When Khalil Zahar set out to build FightCamp, the category he was entering barely existed. Boxing and martial arts training had always been deeply communal — but the community lived in gyms, around rings, in the presence of coaches. Translating that experience into a home product that retained the energy, the accountability, and the sense of belonging was a genuine design and technology challenge.
In this conversation with Matthew Januszek, Zahar explains how FightCamp became what observers have called the 'Peloton of boxing' — a platform backed by world-leading technology and built around a community that spans everyone from professional MMA fighters to families looking for a full-body workout they can do together. It is a story about building something that serves multiple audiences without losing its identity.
About Khalil Zahar
Khalil Zahar founded FightCamp to bring the physical and mental benefits of boxing and martial arts training to a far broader audience than the traditional gym model could reach. The product is built around technology that captures and responds to the quality of a user's training — not just that they showed up, but how they performed — creating the feedback loop that makes the experience genuinely engaging over time.
The community FightCamp has built is one of its most significant assets. MMA athletes, boxing enthusiasts, martial arts practitioners, and fitness-curious families coexist in a shared ecosystem, united by the format rather than separated by their experience level. That breadth is intentional: Zahar designed FightCamp to be a gateway for beginners and a serious tool for advanced athletes simultaneously, which is a genuinely difficult balance to strike.
The 'Peloton of boxing' framing captures something important about the model: like that category-defining platform, FightCamp derives its value from the combination of hardware, content, and community — each element reinforcing the others. Removing any one of them would diminish what the platform actually is. Zahar's achievement is building all three at once in a category that had never had them together before.
What Khalil Zahar and Matthew Januszek Talked About
- FightCamp's success demonstrates that the connected-fitness model — hardware, content, and community as an integrated system — can be built successfully in categories well beyond cycling, including boxing and martial arts.
- Serving both elite athletes and fitness newcomers with the same platform requires deliberate design choices about how technology presents feedback and how community structures prevent intimidation without sacrificing depth.
- The 'Peloton of boxing' framing is earned rather than borrowed: FightCamp built its own technology, its own community architecture, and its own content ecosystem rather than simply applying an existing model to a new category.
- Boxing and martial arts deliver physical and mental benefits that many other modalities do not — the combination of cardiovascular intensity, coordination demands, and discipline creates a training experience with unusually high retention.
- Community is the product's most defensible feature: a sufficiently engaged member community creates belonging that pure fitness utility cannot replicate, and that belonging is what keeps members long after the novelty of the hardware has worn off.
- Technology that measures and responds to training quality — not just activity — fundamentally changes the user's relationship with the product, creating accountability and motivation loops that passive content alone cannot.
- Building in a niche category with a highly passionate existing audience — boxing and martial arts enthusiasts — provides a core community whose energy and credibility lend authenticity that broader-market products often lack.
Why This Conversation Matters
Matthew Januszek has spent his career thinking about what makes fitness experiences genuinely engaging — not just for the first few sessions, but over years. FightCamp's model addresses that question in a way that aligns closely with his own perspective: the answer involves community, technology, and a product that respects both the beginner and the serious athlete. Khalil Zahar's approach to building FightCamp reflects principles Matthew consistently champions in Escape Your Limits conversations.
The questions FightCamp raises are ones Matthew continues to explore through Escape Fitness USA and the LIFTS Podcast: how do you design environments and experiences that keep people engaged with fitness over the long term? FightCamp is a home-fitness answer to that question. Matthew's work is the commercial and design answer. The underlying challenge is identical — and this conversation is worth returning to for anyone building in either space.
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About Matthew Januszek
Matthew Januszek is the co-founder of Escape Fitness, the functional-training equipment brand he built from a UK startup into a global name supplying many of the world’s leading gyms, studios, and hotel fitness spaces. Following the separation of the UK and US businesses, Matthew’s focus today is Escape Fitness USA and the next chapter of the brand in North America. He hosted more than 300 episodes of the Escape Your Limits podcast and now co-hosts the LIFTS Podcast with SweatWorks founder Mohammed Iqbal, covering the business, science, and technology shaping the fitness industry. Explore more interviews and episodes on MatthewJanuszek.com.
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