I've coached in-person bootcamps for years, and the pattern is always the same: people show up hyped in week 1, then attendance craters by week 3. It's almost never a motivation problem — it's a structure problem.

Three things kill a bootcamp before it can work:

1. No progression. Same workout intensity week 1 and week 6 = plateaus and boredom. Every block needs to escalate.

2. No accountability outside the gym. If the only touchpoint is the workout itself, people fall off the second life gets busy.

3. Nutrition treated as an afterthought. You cannot out-train a bad diet in 8 weeks. It has to be programmed alongside training, not bolted on.

So when I built Ironforge, I designed around those three failure points: progressive 8-week blocks, a private accountability chat members actually use daily, and a nutrition guide with weekly macro adjustments instead of a static PDF.

If you're building any kind of cohort-based fitness program, fix those three things first — everything else is secondary.