted, because apparently Tough Mudder’s marketing department did such a fantastic job convincing America that voluntary workplace safety violations were fitness. Before you’ve explained a single thing about what you actually teach, you’re already spending ten minutes undoing somebody else’s definition of those three letters.

Are their bands or burpees? And if there are burpees, what is the movement standard? And if it’s bands is it one band or three? 

That’s a terrible place to start a conversation.

Then there’s HYBRID. I actually like hybrid training. We use it all the time. Running and strength belong together. The problem is that “hybrid” has become just as loaded as OCR. Depending on who you’re talking to, hybrid either means CrossFit for people that can’t do a proper wall ball shot, CrossFit without muscle-ups, CrossFit for people who don’t like Olympic lifting, or simply running between exercises. Nobody agrees on the definition anymore and whether HYROX or DEKA, both seem extremely determined to outperform OCR in their inability to properly staff a race or consistently enforce rules. It’s another word that’s accumulated so much baggage it spends more time creating confusion than clarity.

Meanwhile, we’ve quietly been doing something different this entire time.

The goal at HartFit has never been to produce obstacle racers. That’s simply one of the outcomes. The goal has always been to produce people who are more capable than they were yesterday. People who can carry awkward things without hurting themselves. People who don’t panic when they’re uncomfortable. People who can solve problems while they’re exhausted instead of immediately looking for the nearest folding chair. That’s a much bigger mission than preparing someone to ring a bell at the top of a rope climb.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that we’ve been describing ourselves wrong for years. We don’t train OCR. We don’t train HYBRID. We use both because they’re incredibly useful tools, but neither one is the mission. The mission is what I’ve started calling Controlled Adversity Fitness.

That isn’t some cute marketing slogan I came up with because consultants love inventing categories. It’s a description of exactly what happens every time someone walks through our gate. We intentionally expose people to manageable physical and mental challenges that force adaptation without crossing the line into stupidity. That’s important because our fitness industry has somehow managed to convince people there are only two options. Either exercise should be perfectly comfortable, climate-controlled and optimized down to your smartwatch telling you whether your breathing is sufficiently aerobic… or it should involve some influencer screaming at you while flipping tires until your spine files a complaint with HR. Neither one prepares you particularly well for real life.

The funny part is this isn’t even a new idea. Humans have been adapting to controlled adversity for literally hundreds of thousands of years. We just didn’t call it fitness because there wasn’t a need to. Life itself supplied enough adversity to keep everyone physically and mentally engaged. You carried water because you wanted to drink. You climbed because there was food or safety on the other side of whatever you were climbing. You walked because there wasn’t another option. You squatted because chairs weren’t exactly a hot commodity. Nobody tracked macros around a campfire or debated whether carrying a dead deer counted as Zone 2. You simply adapted because survival rewarded capable people and punished incapable ones. Modern life has done an incredible job removing almost every one of those demands, which is wonderful if your goal is convenience and absolutely terrible if your goal is remaining physically capable.

That’s where exercise came in, and to be fair, exercise has accomplished incredible things. We’ve become stronger, we’ve learned more about physiology than ever before, and sports science has given us a roadmap for improving nearly every measurable component of human performance. Progressive overload has been validated over and over again. Apply stress, recover from that stress, and the body comes back better prepared for the next exposure. Bones become denser. Tendons become stiffer. Muscles grow. Your heart pumps more efficiently. Your brain even gets better at recruiting muscle fibers because strength isn’t just about muscle tissue, it’s also about teaching your nervous system how to use what it already has. The science is remarkably clear. Human beings are adaptation machines.

What the science also tells us, though, is that adaptation isn’t limited to muscles. Psychologists have spent decades studying resilience, and one of the most consistent findings is that people don’t become mentally tougher by avoiding stress. They become mentally tougher by experiencing manageable amounts of it, recovering, then realizing they handled something they previously thought they couldn’t. Researchers sometimes refer to this as stress inoculation. It’s the same principle used in military training, emergency response, aviation, and countless other professions where performance under pressure actually matters. You don’t throw someone into complete chaos on day one. You expose them to increasing levels of challenge until competence replaces panic. That’s not abuse. That’s education.

