Elite Coaches Talk Preparation for the Busiest CrossFit Season in History
As the 2025 CrossFit Games season details have trickled in, in recent weeks, a couple of things have become clear:
- There appear to be more opportunities for elite athletes to compete this year than any other season and more opportunities to make money.
Opportunity comes with other challenges for the athletes in terms of peaking, tapering, and staying mentally and physically healthy in a season that doesn’t appear to give athletes an off-season at all.
We caught up with three coaches whose athletes plan to compete in the CrossFit Games season and the World Fitness Project (WFP) to hear their thoughts as we head into the busiest CrossFit season in history.
Navigating the 2025 Season
Justin Cotler, Adam Neiffer, and Kyle Rolfe all have athletes hoping to qualify for this summer’s Games, who have also signed contracts with WFP, and all agree their athletes — Alex Gazan, Justin Medeiros, and Emily Rolfe — will be competing “considerably more, likely double,” Cotler said, than in previous years.
- And while Gazan, Medeiros, and Rolfe’s “Plan A” is to qualify for the Games via the In-Affiliate Semifinal, if that doesn’t happen, they will have to add yet another taxing, multi-day competition or two to their schedule as they try to qualify through one of the In-Person Qualifying Events.
As a result, all three coaches say there likely won’t be an opportunity to take as much downtime from training as in the past.
In past years, Gazan and Medeiros took considerable time off for intense training after the CrossFit Games and the Rogue Invitational in October before ramping up for the following season.
- The two-time CrossFit Games champion Medeiros has always taken “some pretty big breaks,” Neiffer said. “His biggest off-season this year was after Rogue. Not that he wasn’t training, but training was not as involved [from November until the new year].”
This upcoming season, however, if athletes are hoping to be close to their best for the WFP’s World Fitness Finals in December, they won’t be able to take those weeks off lighter training in the fall, which has also provided them with much-needed mental rest in the past.
Neiffer admits this changes the game slightly, but he’s prepared to adapt.
- “Rather than having one massive peak for the CrossFit Games, it feels like we’re going to be just a little more steady in the approach this year,” he said.
As for Cotler, he expects that he will have to “build in more tapers and more deloads this year” for Gazan.
- “I also think we’re going to have to be smart about volume in between events. The good news is [at 23, Alex] is young. It’s difficult to train at 33 the way you train at 23,” he explained. “She does very well with moderate volume compared to some of the athletes I have coached in the past,” he said.
Cotler and Neiffer agreed that managing their athletes physically in 2025 will be more important than managing them mentally.
- “I think there’s a little more level of pacing yourself, especially mentally, for a long season,” Neiffer said.
Cotler agrees, saying, “Competing is different [than training]. It’s more exciting for athletes to compete, but I also think it takes a toll mentally, especially when [you consider] travel and all those things.
- “It will be a new experience for [Alex] because she has never competed this much. It’s almost like a test year in a way to see how that’s going to be. I will always be cautious with her because she is 23…and hasn’t reached her peak yet. She has another seven to 10 years [of competing] if she wants,” he added.
As for Rolfe, Kyle, her husband and coach, said Emily’s an athlete whose fitness tends to remain relatively close to her peak throughout the whole season, as she isn’t all that into taking long breaks from hard training.
- “Emily has never had a full month off in her life anyway, so she’s fairly used to this,” Kyle said.
Regardless of the competition schedule, the big picture regarding programming remains: It will focus on tackling weaknesses so the athlete can become more bulletproof.
- “It does make it harder to do longer meso cycle stuff…but we’re used to adjusting on the fly, so that’s not abnormal for us,” Kyle said, adding that in Emily’s case, “we know her weakness is her strength,” so Kyle will continue to focus on this and “we will adjust training accordingly for competitions.”
Similarly, Cotler said the season schedule doesn’t determine Gazan’s programming.
- “We know the bullet point items that need to be solidified,” he said: running, snatching, and high-skill inverted gymnastics for Gazan.
“In this sense, her program will be her program. Business as usual,” Cotler added.
Are the CrossFit Games Still the Priority?
At this point, the three coaches said the CrossFit Games are still their athletes’ number one priority, but this could change as more details unfold.
