The road to MAHA was paved by CrossFit. Its gospel of toughness is also creeping into Canadian politics By Calum Marsh October 7, 2026 Late last summer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, challenged Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, to an audacious test of fitness: 50 pull-ups and 100 push-ups in 10 minutes, which they hoped would become a fad across the nation. "You try to get under five minutes," Kennedy said, cranking out a few pull-ups in an inexplicable pair of tight-fitting jeans and what looked like brown suede boots. "It was President Trump who inspired us to do this," Hegseth added. "Thank you, President Trump, for setting the example," he said. "Make America healthy again!" Trump may have "set the example," if only figuratively, but I recognized immediately the real inspiration for the soon-dubbed "Pete and Bobby Challenge." Kennedy and Hegseth were doing CrossFit. Combining ridiculous numbers of pull-ups, push-ups and squats has been a classic CrossFit workout since late 2003, when it was introduced on the CrossFit website as a "benchmark" exercise called "Chelsea." The high-intensity combo was designed as a test of cardiovascular capacity, strength and endurance that could be performed and repeated regularly as a measure of one's progress in the gym. Even for elite athletes, the workout can be a serious grind. Crossfit's roots go back to a personal trainer named Greg Glassman, who developed the program through the 1980s and early '90s. Glassman, a brash but brilliant college dropout and self-described autodidact, taught CrossFit to clients at chain gyms like Gold's across California, eventually opening a space of his own in a commercial lot in Santa Cruz at the turn of the millennium. Glassman's unique combination of Olympic weightlifting, gymnastics and movements like jump rope double-unders and burpees proved extremely effective, and the workouts found an enthusiastic audience in law enforcement and the military, whose members admired the program's gritty physicality and air of ruggedness. CrossFit workouts were accessible but hard - unapologetically so. Unlike other gyms, CrossFit had no mirrors or fancy machinery, just barbells, kettlebells and gymnastics rings. "We are the machines," Glassman would explain to members who wondered where all the stuff was. In the corner was a trash can where members regularly threw up. Glassman started posting his daily workouts to a rudimentary website in February of 2001. But it wasn't until the months after 9/11 that the website's popularity accelerated. CrossFit's gruff attitude was ideally suited to an America reeling from the attack and suffused with an upswell of patriotic feeling; unlike contemporary fitness fads such as Tae-Bo, Zumba or the Tony Little Gazelle, CrossFit did not seem effete but macho, an image that Glassman's clientele of cops and firefighters naturally reinforced, and that Glassman cultivated. Alongside his workouts, Glassman plastered the CrossFit website with images of soldiers fast-roping out of helicopters or SWAT teams busting down doors. Glassman said often at the time that it was his goal to make CrossFit the official workout of the American military. During the War on Terror, this ambition was almost realized. Soldiers deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq would log on to the CrossFit website from overseas and do the daily workouts in groups, sharing their enthusiasm on CrossFit's active message board and sending in photos of themselves working out on gymnastics rings strung up on the cannon of a tank. Glassman was happy to have the association, and he made the most of it, naming special workouts for men who died in the service. As CrossFit grew to become a multi-million-dollar fitness empire with over 15,000 locations worldwide, Glassman's focus drifted away from the day-to-day operation of the company toward carrying out his personal obsessions. He's said that he always considered himself "a health and fitness activist" more than a trainer or fitness guru, and at the height of his brand's success in the mid-2000s, much of Glassman's time and energy was being spent on fighting those he perceived as enemies of health. He became mired in litigation as he fought "Big Soda," pouring millions into lawsuits against Coca-Cola and railing against the harm of sugar. One of the champions of Glassman's fight against the soda companies was his friend Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been outspoken against Coke since taking office, using much of the same language as Glassman in warning against the dangers of sugar-laden American diets. This is just one more way in which the spirit of CrossFit and Glassman's ethos has filtered down into the foundation of the Trump administration. The essence of Make America Healthy Again, with its language of rugged masculinity and its propensity toward hardcore fitness challenges, has its origins in CrossFit. And Glassman's ideas, once radical, have now become mainstream. Kennedy's advocacy for fitness, especially for the country's young people, is certainly admirable. But 50 pull-ups and 50 push-ups are not remotely feasible for 99 per cent of the population. Challenging the country to perform a workout better suited for elite athletes isn't the way to promote fitness, either - it's the way to promote injury. Watching the video of Hegseth and Kennedy attempting to struggle their way through the workout with improper form only