In 2017, Lilly Sabri was renting out her local community hall for £25 an hour to host Pilates classes. “I would think, ‘OK, I just need three people to make a profit’,” she jokes.
Eight years on, she now owns one of the world’s leading fitness apps – Lean With Lilly – while boasting an online following in excess of six million. The catalyst? Posting at-home workout videos on YouTube.
Rarely before have fitness industry figures had this huge sphere of influence. A personal trainer tends to work with clients one-to-one, and even leading group classes might only grant them access to a few hundred faces per week.
By contrast, Sabri’s most-viewed video has been watched more than 87 million times – a figure larger than the population of 90 per cent of countries in the world. Such is her reach that one fan recently told her there are mornings when he hears her voice before his wife’s, with his partner often firing up follow-along workouts on the telly.
This popularity is especially impressive when you consider that exercise isn’t an appealing prospect to many. Most of us know we should probably move more, but we live in a world that makes it increasingly easy not to. According to the World Health Organisation, 31 per cent of adults and 80 per cent of adolescents do not meet the recommended levels of daily physical activity.
So how has Sabri motivated the masses to get moving?
The beginning
When she started posting on YouTube in 2017, Sabri was living with her mum and balancing three jobs. Without the platform, she admits, her life would look very different.
She began her working life as a physiotherapist. Her mum, an NHS nurse, had spotted physiotherapists working on wards and thought the job would be a good fit for her daughter. Sabri agreed, studying in Manchester to become a chartered physiotherapist before starting a junior rotation at Lewisham and Greenwich NHS trust.
“While I was working in the NHS as a physio, I was also volunteering in local football clubs – first Barnet, which was my local team, and then I worked my way up to Watford,” she says. “I was living in north London at the time, even though I was working in Lewisham, and travelling nearly two hours each way. But it was at a time when there weren’t many jobs around, so just getting a job was amazing. I couldn’t afford a place on my own, so I was still living with my mum.”
At the same time, she trained as a Pilates instructor and began leading classes in the evenings. This blend of professions led her to develop what she calls the Lean Method – “Core Pilates principles with a more athletic twist”. Social media provided the potential to share this approach with a wider audience.
“I wanted to reach more people from a physio standpoint as well as Pilates, and I thought, ‘How can I reach more people when I only have one pair of hands and X amount of patients per day?,’” she explains. “The only way was online. With that, I knew that all I needed was a camera, and then to upload it. “
In her own words, her first YouTube video was “not great”, but she hunkered down and dove headfirst into the strategy side of content creation – learning her craft, ironically, from a succession of YouTube videos.
Through this, she came to specialise in follow-along home workouts, using her background as a Pilates instructor and physio to provide constant verbal cues and accessible movement options for all fitness levels.
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The great home workout boom
This approach saw her steadily grow a following of 30,000 in her first three years on YouTube. “A lot, but not enough to pay the bills,” she says. However, it was the Covid lockdowns that sent her channel stratospheric.
When Italy was plunged into lockdown on 9 March 2020, she saw a sudden influx of subscribers from the country. A similar pattern followed as more nations were told to stay at home, and people sought a way to get sweaty sans-gym.
“During that point when everywhere around the world was starting to go into lockdown, it was very much a strategy on my part, looking at how we can effectively use these lockdowns to help as many people as possible, but also utilise the old catalogue of content I already had [from three years of posting],” says Sabri.
“If you crack it and then you keep going with that same approach, maybe tweaking it along the way to make sure it’s aligned to your values and messaging, you can continue to ride that wave.”
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Pitch perfect
As lockdowns continued around the world, people understandably grew more health-conscious, and many found they had more time on their hands than usual. As a result, home workout content was hoovered up like metaphorical hot cakes.
But, as supply and demand saw the internet become saturated with fitness tips, Sabri needed to stand out by pitching her content accordingly.
Firstly, she used her “biggest USP”. Unlike some fitness content creators, she has the requisite credentials to be imparting exercise wisdom, given her experience as a chartered physiotherapist and certified Pilates instructor.
“I’ll try to mention that occasionally and say, ‘I’m here to teach you a Pilates class, and as you guys know I’m a physiotherapist ,so I’m going to be correcting your form throughout’,” she says.
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Start your (search) engines
Because YouTube is a search engine, next on her agenda was developing a strategy that caters to key terms people are searching for – the titles of Sabri’s most-viewed videos centre around common fitness goals such as fat loss and obtaining a flat stomach, while many recent uploads are Pilates workouts targeting muscles in the abs and legs.
“You obviously need to make sure you’re giving people what they want,” says Sabri. “As an example, at the beginning of my YouTube journey, I started off posting things like ‘10 physio tips to help with back pain’.
“It would get views, but it wouldn’t get as many views [as her videos do now]. The reason is that, at that moment in time, there aren’t as many people searching for back pain tips as there are searching for strengthening your core.
“[Making fitness content is] about finding a balance between what the general population wants and what your skillset is. For me, it was combining the two and making sure I always had that physio background in there, while also producing content that people are looking for.”
The next challenge is, if you want your audience to keep coming back for more, the video itself has to deliver on the headline brief.
“The bulk of the video is where you’re going to make a difference,” Sabri says. “That’s when the person is with you for 10 to 15 minutes, or however long it is, so that’s where you’re making the change to their life, building a relationship with them, and you have the opportunity to get across whatever your core message is.”
“For me, it’s making sure they feel good about the workout and making sure they’re getting the form tips they need.”
This message worked. Through a combination of unerring consistency, live-streamed workouts, community-building and more, Sabri gained three million subscribers between March 2020 and July 2021. “I have uploaded twice a week without fail for the last five years – always on the same day, at the same time,” she explains.
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Making a career out of content creation
With the explosion of her YouTube channel over lockdown, Sabri was able to launch her fitness app Lean With Lilly in 2021. Over the years, this has seen her focus shift from content creation to building a business.
“All of this started because of YouTube, and I wouldn’t be where I am now without it,” she says. “But now YouTube probably only takes up 25 per cent of my [working], time. A huge part of it now is looking at the business strategy; how we can scale this, how we can help more people and how we can turn this into more of a sustainable business with a growth strategy.”
This change in her business reflects personal changes she has experienced over the years. Sabri has only recently returned to social media following a “1.5 year mental and physical health battle”, which came after she found out about her then fiance’s infidelity via a podcast.
One of the changes she has made is splitting her work and personal life. In a 2021 interview, she spoke about turning her apartment into a “YouTube studio” and being a “walking, talking, eating and filming machine”, but tells me: “thankfully, that’s now separate.”
“It’s definitely for the work-life balance, but also for the business,” she says. “It’s been really helpful to step into my [identity as a] businesswoman and make sure I'm not just known for content creation.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, being a content creator, and naturally I’ve evolved through that time. I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago when I first started, and it’s really important to me that I take my audience with me on that journey.”
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