“Everyone in the class gets real attention”: how Britta built Barbell 125

• Started with five athletes who wanted to train more often and more seriously than a university class allowed.
• Small groups on purpose so every athlete in the room actually gets coached.
• Members onboard themselves and buy their own memberships and punch cards, instead of manual bank transfers.
• A first real view of the finances after years of checking whether the bank account looked alright.

Britta came to Innsbruck from Germany in 2010 to study sports science, and never left. She began coaching CrossFit in 2016, competed in weightlifting, and in 2022 placed fourth overall with her team at the French Throwdown in Paris.

But the story of Barbell 125 doesn’t start with a business plan. It starts with five athletes who wanted more. While teaching open university sports classes, Britta found a small group who wanted to train more often and more seriously. So she went looking for a room and some equipment to give them proper CrossFit training. That search became her own gym.

Britta had seen the other model up close. The box where she started coaching grew to more than 200 members, with 15 to 18 people per class for a single coach. She didn’t want that.

At Barbell 125, small group training is the whole point. Members follow the daily programming, complemented by dedicated weightlifting classes three times a week, plus gymnastics and GPP, so everyone can pick what fits their goals. Asked what she likes best about her own gym, Britta doesn’t hesitate: the direct coaching of every single athlete in the room.

The most important value in the box, Britta says, is that members support each other. Not just during class, but before and after it. The community celebrates together too: parties, hikes, a skateboarding course, and bouldering next on the list.

Since her son was born, the box has also become more welcoming to families. Members can bring their children along, and there’s a small play area upstairs.

It cuts both ways. Whether Bruno is in the gym or at home, part of her attention is always with him, and Britta is straightforward about what that costs: running a box and raising a child at the same time is exhausting.

Last year the box changed location, and the community moved with it, through the building work. For two to three weeks there was no rig, which meant no pull-ups and a lot of dumbbell rows. Britta could feel the mood shift before anyone put it into words.

So she asked. She sent out a digital feedback form, and almost nobody answered it anonymously: members typed in their names, because they wanted her to know who was speaking. That left her with a stack of long, honest answers and a conversation to have with every single person who had written one, which by her own account was a hard stretch.

Like many coaches who become owners, Britta didn’t open a gym to run a business. For years, her financial control was checking that the bank account looked okay at the end of the month.

What saved her was the pace. The box grew slowly, five people and then ten the year after, and that gave her time to learn the business side before it could overwhelm her.

Even now, she is honest that the two halves of the job pull against each other.

That changed when she switched to Boxbase. Her previous software had grown more expensive every year without improving, so the transition seemed like a clear step to take. Here is how a Boxbase migration works.

More importantly, she finally got the overview she’d been missing.

The same attention shows up in the schedule. If a class stops filling, she changes it rather than waiting for it to recover, and in a community this size nobody drops off unnoticed.

Day to day, the gym now runs with less admin: new members onboard themselves, buy their own memberships and punch cards, and pay through Stripe instead of manual bank transfers. Time Britta would rather spend where she likes best: on the gym floor.

Asked what she would tell someone about to open their own box, Britta answers with the lesson she learned the hard way.

She learned it the hard way, she says, because she started with five people she wanted to give her best to, every time, until the five became many. But maybe the best proof that she found the balance: the original five are still there, training with her, all these years later.