The Silicone Wedding Band: Where Functional Fitness meets Functional Faith
by Cody Musselman
The sun was high and the summer heat in Madison, WI was becoming unbearable when I ducked into the vendor village at the 2019 CrossFit Games. CrossFit is a functional fitness exercise regimen that combines Olympic weightlifting, gymnastics, cardio, and odd objects movements with diet and lifestyle recommendations. Yet it is perhaps better known for its tight-knit communities that span the globe, prompting its former CMO to declare that “CrossFit is tighter than religion.” At the annual CrossFit Games, CrossFitters revel in the festival atmosphere, cheer on elite athletes vying for the title of “Fittest on Earth,” and recommit themselves to the CrossFit lifestyle premised upon high intensity functional movements and a diet of “meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar.” And perhaps most importantly, spectators at the CrossFit Games exercise their consumer power in a new yet robust market niche that caters to the specific needs of CrossFit enthusiasts. Here I encountered Groove Life’s wedding band, an object that combines men’s fashion with the priorities of normative masculinity, muscular Christianity, and Christian marriage.
Back inside the vendor village, salesmen and women hock a wide array of products that help everyday CrossFitters fuse their identity with their fitness. Wandering from booth to booth, I see Paleo-diet snacks and specialty wine glasses with Keto-diet portions marked off. I test out balms and salves that heal calluses and self-massage tools that sooth sore muscles. Gym-friendly Bibles are on sale next to custom-order jeans made to fit over muscular glutes and bulging thighs. I am brought up short, however, by the Groove Life jewelry booth, which is buzzing with activity.
At the Groove Life booth, sales representatives measure men’s ring fingers and rush to find a silicone wedding band in the right size. This scene of measurement and exchange takes place in front of a poster of Rich Froning, the 7x CrossFit Games champion and outspoken evangelical Christian. In this poster, Froning is shirtless—revealing his carefully crafted CrossFit body—and his face is serious. But neither Froning’s expression nor his body are the focus. Rather the image sharpens around the small silicone ring Froning is presenting with an outstretched arm. [Fig. 1]
Figure 1. Groove Life booth at the 2019 CrossFit Games. Photo by author.
Upon closer inspection, one sees that the silicone band is inscribed with Galatians 6:14. Froning’s large evangelical fan-base would immediately recognize this as the verse he also has tattooed on his side, reading “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” [Fig. 2]
Figure 2: Groove Life advertisement from 2019. Photo from Mayhem Nation website: https://www.mayhemnation.com/products/6-14-ring accessed Feb. 8, 2024.
When Froning emerged as one of the first superstars of CrossFit in the early 2010s, he became famous not only for his impressive physical feats of strength, but also for his Christian piety, his love of guns, and his commitment to traditional performances of masculinity—which for Froning included frequent references to the sanctity of heterosexual monogamous marriage.
Froning’s reputation as a person of serious commitment—both in the gym and in marriage—made him an obvious choice as a spokesperson for Groove Life, a company that makes durable wedding band replacements. As a spokesperson, his presence underscored the dual purpose of the Groove Life rings. The first purpose is symbolic and, as is the case with many wedding bands, it communicates marital status (and often implies a monogamous commitment). Groove Life understands that there may be some activities in which wearing one’s wedding band gets in the way, but Groove Life’s advertising reminds consumers that practical considerations need not negate the ring’s symbolic power as an object of personal and relational fulfillment. As an advertisement for the Groove Life ring reads, “When you take your wedding band off, it feels like a part of you is missing.” Groove Life’s silicone offers a solution to this feeling of lack.
However, the subtext of the booth’s presence at the CrossFit Games, where CrossFitters dash around scantily clad, shirtless, or in form-fitting athletic attire, is that symbols like the Groove Life rings are necessary aids in upholding conservative Christian social mores around marriage and courtship in the sexually charged atmosphere of the gym. This message is likewise communicated through Froning’s poster, where, in presenting the ring to the viewer, Froning’s stern and stoic demeanor conveys a challenge to the onlooker, as if to ask: “What are you doing in the gym to show your commitment to your marriage?”
It has taken some time for men’s wedding rings to accumulate this symbolic weight, however. While men’s wedding bands have gone in and out of style over time, at the turn of the twentieth-century jewelry consumption in America was primarily associated with women. This began to change in the 1920s when jewelers attempted to popularize men’s engagement rings and wedding bands. Yet this attempt by jewelers was met with limited success. Despite advertising rings as new markers of masculinity that were made of “rugged materials such as iron or bronze” and as adornments for “the he-man who appreciates true value,” jewelers couldn’t make the groom’s wedding band stick.