makes this more obvious. Their sloppy, corner-cutting pull-ups and push-ups both were almost definitely the only way they'd manage to complete that volume of either movement in under the 10-minute goal, and they show precisely the ridiculousness of the Pete and Bobby Challenge to begin with. This is typical, though, of the MAHA ethos, which often seems more about quick fixes and flash than solid foundations and best practices. Instead of teaching kids to love exercise through play, they're bringing back the blunt tool of the Presidential Fitness Test. Instead of increasing access to clean drinking water, they're urging Coke to use cane sugar. Instead of doing slow, careful pull-ups that deliberately target the muscle groups for strength building, they're flopping their way through a dubious 50 for the sake of completing a challenge that sounds rugged and hardcore. It won't improve your fitness, but it sure has the right attitude. Canada hasn't been immune to the MAHA movement's incursions into the political mainstream. This summer, a cowboy-hatted Pierre Poilievre spoke before a crowd at the Calgary Stampede and extolled the need for increased military spending and a renewed focus on toughness in the Armed Forces. "We will reinstill a warrior culture," he vowed, "not a woke culture," a clear echo of Hegseth's derisive observation that the War Department had become in recent years the "woke department." Nor was this the first time that Poilievre has hammered this distinctly Trumpish point. In late 2024, he told the Toronto Sun that, if elected prime minister, he would be "recruiting warriors to fight for this country." Of course, the Canadian military's traditional role as self-described peacekeepers would seem at odds with a "warrior culture," but it's certainly in keeping with the "tough it out" brutality of American military culture under Hegseth and Trump. It would hardly be out of character for Poilievre to propose a fitness challenge of his own, a Canadian spin on the same CrossFit-inspired ethos of rugged masculinity whatever the cost. When I wrote about the Pete and Bobby Challenge last summer, I interviewed some trainers and asked their advice on how newcomers to this kind of exercise could scale the challenge to be more approachable. Many people were upset about my suggestions. But the most characteristic response came from the official Department of Defense account on X. "This was definitely written by someone who COULD NOT complete the Pete and Bobby Challenge," the account posted, appending a screenshot of my article. (Pete Hegseth retweeted it.) I didn't bother pointing out to them that I literally wrote the book on CrossFit and had done variations on this workout dozens of times. Wading into the fight struck me as a bit too macho. Calum Marsh is the author of the upcoming book The Glass Box: The Shocking True Story of How CrossFit Broke the Rules, Made Millions, and Left Chaos In Its Wake What did you think of this story? Send a comment for publication to [email protected], and supply your name and address. Comments should be fewer than 200 words, and may be edited for length and clarity. Daniel Kunitz takes readers from naked Greeks to Jazzercise in a book that's easy to lift A new shoe claims to burn up to 50 per cent more calories. Just don't drive with it on. What students are talking about today (February 12th) The pandemic shutdown forced a reality check: for many, all that time spent in the gym was more luxury than necessity

CrossFit wants you to take its new nutrition course, but won't tell you where to find it. September 10, 2026 CrossFit is launching a new in-person nutrition course called Applied Nutrition. This is a one-day, in-person course "packed with interactive lectures, hands-on activities, and real-world applications." Jocelyn Rylee created the course and was on the CrossFit CF Network earlier this week to discuss the new seminar with Sevan Matossian. That's all well and good. But then Jocelyn joined Denise Thomas on the CrossFit YouTube channel. The live show was titled Talking Nutrition with Jocelyn and Denise. As Andrew Hiller constantly harps on, the thumbnail and title is critical. I'm not sure this title is captivating enough to draw viewers...but time will tell. So I head to the show description to find the link. Here's what I was greeted with... The show description is standard template wordspeak. There is nothing about the new nutrition course, Applied Nutrition. The links take you to generic pages on CrossFit's website. Why is there not a link directly to the Applied Nutrition course? Instead, you force them to find it themselves. The Barbell Spin all know the more steps you add, the less likely someone actually does something. So here it is, here is the link to learn more about the new CrossFit course, Applied Nutrition: https://www.crossfit.com/applied-nutrition There are four Applied Nutrition courses currently on the calendar between October 8 and November 8. Oh, great. At the 56:14 mark (see, I'm actually watching this), Jocelyn mentions the link is in the live chat. the LIVE CHAT. That only a handful of people were watching when it was live. Way more people watch after the livestream is over. The live chat isn't even available for hours after the stream ends. Did they put the link in the comments where it will be easily available? No. Is it in the show description? No. Is it on the screen where you have to type it into a web browser manually? Yes. FML.