Before I ever walked into a gym, I assumed I wouldn’t belong. That wasn’t unique to fitness — it was how I felt walking into almost any new room. School lunch tables, clubs, a 100-person lecture hall, even parties where I didn’t know where to stand. I always felt slightly different from everyone else, like I belonged a little to a lot of groups, but fully to none. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just a quiet assumption I carried with me into almost every new space: I probably won’t fit in here either.
So when I first walked into CrossFit Lincoln, I expected the same thing to happen. I braced for it, honestly. Instead, it turned out to be one of the first places in my adult life where I actually felt like I belonged — and it happened almost immediately. That hadn’t happened for me since I played on a few sports teams growing up. It’s a rare feeling, and it’s stuck with me ever since, which is a big part of why I care so much about making sure other people get to feel it too.
Most people picture the wrong thing.
Before I ever stepped into a real gym, I assumed it would be full of professional athletes — people who trained for a living, who already knew what they were doing, who I’d have nothing in common with. It wasn’t until after college, walking into a YMCA, that I realized regular people go to the gym — people just trying to get a little better, one day at a time. I still carried that same assumption about “specialty” gyms, picturing them stacked with elite athletes, until I actually walked into one myself. Turns out it’s just a bunch of average people showing up and doing the work. That assumption keeps a lot of people away from something that would actually help them, and I was one of them for a long time.
What makes people feel like outsiders isn’t the room — it’s the silence.
The times I felt worst walking into somewhere new weren’t because the material was hard or the people were unkind. It was the quiet. Nobody acknowledging me, nobody inviting me in, nobody making eye contact. The more unfamiliar the situation, the worse that silence felt. What helped, every time, was someone reaching out first — a coach, a leader, even just one other person saying “you can sit here.” It didn’t take much. It just had to happen.
I think about that a lot when I think about why some people judge themselves before anyone else even has the chance to. It’s usually not random — it comes from somewhere. Something they were taught growing up, or something they picked up from a place that genuinely didn’t welcome them. The tricky part is that once you’re carrying that assumption, it’s hard to walk into a new room without it, even when the room itself is nothing like the one that taught you to feel that way.
That’s the whole model here, and we built it on purpose.
We know your name before your first class, because your coach has already met you and texts ahead to let them know you’re coming. Members spot new faces fast, and they walk over to introduce themselves — where are you from, what brought you in, here’s where the equipment is. We sit down with everyone before they even join, just to get to know them, answer questions, and let them get comfortable with the space before they ever have to do a workout in it. By the time you walk through the door for real, you should hear your name more than once, from more than one person.
I’ve talked to a lot of members about this, and the story is almost always the same. They assumed they weren’t fit enough, and the opposite happened. They realized how many options exist for almost every movement we do. They realized nobody in the room is being judged against anyone else — everyone’s just doing their own version of the workout, at their own pace. That fear usually doesn’t take weeks to fade. It drops the moment they actually experience it for themselves, and it happens faster than people expect, because it’s genuinely not what they think it’s going to be.
I compare it to grocery stores sometimes. You can tell within a minute of walking into one which kind you’re in — the kind where someone greets you and asks if they can help you find something, or the kind where the shelves are half-empty and nobody looks up. You keep going back to the first kind. You avoid the second, even when it’s got something on sale. Most gyms, by default, feel like the second kind — headphones in, mirrors up, everyone locked into their own world. So when people walk into something different, it genuinely surprises them, and belonging happens fast because of that contrast.
Belonging here doesn’t depend on fitness level, and it never will.
We have members from 16 to 70 years old. People who’ve never worked out a day in their life train right next to former collegiate athletes. On a heavy lifting day, one group shines. On a running day, it flips entirely. Everyone gets humbled, and everyone gets built up in the same class — that’s what actually creates closeness, more than any icebreaker ever could.
If you’ve ever avoided something new because you assumed you wouldn’t fit in, you’re not alone in that feeling — but it’s usually wrong. The people who feel like they need to “earn” their spot before showing up are exactly the people this place is built for. You don’t have to already be fit. You don’t have to already belong to anything. You just have to show up and be willing to get a little better than you were yesterday.