Four Years Later, CrossFit’s Disgraced Guru Attempts a Comeback

Greg Glassman, who sold the company amid sexual harassment complaints, has a new health and fitness venture. It sounds a lot like his old one.

In the summer of 2021, Josh Hunnicutt, a longtime personal trainer and the owner of the New Species CrossFit gym in Royal Oak, Mich., had a surprising opportunity: Greg Glassman, CrossFit’s contentious but charismatic co-founder, offered — more or less out of the blue — to pick him up in his private jet and fly him to a party in Ohio. The pitch was for the two of them to drink vodka sodas and rub elbows with other luminaries of the health and fitness industry.

Mr. Hunnicutt couldn’t say exactly why Mr. Glassman had singled him out with this invitation — “I randomly caught his attention, I think because I mentioned all my daddy issues,” he speculated in a recent video interview. But after spending time with Mr. Glassman, he was duly impressed. “It was the most surreal experience,” he said. “People say, ‘Don’t meet your heroes, because you’ll be disappointed.’ But Greg is Greg.”

Mr. Hunnicutt described himself as “the most basic version of a CrossFit box owner there is,” with “the pit bull, the tattoos and the wife who also does CrossFit.” His gym was founded in 2008 in the basement of a Y.M.C.A., and for 16 years it has scrupulously followed the philosophy of fitness that Mr. Glassman, a former gymnast, expounded on the CrossFit website in the early 2000s — a simple but revolutionary methodology based on “constantly varied, high-intensity functional movements,” which spawned a brand worth billions that has been adopted in more than 12,000 gyms across 140 countries.

But while his facility will continue to offer CrossFit training, Mr. Hunnicutt will be among the first gym owners to promote Mr. Glassman’s new fitness offering: MetFix, an “invite-only community” of gyms and trainers that bills itself as an “evolution of Greg Glassman’s methodology.”

Part functional fitness program with movements in the vein of CrossFit, part nutrition program that advises against sugar and carbs, it’s designed to “cut through the epidemic of chronic disease that’s killing millions and bankrupting nations.” Or, as Mr. Hunnicutt described it, “it’s a grown and sexy version of CrossFit, with a little bit more on the critical thinking.”