- “The CrossFit Games are still, for us, the most important event on the calendar, but that being said, maybe there won’t be as big of a difference between the peak performance and your steady state,” Neiffer said.
Colter added, “The CrossFit Games is still the most prestigious…But there are a lot of details that [still] need to be worked out before we can say what essentially the pinnacle event of the year is. There are still a lot of answers that we don’t have.”
The “answers” Colter is talking about is the money.
Remind Me: Unlike in the past, the CrossFit Games prize purse this season is tied solely to CrossFit Open registration.
In the 2025 Rulebook, CrossFit provided an example should there be 300,000 Open participants.
- With 300,000 Open participants, the male and female winners of the CrossFit Games would take home $367,500 each. Second place would receive $73,500, and third place $58,800. In comparison, first place received $315,000, second earned $125,000, and third $85,000 last season.
Worth Noting: Even with 300,000 Open competitors, the overall prize purse for the entire season would be down 12.89 percent from 2024.
And what if there aren’t 300,000 Open participants?
- Based on CrossFit’s explanation in the rulebook, if there are only 250,000 competitors this year, the winner of the CrossFit Games will take home $306,250, while second place will earn $61,250 and third $49,000. And in this case, the entire prize purse would be down 27.41 percent from last season.
Further, if there are only 200,000 Open participants, the winner will earn $245,000, second place $49,000, and third $39,200.
Meanwhile, Semifinals winners would earn $7,500 (down from $10,000 last season). Overall, with just 200,000 Open participants, the prize purse for the season would be down 41.93% from 2024.
In comparison, the winner of last year’s Rogue Invitational took home $262,687.18, while second place earned $91,635.06 and third place $48,872.03.
- As a result, Cotler thinks some athletes already view the Rogue Invitational, “not necessarily as bigger than the CrossFit Games, but it’s close,” he said.
While the prize purse, even with 200,000 Open participants, might still sound acceptable to some, Cotler explained that there’s something about experiencing a pay cut that doesn’t sit well with people.
- “I don’t want to be shallow, but at the end of the day, if you go backward…if you go from a $315,000 first prize to something that’s a fifth of that, it’s going to be hard to sell that to the athletes,” he said.
As for the WFP, their prize purses have not yet been announced; however, this year’s 20 men and women who hold Pro Cards all signed contracts that provide some degree of guaranteed money, on top of having the ability to earn more depending on how they perform.
All this is to say, athletes’ priorities might shift depending on the prize purses both the CrossFit Games and the WFP bring to the table, both this year and in the future, Neiffer believes.
- “As the sport grows and athletes are in a position where they’re picking and choosing what competitions they’re going to do, [prize money] is going to play into it for sure,” Neiffer said.
He added: “If it gets to an environment where it doesn’t make sense to do all the competitions, then you pick the ones that give you the best opportunity to make a living doing CrossFit. And certainly, if there’s a big disparity in prize payouts, you’ll see the best athletes competing at those highest earning potential opportunities.”
- Kyle agrees, saying, “I would imagine [the prize purses] will be a big factor. With the CrossFit Games just releasing the payment structure, I would assume this will have a massive impact on the athletes’ priorities and deciding to put their eggs in one basket.”
As for Emily’s number one competition priority this season, Kyle said he still doesn’t know the answer as much remains to be revealed.
- “You can either peak for one or peak for the other. You can be good at one, but to be at optimal peak level, that doesn’t happen. It’s impossible to run at 100 percent all the time, and you’d be training inefficiently if you were [trying] to do that,” he said.
The Big Picture: More Opportunities Than Ever
The 2025 season feels like a whole new era of the sport, and as “uncertain” and “nebulous” as it has felt, as Cotler put it, he feels it’s also an exciting time to be an athlete.
- “It’s a great time to compete. There are more opportunities now than there have ever been in our sport,” Cotler said. “I want these athletes to have opportunities to be full-time athletes. And if this allows them to do that, make more money, and build their brands, I think that’s positive…I hope that moving forward after this year, it will continue to roll, where athletes will have more and more opportunities.”
And to some degree, CrossFit has always been uncertain, unpredictable, and filled with unknowns anyway, which is also [arguably] part of its charm.
“It’s always changing anyway, so we’re quite used to that,” Kyle laughed.
Featured image via Scott Freymond
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