A flood of investment into fitness technology over the prior eighteen months had changed the landscape: smart-fitness devices, connected at-home fitness, daily trackers and wearables were no longer niche products but mainstream expectations. The question was where all of it was heading — and who was best positioned to answer it.
In this episode of the On The Edge Podcast, co-hosts Emma Barry and Matthew Januszek brought that question to the Connected Health & Fitness Summit, interviewing five industry leaders on the current state of health and where they see it progressing.
About The Future of Connected Fitness
The On The Edge Podcast, co-hosted by Emma Barry and Matthew Januszek, is built around the idea that the most interesting conversations in fitness happen at the intersection of disciplines — where tech meets movement, where fashion meets function, and where business strategy meets science. The Connected Health & Fitness Summit provided exactly that kind of cross-disciplinary backdrop for this set of interviews.
Across five conversations, the episode covers technology, business strategy and growth, the incorporation of science into fitness, and health and well-being more broadly. Among the five industry leaders interviewed is Rhian Collinson of Kisaco Research, whose perspective on where the connected fitness market is heading carries particular weight given Kisaco's focus on the health and wellness investment space.
The episode captures a moment of genuine inflection in the fitness industry — a period when investment was running ahead of clarity about which connected fitness models would actually stick. The five guests each bring a different vantage point to that question, and together they sketch a picture of an industry working out, in real time, what the next chapter looks like.
Key Insights from the Conversation
- The connected fitness investment surge of the prior eighteen months created both opportunity and noise — and the sharpest operators in the space are focused on separating durable trends from temporary momentum.
- Technology alone does not define connected fitness. The most compelling leaders in this space think about tech as a delivery mechanism for genuine health outcomes, not as the product itself.
- Business strategy in connected fitness requires a different playbook than traditional gym or wellness businesses. Scale, data, and recurring engagement metrics matter in ways that square-footage models never had to reckon with.
- The incorporation of science into fitness is accelerating — and the companies that build rigorous evidence into their offerings early will be harder to displace as the market matures.
- Rhian Collinson of Kisaco Research offers a research-backed lens on where the connected health and fitness market is heading — a perspective grounded in the investment flows and strategic signals that often precede industry shifts.
- Fashion and lifestyle integration is emerging as a meaningful dimension of connected fitness adoption. The companies treating wearables and fitness tech as identity products, not just utility tools, are tapping a different kind of consumer motivation.
- The five perspectives gathered at the Connected Health & Fitness Summit converge on a single underlying theme: health and well-being are becoming a continuous, technology-mediated practice rather than a scheduled, location-based activity.
Why This Conversation Matters
Matthew Januszek's focus with Escape Fitness USA is on building fitness products and environments that meet people where the industry is actually heading — not where it has been. The connected fitness conversation is central to that work, and the On The Edge series with Emma Barry is his way of bringing the most informed voices in that conversation into the open. This episode, set against a backdrop of significant investment and rapid technology change, is one of the clearest windows into how industry leaders are thinking about the future.
On the LIFTS Podcast, Matthew and Mohammed Iqbal of SweatWorks regularly explore the business and technology forces reshaping how fitness is delivered and experienced. The themes from this episode — tech investment cycles, the science-fitness bridge, the evolution of connected health — map directly onto those conversations. For anyone building in the fitness and wellness space, understanding where the connected fitness market is heading is no longer optional background knowledge; it is central strategy.
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube
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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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