Gold's Gym filed for bankruptcy. 24 Hour Fitness closed hundreds of locations. Planet Fitness, the discount leader, has seen its stock price halved.
Meanwhile, a 26-year-old fitness influencer with no formal training and no gym affiliation generated $15 million last year selling workout programs from her apartment.
Something fundamental has shifted in the fitness industry, and the traditional players are only beginning to reckon with it. The business has undergone a quiet revolution — one where credentialed expertise and physical infrastructure matter less than the ability to connect with audiences online.
The Great Unbundling
For decades, the fitness industry operated on a bundled model. Gyms provided equipment, space, community, and (often) expertise in one package. Personal trainers needed gyms to access clients. Workout programs came from established organizations with credentials and reputation.
The pandemic accelerated an unbundling that was already underway.
Equipment became widely available for home use. Peloton, Mirror, and countless lower-cost alternatives made quality exercise possible without ever entering a gym. The space constraint disappeared for many people.
Expertise moved online. YouTube tutorials, Instagram coaches, and TikTok fitness creators demonstrated that effective instruction didn't require physical presence. An influencer filming themselves in a garage could teach movement patterns as well as (or better than) a credentialed trainer at a gym.
Community migrated to digital spaces. The social motivation that once required showing up at a gym could now be replicated through online communities, live-streamed classes, and accountability apps.
What remained of the traditional gym model? Equipment that most people could buy or substitute, and space that many discovered they didn't actually need.
The Attention Economy of Fitness
The fitness influencer economy runs on attention mechanics that traditional players don't understand.
A successful fitness influencer doesn't primarily sell workout programs or supplements. They sell aspiration and identity. Their content performs the work of making fitness feel achievable, attractive, and aligned with who their audience wants to become.
This is fundamentally different from what traditional fitness businesses sell. A gym sells access to equipment. A certified trainer sells expertise. These are transactional value propositions.
The influencer sells ongoing relationship and transformation narrative. Their business model depends on followers who stay engaged over months and years, identifying with the influencer's journey and purchasing products that feel like participation in that journey.
The economics flow accordingly. A gym gets $40/month from a member who shows up sporadically. A fitness influencer can get $200 for a program purchase plus ongoing supplement and apparel revenue from a follower who feels personally connected to them.
Who's Winning and Why
The fitness influencers who've built the largest businesses share certain characteristics that distinguish them from both traditional fitness businesses and less successful influencers.
They prioritize relatability over credentials. The most successful fitness influencers rarely lead with certifications or professional backgrounds. They lead with personal transformation stories — "I was out of shape, here's my journey" narratives that audiences see themselves in. A PhD in exercise science often matters less than before-and-after photos and an authentic voice.
They create content designed for consumption, not just education. The content isn't just instructional — it's entertaining. They understand that they're competing not just with other fitness content but with everything else vying for attention.
They build ecosystems, not single products. The successful ones have layered offerings: free content that builds audience, lower-priced products that convert followers into customers, premium offerings for the most engaged, and ongoing subscription products that create recurring revenue.
They treat fitness as a lifestyle brand. Rather than staying narrowly focused on workouts, they expand into adjacent areas: nutrition, mental wellness, productivity, fashion. This expands their content universe and revenue opportunities while keeping followers engaged across more touchpoints.
What Traditional Players Are Getting Wrong
The established fitness industry's response to this shift has been largely ineffective.
Gyms have tried to launch apps and digital content, but they approach it as an extension of their existing business rather than a fundamentally different model. The content feels corporate because it is corporate.
Certification bodies have responded by questioning influencer credentials, which misses the point entirely. Audiences aren't choosing influencers despite their lack of credentials. They're choosing them partly because of it — the uncredentialed influencer feels more relatable than the intimidating expert.
Legacy brands have partnered with influencers, often awkwardly. The partnerships tend to feel transactional rather than authentic, and audiences can tell the difference.
The fundamental issue is that traditional fitness businesses don't understand that they're no longer primarily in the fitness business. They're in the attention business, competing against every other entity trying to capture and hold audience attention. Until they internalize this shift, their responses will continue to miss the mark.
What This Means Going Forward
The fitness industry's influencer revolution isn't a temporary disruption. It's a structural shift in how the business operates.
Physical gyms won't disappear entirely — there's still value in specialized equipment and in-person community that digital can't fully replicate. But they'll likely occupy a smaller, more niche position in the overall market.
The power will continue to shift toward individuals who can build direct audience relationships. The fitness influencers of today are building media companies — and the most sophisticated among them are building them deliberately, with the infrastructure to scale.
For aspiring fitness professionals, the implications are clear: building an audience is now as important as building expertise. The ability to teach a deadlift matters less than the ability to make people want to learn it from you.
The revolution has happened. The question now is who adapts and who gets left behind.