Movement research points in the same direction. The body doesn’t become adaptable by repeating the exact same movement in the exact same environment forever. It becomes adaptable through variability. Uneven terrain. Different loads. Different grip positions. Different speeds. Unexpected transitions. Your brain is constantly building better movement solutions because it keeps encountering new problems to solve. Compare that to spending forty-five minutes staring at the same television while an elliptical trainer faithfully removes every meaningful decision from your workout. Efficient? Sure. Challenging? Maybe. Preparing you for anything outside that gym? Not especially.

That’s why I’ve never understood the obsession with making fitness as predictable as possible. We celebrate machines that eliminate balance. We design equipment that tells you exactly where your hands go. We spend thousands of dollars creating perfectly flat running surfaces inside climate-controlled buildings while simultaneously wondering why people’s backs hurt after carrying groceries or why they roll an ankle the second they step on an actual trail. We’ve become unbelievably good at exercising in environments specifically designed to remove the variables that make human movement valuable in the first place.

Controlled Adversity Fitness flips that philosophy upside down.

Instead of asking, “How can we make this exercise easier to perform?” we ask, “What adaptation are we trying to create?” Sometimes the answer is strength, so we’ll lift something heavy. Sometimes it’s endurance, so we’ll run. Sometimes it’s grip, balance, coordination, spatial awareness, or problem-solving under fatigue. Sometimes it’s simply teaching someone that being uncomfortable isn’t actually an emergency. The workout isn’t built around a piece of equipment. It’s built around a human adaptation.

That’s also why obstacle course racing fits so naturally into what we do. Notice I said fits into it. It isn’t the destination. It’s one of the best vehicles we’ve found for creating those adaptations because obstacles force your body and brain to work together in ways a barbell never can by itself. You have to think while you’re tired. Adjust while you’re moving. Make decisions while your heart rate is elevated. Fail, regroup, and immediately try again. That’s real life. Real life rarely asks whether you can bench press your bodyweight. It asks whether you can solve problems when you’re exhausted, frustrated, and wishing somebody else would handle it.

That’s the mission.

OCR just happens to be one of the best classrooms I’ve ever found for teaching it, and I was involved as a fitness professional for 10 years before I ever ran my first OCR.

The more I look around the fitness industry, the more I think we’ve all become obsessed with selling methods instead of outcomes. Every discipline believes its own logo is the answer. CrossFit has its methodology. Bodybuilding has its methodology. Powerlifting has its methodology. HYROX has its methodology. Running has its methodology. OCR has its methodology. Every camp insists they’ve figured out the secret while quietly pretending the others are missing something.

The truth is they’re all missing something because they’re all sports.

That’s not an insult. I love sports. But somewhere along the line, people started confusing being good at a sport with being prepared for life, and those aren’t remotely the same thing.

A marathon runner could cover twenty-six miles but struggle carrying an eighty-pound bag of concrete across a yard. A powerlifter could squat six hundred pounds and be completely humbled by climbing a rope. A bodybuilder could look like a Marvel superhero until he’s asked to jog two miles without negotiating with his lungs halfway through. CrossFit athletes are phenomenally fit, but put some of them on uneven terrain where movement quality matters more than barbell mechanics and suddenly all those perfect gym reps don’t always translate. The same goes for OCR athletes. I’ve watched obstacle racers who could fly across multi-rigs get dropped because they couldn’t carry anything heavy. Every sport develops incredible specialists.

Life couldn’t care less about specialists.

Life rewards versatility.

Nobody gets a text message saying, “Congratulations. Today you’ll only need your upper body.”

Nobody schedules emergencies around leg day.