Rather, it wasn’t until the post WWII years that men’s wedding rings became the norm, when jewelers began profiting off a new orientation towards wedding consumption as a patriotic act and the post-war wedding boom. In fact, the presence of men’s wedding rings became so prevalent during this time that Catholic priests who were unaccustomed to dual-ring ceremonies turned to the American Ecclesiastical Review to debate whether the groom’s ring should be blessed alongside the bride’s ring or blessed separately. Changes in consumer practices, it appears, were bringing about changes in religious ritual as well. This new mode of consumption likewise reflected “new gender configurations that were part of the landscape in the 1940s and 1950s” in which companionate marriage and, what Margaret Marsh calls “masculine domesticity,” arose as ideals shaping mid-century middle-class homes. Unlike in the 1920s when jewelers struggled to overcome the feminized associations of jewelry to sell men wedding bands, mid-century changes in men’s domestic roles meant the “shiny gold of his new ring [was] a physical marker of his new role as husband,” committed companion, prospective father, and breadwinner. This was particularly true of middle-class men and white collar workers.
“Working-class men, however, did not necessarily always embrace class domestic role signified by the groom's ring,” as Vicki Howards writes. Evidence for this can be found in the 1946 employee newsletter of Maidenform, the women’s undergarment company. The newsletter reads as follows:
As the two gold bands were slipped on, Jimmy began to feel the pressure of his marital chains, the ring Doris put on his finger was just a little too small. Jimmy claims he hasn't yet been able to take it off. He says he tried to convince Doris of the danger of a mechanic wearing a ring while working at machines, but Doris refused to be convinced.
While this passage plays off of the sexist trope of the wife as man’s “ball-and-chain,” it also usefully highlights how, for mid-century industrial workers adjusting to the new norm of double-ring ceremonies, “a wedding band could be dangerous, sparking or catching in the machinery.” And while wedding bands have become more of a mainstay in men’s fashion over the past half-century, their threat to manual laborers remains.
This leads me to the second purpose of the Groove Life ring, in which practical considerations feed off of the ring’s symbolic role. Simply put, metal wedding bands sustain extra wear-and-tear during CrossFit workouts wherein exercisers are gripping metal barbells, holding onto pull-up rigs, doing rope climbs, or pushing sleds. CrossFitters are certainly not the only consumers to encounter this problem, however. Indeed, Groove Life’s primary market competitors like Thorum, Enso, Manly Bands, or SafeRingz market themselves as the rings of choice for electricians, plumbers, handymen, and factory workers. Unlike these other practically oriented silicone jewelry businesses, however, Groove Life chose to focus on the CrossFit market, wherein middle-to-upper class white-collar exercisers mimic blue collar labor and strive for blue collar bodies in their sled push, farmer’s carry, wheel-barrel, and sandbag toss exercises.
Key to this consumption of working-class cosplay is the presence of Froning, reminding male CrossFitters that the bodies they craft, the masculinities they inhabit, and the rings that they wear are also religious in nature. The Groove Life ring—with its Galatians inscription and with the backing of CrossFit’s all-star champion—demonstrates how masculinity in these gym spaces is not merely compulsory, normative, or fashionable, but is religious as well.
Bibliography
Brinig, Margaret F. “Rings and Promises,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization vol. 6(1), 1990. Pp. 203-215.
CrossFit Training, Level 1 Training Guide, 3rd ed., 2020.
Froning, Rich. First: What It Takes to Win, (Carol Stream IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2013).
Howard, Vicki. “A ‘Real Man’s Ring’: Gender and the Invention of Tradition,” Journal of Social History, vol. 36(4), 2003. Pp. 840.
Hudson, Robbie Wild. “Rich Froning Collaborates with Groove Life to Create Brand New Ring for Athletes,” BoxRox, July 12, 2019, https://www.boxrox.com/rich-froning-collaborated-with-groove-life-to-create-this-ring/#:~:text=When%20you%20take%20your%20wedding,ever.
Marsh, Margaret. Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press: 1990).
Pathak, Shareen. “CrossFit CMO Jimi Letchford: ‘CrossFit is Tighter than a Religion,” Digiday, March 27, 2015, https://digiday.com/marketing/crossfit-cmo-jimi-letchford-crossfit-tighter-religion/
Cody Musselman earned a Ph.D. in Religious studies from Yale University in 2022. She is an ethnographer of contemporary American religion, focusing on the intersections of religion, capitalism, the body, and health. Her book manuscript, “Spiritual Exercises: Fitness and Religion in Modern America,” observes how the structuring logics of American Christianity operate in the consumerist landscape of health, wellness, and fitness to understand how religion is enlisted in the politicized work of reforming the body. Her research has appeared in Religion Dispatches and The Conversation.