CrossFit or the Gym: Which One a Busy Amersham Parent Should Choose

There are several gyms within ten minutes of Amersham station and their websites all say roughly the same thing. Equipment, opening hours, a photo of someone on a treadmill. None of that is the decision you're making.

The decision is what happens to your hour.

A big gym sells you access. You pay a monthly fee, the doors are open, and everything after that is yours to sort out — what to do, how heavy, how many, whether last Tuesday's session should inform this one. That's a reasonable model if you're happy with an online or ChatGPT programme and have the appetite to follow it. But look at how those places are priced. A budget gym at £25 a month is profitable because the vast majority of members don't come. The economics of the sector assume you won't, because the first two weeks of January show you what happens if the number turning up goes from 10% to 50%.

Time is what you have a limited supply of, alongside the energy of making a decision of what to do. A CrossFit class removes the decision entirely. You turn up, someone tells you what you're doing, the load gets chosen for the state you're in that day, and somebody watches your form and corrects it. Sixty minutes, start to finish, no procrastination, no wasted time.

The cost difference is worth being straight about. A coached hour costs several times what access costs. What you're buying is the coaching, the fixed time and the fact that someone knows your name — and whether that's worth it depends entirely on whether you'd have gone otherwise.

The other difference is how you get started. At a big gym, month one is an induction — someone walks you round the machines, and after that you're on your own. Here it's five one-to-one hours running alongside your classes from the first week, covering the movements and testing where you're starting from. Same month, completely different amount of attention.

So do this before you choose. Open your banking app and find the gym you're currently paying for. Count the visits in the last month. Then ask how many of those visits you finished knowing you'd done something useful. Make that count and the argument with yourself about price usually ends.

You have three or four hours a week. They need to be hours that work whether or not you feel like it on the day.

Fifteen minutes on the phone will tell you whether this is the right fit. Free, no obligation, no hard sell — Jeremy or Beth at crossfitchiltern.com. Most of us hadn't trained in years when we started.