A certified nutrition and Level 4 CrossFit coach, Easton BJJ purple belt and entrepreneur Jason Ackerman has devoted his life to helping people connect deeper to their bodies and live their most healthy life through one of the most necessary facets of training – coaching.  

With multiple streams to help people find what they’re looking for, Jason co-hosts a podcast, works for the CrossFit brand as part of its Seminar Team and runs a business helping affiliate owners and coaches get better.

His business, Best Hour of Their Day, which he runs with two other long-time CrossFitters and which began as a podcast dedicated to helping the CrossFit community, has since become an industry leader in business mentorship and coaching development with a roster of 300 clients, a Facebook study group, a published book and an online platform for coaches to learn from. 

Jason grew up in New York and started wrestling in high school. A smaller kid, he joined a gym to help him put on some muscle and fell in love with weight-lifting. 

“Never in my wildest dreams,” says Jason, “did I think 30+ years later that would still be my career.”

By the time he finished undergrad with a degree in psychology, Jason realized he faced limited options and went back for his Masters. He knew he’d need to get a real job at some point, but he wasn’t quite ready to pull the plug on fitness.  He continued to weight-lift and worked at a few different commercial gyms throughout school, but in the back of his mind, Jason also knew that he could become a teacher. 

Movement that aligns your life

In 2007, when Jason finally decided to take the steps to become a PE teacher and went back to school to get all of his phys ed requirements, he found CrossFit by way of Jiu Jitsu. 

After four years of partying in college Upstate, he missed having something competitive in his life, but there was nothing nearby. Then, in 2005, Bruno Tostes, a Black Belt under Renzo Gracie, opened a school in Latham, Upstate New York.

Jason began training there and found an outlet for not only his grappling passion but a doorway to what would become one of the biggest parts of his life with CrossFit. (He never became a PE teacher, but today, Jason holds a purple belt in BJJ and a Level 4 CrossFit coaching certification!)

One day at Bruno’s in 2006, his friend Chad showed Jason an issue of Muscle & Fitness magazine with CrossFit on the cover. He read the article and went home to do some research. Back then, the internet didn’t have a lot of information on the sport, but on crossfit.com you could find a different exercise to do every day.

Jason was hooked. Before he ever took a class himself, he decided to apply for a coaching certification. At the time, he already worked as a personal trainer alongside teaching spin, yoga and pilates, running 16 hours a day doing whatever he could to make money. 

“I was training so many people a day,” says Jason, “12-14 hours a day. I thought, with this thing, I can train multiple people at once and minimize the hours. Most importantly, they’re gonna have way more fun; which they did.”

He immediately took his Level 1 course to become a coach. At the time, they started offering a pass-or-fail Level 2 seminar. Jason passed, but the course only had a 10 percent pass rate so eventually CrossFit restructured everything. 

Fun fact: Today, as a CrossFit Level 4 Coach, Jason holds the highest credential you can earn in the CrossFit world – like a black belt in BJJ with 2 or 3 stripes.

When Jason opened his first CrossFit, he didn’t have money, but he borrowed $5,000 from someone and went for it. Jason’s bet paid off! He had that studio for seven years, and some of its very first students are still there today – including an army of middle aged women Jason calls his Golden Girls, CrossFit die-hards and best friends.

Merging for success

Around that time, as a Level 4 certified coach, Jason got hired by CrossFit to travel the world and teach the other trainers. While doing that, he met another trainer, Jason Fernandez, doing the same thing. 

The two quickly hit it off, finding plenty to talk about between their shared passion for business and ownership. They thought, Why not record a podcast on this stuff? In March 2019, Best Hour of Their Day was born in a closet in Florida.

Eventually, people listening to their podcast began to reach out. They wanted coaching or help launching their CrossFit affiliate. 

“There’s not many people in CrossFit doing that,” Jason says. “You open an affiliate and [usually] you’re on your own. We slowly started to make it into a business.”

As with martial arts, not all CrossFit schools are created equally. While CrossFit has a governing body, it’s not a franchise, so you don’t get a set way to do things. Some business owners love this freedom, but for others it can pose challenges if they’ve never run a school before. 

In 2020, Markus Gerszi, who had done something similar, reached out to Jason and Jason with an opportunity to join forces and make their coaching-consultancy into a real curriculum. Today, he serves as the third partner in Best Hour of Their Day, along with Jason Ackerman and Jason Fernandez. 

In 2015, Jason sold the three CrossFit affiliates he owned in New York and moved down to Florida. That’s where he met his wife, Roz, and the two relocated to Boulder in November of 2019. 

Both times Jason moved, an opportunity or connection within their movement community guided them. No matter what venture they embarked on, whether running a nutrition business together, co-writing a book or pursuing new collaborations and business ventures, both Jason and Roz approach everything from a passion for health and fitness. 

In many ways, the ability to take a core value and feed it through so many different channels underscores the way a coach can intuitively understand what people need and how they’ll best receive it. With a background in Psychology to complement the years of kinesthetic training and physical mobility, Jason understands what people need, how they work and what might trigger certain connections. 

The key to coaching

In Jason’s experience (and we would agree), the key to being a good coach comes down to caring about your people and what they need. Like Maya Angelou said, They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Another key to building up strong coaches rests in constructive feedback from better coaches. Sometimes, coaches will get their Level 1 certificate and the owner of the gym they work at is either burnt-out or otherwise not equipped to develop that coach.

Instead of getting guidance and correction to optimize their potential, those coaches continue to come up against the same challenges without understanding what they’re doing wrong. Whereas in a different environment that coach may have grown and thrived, in the wrong setting it can lead to wasted passion and short-lived careers. 

Similarly, when you run a business, it helps everyone when you put your staff first. If you build solid relationships (link) with people you trust and develop them to uphold your core values, you’ll have a much easier time of taking your product through multiple channels without watering it down.

Jason credits his great team for the success he’s found in growing each facet of his business without any of them suffering in consequence. How does he keep his team happy?

“Taking as good of care of them as possible,” Jason says. “Making sure they’re good first and foremost. You will be limited in your growth without a solid team.”

Jason’s personal drive comes from deep within – so deep sometimes that he actually thrives off of not telling people what he’s up to. He gets a kick out of taking people by surprise, and in this way prioritizes living by his own values – not the external validation of others.

“Too many people these days talk about what they’re gonna do on social media,” says Jason. “I like people being like, where did this guy come from?”

Jason Ackerman’s story reminds us that there are many ways we can make a positive impact in our communities, starting with ourselves. What you approach with hard work, passion, and a relentless pursuit of growth will flourish – whether on the mats or in the office, and if you prioritize caring for others along your path, you’ll go even further.