If someone were to come up and ask you, What’s the biggest sport in the world?, what would your answer be? Soccer? Cricket? Basketball?
You’re not wrong. Those are all top-watched sports.
But even their robust player populations pale in comparison to the number of people participating in the world’s actual #1 sport: going to the gym.
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Anyone who argues going to the gym isn’t a real sport will have a lot to hear from Phillip Mills, the founder and Managing Director of international fitness company Les Mills. Named after Phillip’s Olympian father, Les Mills offers a vast variety of in-person and online fitness classes hosted–and this is crucial–by over 100,000 expert instructors from all around the world.
Now, the best of the best of those instructors are being featured in an original YouTube competition/documentary series made by Les Mills and Auckland-based studio Tomorrowland.
Called RISE: Search for the Ultimate Trainers, the six-episode series was originally intended to be a six-month project, and ended up spanning over three years of production in an effort to truly highlight the “superhumans” who lead Les Mills’ classes.
Why release the series on YouTube? Simple: “YouTube is the biggest platform for group exercise classes in the world,” Mills tells Tubefilter. “There’s maybe as much as a billion, but certainly as much as three-quarters of a billion people who do online exercise classes on YouTube. If you want to be seen, you do it there.”
And just as we here in the digital content economy are used to creators being the powerhouses driving our industry, Les Mills recognizes that its instructors “are the rockstars of our business.”
“We’ve been at this for a long time. For 60 years now, we’ve been distributing branded classes,” Mills says. “There’s not a Michael Jordan of [fitness instructors] yet, but there will be one day. These people are amazingly talented. They come from performing arts backgrounds, from sports backgrounds, some are dancers.”
So, for RISE, Les Mills (which is based in New Zealand) set out to cast a diverse group of instructors and find who among them are the most dynamite. It started with a massive group audition in London, where it winnowed down to around 250 people. From there was a “rigorous selection system” that eventually narrowed the final tally to just eight trainers–all of whom get their time in the spotlight during RISE‘s six episodes.
Throughout episodes, each of these trainers travel around the world and perform at live fitness events, sometimes in front of thousands of attendees. Whoever comes out on top will snag a coveted spot on Les Mills’ global filming team, which Mills says will inevitably end in fame.
RISE was planned to be a sort of Drive to Survive or Break Point for the fitness industry, offering behind-the-scenes looks at instructors in their prime, but it ended up closer to the 2006 hit Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team, Mills says.
“It became more about achievement,” he says. “To make the team out of 100,000 instructors, it’s a dream, because when they do that, they get famous, not just with other instructors but also with classes online.”
Les Mills tapped Tomorrowland (a Webby Award winner), and brought in some of the camerapeople responsible for filming the thousands of proprietary fitness videos Les Mills distributes on its website for subscribers.
“Some of them are people who’ve shot big New Zealand movies,” he says. “The production value was pretty high.”
As RISE‘s production went on longer, the star instructors began to open up, he adds, and show why their personalities are the anchors for successful classes. “We followed our people around the world, and it emerged who the top instructors were going to be. We went into their home towns, met their children,” Mills explains. “These wild and wonderful characters, we got to know them in their homes around the world.”
Though the shape of RISE became fluid during production, changing to suit the needs of the story, its distribution plan remained rock solid.
That’s where The Now Agency comes in. Co-founded in July 2025 by its Managing Partner Gabe Feldman and Reign Maker Group co-founder/CEO Jonathan Chanti, The Now Agency “exclusively deals with brands of varying sizes, and in helping them transition from traditional media and traditional advertising to social media and influencer-led advertising,” as Feldman puts it.
Mills says his company and The Now Agency came into contact through a Hollywood agent who “brought The Now Agency into the room and we really liked each other,” he says. “We liked what they were saying and doing, and they liked our production values and what we were doing on YouTube already. They came down to New Zealand during a filming round and we fell in love with each other.”
Feldman and Chanti’s company is now Les Mills’ exclusive YouTube agency.
Feldman says The Now Agency believes that, these days, it’s “less of a question if brands should do YouTube, and more of a question of how to do it at scale and effectively.”
“Every major brand today understands the power of influencers. The problem we’re solving is giving brands the best possible infrastructure to move online,” he says. “We can give them a real understanding that’s grounded in terms of what works and what doesn’t in today’s world of influencers.”
For Les Mills, The Now Agency advocated that it “needs to operate less like a brand on YouTube and more like a creator,” Feldman says. “It needs to be entertainment first, providing value through long-form content. And we leaned into that with RISE, which is a prime example of our belief that today, entertainment is marketing, and vice versa.”
RISE is also “the first entry point into a fully optimized YouTube channel for Les Mills as a brand,” Feldman says.
Together, The Now Agency and Les Mills are publishing one episode of RISE per week on Les Mills’ YouTube channel. Episodes are around ~40 minutes each, but are broken into three 15-minute chunks; chunks are published throughout the week.
At the end of each week, a wrap-up podcast–hosted by Les Mills ambassador trainer Bas Hollander–brings in two of RISE‘s instructor stars to view the episode in full and have a post-show chat. This strategy plays into the popularity of video podcasts (especially sports podcasts) and helps Les Mills get more juice from its RISE footage.
“I can’t remember if it was our idea or Now’s idea, but it’s been very cool to see instructors’ reactions to the show,” Mills says. “In the first week, two of our stars share fascinating back stories–Bronté is based in the UK and was previously an actor, while Marlon has a U.S. military background. They’re two incredible characters, who speak with such openness and vulnerability. I was hooked on it.”
He hopes viewers will be hooked on it too, and on RISE as a whole.
And, of course, he hopes they’ll think of those instructors’ inspiring stories–and Les Mills–next time they’re gearing up for a gym session.
Reign Maker Group is a Tubefilter partner.
