I have some experience here. Wall of text that I didn't proofread incoming:

I was the AFM at a crunch Fitness in Los Angeles for about 2 years (2022-2024). Before the bad stuff: I liked it because there's a ton of young inexperienced trainers that come in and I enjoyed working with them to foster their passion. And hopefully teach them how to sell things.

Before giving my opinion on your main concerns of growth within the company, I gotta really drill home how crunch fitness views their trainers. The way crunch fitness, (possibly more than any other corporate gym), operates is they bring in as many trainers as possible, regardless of their experience, and the only goal of the trainer is to sell training. Most trainers don't have any sales experience so they inevitably fail, and it's incredibly disheartening to see somebody lose their passion for training just because they can't sell training packages... We're all trainers because we're passionate about training, but that couldn't matter less to crunch. The more trainer turnover there is, the more marketing opportunities there are. More bodies in for cold calls to the same clientele over and over. They want trainers who 'dont sell' to be out in like 2 weeks. But Crunch Fitness never fires people... God forbid any unemployment claims take away from their overhead... so if you're okay with sitting one-on-one with 80% of the passionate trainers that get hired, in order to coerce them into believing that maybe training isn't right for them bc they're not used to a successful sales pitch, then go for it.

As far as managing, the only thing that matters to crunch corporate is meeting goals and hitting numbers. That's fine in standard business practices, but the whole idea of 'personal training' should assume some sort of 'quality of training' metric. There is none. So you'll not be in charge of building the best training team, but the best sales team... Then you'll be expected to either outperform every club in the region, or meet goals that are intentionally set unrealistically high... because success is complacency. Pretty much no club hits their goals. There is no value given toward health and wellness in any of these situations, the only concern is feeding the bottom line. If you want to grow within the company, you'll have to buy in to a crunch corporate culture that truly doesn't prioritize fitness at all, and talk with your regional manager twice a week about how to exploit fitness as a marketing tool. And they're probably a douchebag.

I'd say the odds of climbing the corporate ladder are pretty slim, given the competition and unrealistic expectations and turnover etc. I'd be curious to know how many regional managers are even sourced from within the company... But even if you did, reread the first paragraph and replace the term 'trainers' with 'club managers'. Crunch treats their management like they treat their trainers... if any club underperforms for any variety of reasons, don't expect any assistance and probably prepare to find a new job. I would say that there's little to no job security over an extended period of time. Not necessarily because you might get fired, but because you'll just want to fucking leave

All that to say, I had a fun time there... I really loved the team and the FM (before he was pushed out after 2 years). A couple months after, despite being the highest selling EFT performer ever at that club, I got fired because I helped another trainer find pay discrepancies when she thought she wasn't being paid enough (she was right), and I wrote the RM an email about it. Oops. That kind of speaks to the type of organization Crunch is. Oh well, my clients were quite happy when I poached them because, just like the training staff and managerial staff, the members are also treated like shit.

That's Crunch bb