Matthew Januszek, co-founder of Escape Fitness and partner in Escape Fitness USA, and Mo Iqbal, founder and CEO of SweatWorks, return to the microphone for the second half of their live recording from Beyond Activ — the EMEA's largest health, fitness, wellness, and sports festival, held in Riyadh in February 2024. This follow-up to Part 1 brings more international industry voices into the conversation, each of them actively building or advising businesses in Saudi Arabia and the wider region.
The guests cover an enormous amount of ground across just under two hours: population health challenges, responsible tourism, sustainable mega-development, member education, and what it takes to build an organization that people love rather than merely use.
What This Episode Covers
The guests represent a cross-section of the fitness and wellness industry's engagement with Saudi Arabia. Regional operators speak from the perspective of deep roots in the Saudi market and an understanding of the population health issues — including physical inactivity and related chronic conditions — that an expanded fitness sector is being asked to help address. Voices from responsible tourism and regenerative development describe how giga-environments are being designed to set new global standards for sustainable hospitality and wellness infrastructure.
A comparative European perspective examines what the KSA can learn from European fitness market development to accelerate its own growth while avoiding the mistakes that took other markets decades to correct. Premium multi-modal wellness operators discuss the challenge of building in a market where the category itself is still being defined for large portions of the population, and technology leaders address the tracking infrastructure that operators across the region are deploying to measure and demonstrate member outcomes.
The episode closes with a perspective on the importance of building consumer relationships that generate genuine affection rather than simple transaction — the distinction between a brand people love and a brand people merely use, which is framed as the critical variable separating durable businesses from those that grow quickly and then stall.
Key Moments from the Conversation
- Beyond Activ's presence in Saudi Arabia is itself a signal — the festival's choice of Riyadh as an EMEA anchor reflects the scale of investment and intent coming from the country's government and private sector in health, fitness, and wellness.
- Prevalent population health issues across the Kingdom — including high rates of physical inactivity — are not just a public health challenge but a market opportunity, and operators who understand both dimensions will build more sustainable businesses.
- A winning mindset for business success in Saudi Arabia requires patience, cultural fluency, and a genuine commitment to partnership with local entities rather than a purely extraction-oriented approach.
- Responsible tourism and regenerative development represent a new standard for how giga-environments can be designed to create long-term value rather than short-term spectacle.
- Saudi Arabia has the opportunity to learn from global fitness market development and leapfrog some of the slower evolutionary stages, but only if operators and government stakeholders actively seek out that knowledge rather than reinventing it independently.
- Network and collaboration between international and local players is not just strategically beneficial in the market — it is practically essential, given the pace of development and the complexity of operating across cultural and regulatory environments simultaneously.
- Educating a population that is encountering organized fitness and wellness at scale for the first time requires long-term investment in communication, programming, and community building rather than a simple marketing push.
- The distinction between businesses that people love and businesses that merely wow them is as relevant in a fast-growing new market as it is in any mature one: sustainable retention comes from genuine value, not novelty.
Why This Conversation Matters
Matthew Januszek's interest in the Middle East market is grounded in the same instinct that has driven Escape Fitness USA's growth: the recognition that the most significant fitness market opportunities tend to appear where there is both unmet demand and real investment in infrastructure. Saudi Arabia has both, in quantities that are difficult to overstate, and Matthew's conversations with people who are actively operating there offer a clearer picture of the opportunity than most industry observers have access to.
The LIFTS Podcast, co-hosted with Mo Iqbal of SweatWorks, has consistently looked beyond the markets that dominate fitness industry coverage. This two-part Beyond Activ series from Riyadh is one of the most substantive treatments the show has produced of what the next decade of global fitness growth actually looks like — and who is already building it.
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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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