Pay a visit to HGST, Inc.’s San Francisco Bay Area campus, and you may find a group of employees doing squats in the parking lot or bolting out for a run on their lunch break. The storage company believes in health and fitness so strongly that it formed a business partnership with CrossFit, Inc., the popular strength and conditioning program known for grueling Workouts Of the Day (WOD), sprints and clean eating. The company now has 13,000 gyms worldwide and more than 230,000 members.

The best of the best get a chance to compete in the CrossFit Games, an annual competition to determine the “Fittest on Earth.” But that’s not really CrossFit’s main draw. Justin Bergh, Joe Novello and Kyle Moschetto of the CrossFit Games talked with Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during SportsDataSV 2015.

“The communal event makes it very attractive,” said the CrossFit Games GM Justin Bergh. “Most of us aren’t going to be professional athletes. But every day when you go to a CrossFit gym, you get to have your World Series game seven.”

Bergh said that the partnership with HGST was a natural. “HGST understood how [CrossFit] transformed communities, broke down social barriers and built strong relationships,” he said. “We use a lot of their products. We store a lot of video, and we have a leaderboard that is popularly attended, so it became a natural fit for us.”

Kyle Moschetto, manager of systems and network administration for CrossFit, said that while technology helps the company internally, its members don’t need a Fitbit or some other wearable device to stay motivated.

“Wearables are great for motivating people to see results and share them with their friends,” he said. “That’s a struggle that we don’t have in CrossFit because you are coming to a gym every day. In this community, everyone helps each other to get better.”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of SportsDataSV 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE