Over the course of 2020, there was a significant rise in people turning to YouTube fitness videos to stay in shape .
In fact Google Trends highlights a peak of 100 at the very start of lockdown. In turn, certain fitness influencers began to grow in popularity with their views and subscribers for their YouTube channels skyrocketing.
For example Joe Wicks aka The Body Coach, who quickly became the nation’s personal PE coach for children and adults, with searches for ‘YouTube The Body Coach’ increasing by 350% over the last 12 months.
But considering the hype, which fitness YouTuber can be crowned the most ‘successful’?
To discover this, Flawless scraped multiple lists of top fitness YouTubers, measuring success through factors such as their estimated yearly salary, number of subscribers, and total video views.
To fully measure these variables of success, Flawless created an index-based points system to find out which influencers top the list!
- Athlean-X is the most successful fitness YouTuber, according to an index-scoring system for number of subscribers, total views and yearly salary (9.82 points out of 10)
- Out of these 20 fitness YouTubers, Pamela Reif is the highest earning with £1,900,000
- Despite his popularity, The Body Coach, comes in at 12 out of 20 with 2,760,000 subscribers
- Athlean-X has the most subscribers (10 points) and views (10 points)
Who are the most successful fitness YouTubers?
With an overall score of 9.82 out of 10, the data shows that former physical therapist and strength coach Athlean-X is the most successful fitness YouTuber.
He has the most subscribers (10 points) and the most views (10 points) with 11,600,000 and 1,847,112,280 respectively.
Coming in second place is German influencer Pamela Reif, scoring 9.29 out of 10. According to Social Blade data Reif is also predicted to earn the highest yearly salary, having scored 10 points (£1,900,000).
Then there’s Yoga with Adriene in third place with an overall score of 8.77.
Yoga with Adriene had the second highest number of subscribers (9,870,000) after Athlean-X scoring 9.47 points overall.
Likewise, Adriene’s high subscriber count can be attributed to her zen personality and videos that cater to all abilities.
Trailing behind in 18th place, but still considered one of the top 20 most successful fitness YouTubers is Stephanie Buttermore (1.05 points out of 10) who uses her background in science to educate her subscribers.
Similarly, former Olympian Tom Daley is in the penultimate spot with an overall score of 0.87. Whilst in last place is fitness and figure competitor Dana Linn Bailey who despite having 479,000 subscribers and 99,977,573 total video views, scored no points overall.
Other notables were Blogilates, who came in 6th place. Founded by Cassey Ho whose pilates style videos scored a total of 7.19 points.
Despite being in the news consistently over the course of 2020 through to 2021 encouraging the nation to keep active, surprisingly Joe Wicks aka The Body Coach only comes in at number 12. Wicks has 2,760,000 subscribers and 275,709,950 total video views.