Matthew Januszek and Mohammed (Mo) Iqbal opened a LIFTS Podcast episode in January 2026 with a premise that challenges how most gym owners think about their competitive landscape: the real threat is not the gym down the street — it is the creator on YouTube who has spent years earning the trust of the audience you are trying to attract.

Joined by David Sherman-Presser, founder of Structure Creation and a specialist in fitness content strategy, the conversation covers attention economics, platform dynamics, and the practical question of what it actually takes to build a modern fitness brand when a smartphone and a YouTube channel can do what a marketing budget used to buy.

What This Episode Covers

The argument that fitness is becoming a media business is no longer theoretical. Across the industry, operators and brands are learning that audience ownership — the ability to reach a defined community without paying for access each time — is now as strategically important as physical square footage. YouTube has emerged as the primary arena for that competition, rewarding long-form content that builds trust over time in ways that shorter platforms simply cannot replicate.

LIFTS — the Latest Industry Fitness Trends and Stories — is Matthew Januszek and Mo Iqbal's weekly pulse check on where the fitness industry is heading, published at liftspodcast.com. Matthew brings decades of experience building Escape Fitness into a global brand and now applies that lens to Escape Fitness USA's North American chapter; Mo contributes the SweatWorks operator perspective. Together they built LIFTS to surface the conversations that move the industry — and the shift from physical-first to media-first fitness business models is one of the defining stories of this era.

David Sherman-Presser founded Structure Creation to help fitness businesses navigate exactly this transition. His work sits at the intersection of content strategy, brand building, and platform mechanics, and the episode draws on his practical experience working with gym owners who are figuring out how to compete in a creator-driven economy without losing sight of the physical business that pays the bills.

Key Moments from the Conversation

• The core argument Matthew, Mo, and David build together is that gyms are now competing with creators as much as with other gyms — and the operators who recognize that shift earliest will have the biggest advantage in acquisition and discovery.
• Attention, trust, and audience data are framed as new forms of business infrastructure: a gym that owns a loyal YouTube audience has a durable marketing asset that compounds over time, while one that relies entirely on paid channels faces perpetual cost pressure.
• YouTube earns a specific focus as the platform best suited to fitness content because long-form video builds the kind of trust and authority that drives real membership conversions — not just passive views.
• The episode explores how operators can use YouTube to validate a gym concept or programming approach digitally before committing capital to physical expansion, reducing the risk of expensive mistakes.
• David breaks down how YouTube strategies need to scale with business size: the content approach that works for a single-location boutique is different from what a growing multi-site brand needs, and understanding that distinction saves operators from copying the wrong playbook.
• Building repeatable content formats — structured series and formats that audiences can expect and return to — is presented as the key to growing a YouTube presence sustainably rather than relying on one-off viral moments.
• The conversation makes clear that for fitness brands trying to build relevance in 2026 and beyond, YouTube functions as a trust platform first and a traffic driver second: audiences come for expertise and stay because the relationship feels genuine.

Why This Conversation Matters

For Matthew Januszek, the media-business argument resonates with lived experience. Building Escape Fitness meant developing a brand that operators and gym owners would trust across dozens of markets — and that kind of trust is built through consistent, valuable communication, not just a product catalog. At Escape Fitness USA, the same logic applies: the North American market responds to brands that show up with genuine expertise, and LIFTS is part of how Matthew and Mo do exactly that.

The operators who leave this episode with one thing should leave with a sharper sense of urgency. The audience that will decide where to work out in 2027 and 2028 is building its preferences right now — through the YouTube channels and content creators it follows. Gym owners who are not in that conversation are ceding ground that will be expensive to recover later.

▶  Watch the full episode on YouTube

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