Before she found CrossFit, Kayla Bonkowski trained mostly alone. She had a gym membership, she followed programs she found online, and she put in the work. What she did not have was anyone else in the room who cared whether she showed up.
That changed in 2021. Training alongside other people — people who were working toward their own goals, dealing with their own hard weeks, celebrating their own small wins — turned out to matter more than she expected. The training itself was not that different. The experience of it was completely different.
Kayla Bonkowski has thought a lot about why that is, and the answer she keeps coming back to is accountability — but not the version of accountability that comes from a training partner who texts you on off days. It is something subtler. When you train with other people, you become part of something larger than your own progress. You show up partly for yourself and partly because the group expects you to be there. That expectation is not heavy, but it is real, and on the days when your own motivation is low, it matters.
What Changes When Other People Are Watching
There is a well-documented phenomenon in sports psychology where people perform better in the presence of others than they do alone. For experienced athletes working on practiced skills, this tends to be true. For beginners working on something new, it can go the other way — the audience increases anxiety and degrades performance.
What Kayla Bonkowski has found, and what most people find over time in a CrossFit environment, is that the early awkwardness fades and the performance boost takes over. After a few months, the presence of other people stops feeling like judgment and starts feeling like fuel. She has hit personal records on lifts she has been stuck on for weeks, and she is fairly sure the only difference was that someone else was in the room expecting her to try.
This is not unique to CrossFit. Any group fitness environment can produce this effect. But CrossFit tends to produce it strongly because the community structure is intentional — people know each other, cheer each other, and stay around after class to talk. CrossFit Teneo in Macomb, Michigan, is the kind of place where that structure exists, and Kayla Bonkowski has seen firsthand how much it changes the quality of the training.
The Standard You Keep Without Realizing It
One of the less obvious ways that community shapes your training is through standards. When you train alone, your standards for effort are entirely self-set. If you decide that today is a moderate day, nobody is going to challenge that. If you want to scale a workout down more than is probably necessary, nobody notices.
When you train with people who know you and know your capacity, that changes. Kayla Bonkowski has had coaches and training partners who knew she was capable of more than she was giving on a given day. They did not let her get away with it. Not in a harsh way — in the way that people who actually care about your development are willing to say the thing that is uncomfortable to say.
That feedback is hard to create in isolation. You can hire a coach to provide it remotely, and that helps, but it is not the same as someone standing next to you who has watched you lift for six months and knows what you are capable of when you are not tired and when you are.
What It Looks Like After a Few Years
Kayla Bonkowski started in 2021 and has been training in Macomb, Michigan, since then. Looking back, the clearest way she can describe what community has done for her practice is this: it has raised the floor. The worst version of her training day now is better than the worst version of her training day when she was training alone. Because on the low days, there is still a class to go to, still people to train alongside, still a coach who will notice if something is off. That floor is worth a lot.
Solo training has its place. There are times when quiet focus is exactly what is needed. But as a primary mode of training, Kayla Bonkowski does not think it competes with what you get when you are part of a real fitness community. The ceiling is higher, the floor is higher, and the whole thing is more sustainable over time.