Nobody politely waits until you’ve completed your deload week before asking you to move furniture, help after a car accident, carry your injured dog off a hiking trail, or spend twelve hours cutting up fallen trees after a windstorm. Real life has an incredible habit of throwing random physical problems at you without first checking whether they align with your current training block.

That’s why capability has always mattered more to me than performance.

Performance is what you can demonstrate inside the rules of a particular sport.

Capability is what remains when there are no rules.

Capability is adapting when the plan falls apart.

Capability is staying calm when something unexpected happens.

Capability is figuring out how to get over, under, around or through whatever obstacle life just dropped in front of you instead of standing there waiting for someone to explain the workout.

Ironically, that’s exactly what obstacle course racing was originally so good at teaching.

Not because of podiums.

Not because of medals.

Not because somebody got to call themselves elite on Instagram after finishing a race with seven participants. 

It was because obstacles forced people to stop thinking like exercisers and start thinking like problem solvers.

Somewhere along the way, though, even OCR started drifting toward specialization. People wanted the fastest rigs. The hardest grip gadgets. More technical obstacles. More niche skills. More things that made you better at OCR instead of making OCR better at making you a more capable human being.

I understand why it happened. We definitely contributed to it ourselves. Every sport evolves. Every sport becomes more competitive. Every sport eventually begins rewarding specialization.

But that’s exactly why I don’t want to sell the sport anymore.

I want to sell what the sport was accidentally creating all along.

A more resilient person.

A more adaptable person.

A more useful person.

Someone who doesn’t immediately panic when things become physically uncomfortable because discomfort isn’t foreign anymore. It’s familiar. They’ve lived there before. They’ve solved problems there before. They’ve failed there before. More importantly, they’ve discovered failure usually isn’t fatal, despite what social media would have us believe every time somebody misses a pull-up.

That’s Controlled Adversity Fitness.

Not because adversity is somehow noble by itself. There’s nothing magical about suffering. Anybody can make someone miserable. That’s easy. Good coaches have been doing the opposite for years. They apply exactly enough challenge to force adaptation without breaking the person standing in front of them.

That’s where the word controlled matters.

Anyone can make a workout harder.

Very few people know how to make someone better.

Maybe Controlled Adversity Fitness never becomes a thing.

Maybe ten years from now everyone still argues about whether they’re a CrossFitter, a HYROX athlete, an obstacle racer, a bodybuilder, a runner or whatever new fitness label gets invented because apparently we can’t just exercise without forming another tribe.

That’s fine.

I’m not interested in winning an argument over terminology.

I’m interested in producing people who can handle life better because they chose to voluntarily do difficult things before life volunteered them.

I don’t particularly care whether someone ever signs up for a Spartan Race, a HYROX event or an ultramarathon. If they do, great. I’ll probably be there cheering them on or lining up beside them. But if the only thing they ever gain from training here is the confidence to hike that mountain they’ve always avoided, carry their kid without throwing out their back, help a neighbor after a storm, recover after falling down instead of staying there, or simply stop doubting themselves every time life gets uncomfortable, then we’ve already accomplished something far more valuable than another finisher medal hanging in a garage and a blue check mark next to your name because giving your social security number to Instagram makes you official. 

That’s why I don’t want to sell OCR anymore.

I want to sell capability.

I want to sell confidence that has actually been earned instead of manufactured through motivational quotes and filtered Instagram videos.

I want to sell resilience that comes from experience instead of hashtags.

OCR.

HYBRID.

CrossFit.

Running.

Strength training.

They’re all just tools.

Good tools.

Useful tools.

But no carpenter ever framed a house because he loved hammers.

He loved what the hammer allowed him to build.

That’s how I look at obstacle course racing now.

I don’t love it because of the obstacles.

I love it because of the people it has the potential to create when it’s used correctly.

Maybe that’s been the answer all along.

Stop trying to convince people to love obstacle course racing.

Show them what becoming more capable feels like.

If we do that well enough…

The obstacles will take care of themselves.