440 - Gym Instagram Marketing Playbook 2026

So most gyms think they crush on Instagram, but they're actually hurting their own results. And today I'm gonna take you inside my phone to show you exactly what I mean, as I spent the last 90 days testing things that experts that I've hired have taught me to do, and in the last 90 days alone, we've dwarfed everything we were doing [laughs] in the past 16 years when it came to our follower count, when it came to the leads that we get, and the sales that we get. So Instagram is very underutilized by most, and gyms are one of the biggest culprits. So we're gonna dive in now, and this is actually a presentation that I did at GSD Con that went really, really well and has helped people along the way since, and I'm gonna share it with you. And by the way, for people that are listening to this on the podcast, I know you're listening. I'm gonna do my best to make it non-visual for you, but I will tell you, you'll get a lot more out of this if you watch the video, uh, on YouTube. Hi, my name is Mike Arce, host of the Behind Gym Door podcast and CEO of GSD Gyms, where we've now worked with more than 4,300 gyms in 13 countries, 60 different franchise brands, and hundreds of independent brands. And, uh, I, I'm 100% confident that we've helped more gyms reach the $100,000 a month mark than probably anybody else on the planet. If you wanna learn more about how to do that, you can go to 100kplan.com, and we'll show you how we actually do it. Okay, so we're gonna talk about Instagram and marketing on Instagram organically, specifically, and how you're probably doing it wrong. I was doing it wrong, and I learned some things that I was doing wrong, and it makes me wanna almost go back in time and rewrite history because I feel like in 16 years, or however long we were doing Instagram, whenever we started it, up until 2026, we were posting stuff that was, like, cool, but... It's like we had techniques, we had tactics, but we didn't have a really great strategy, and I didn't realize it until now. But now we've got a great strategy and, uh, just in the last 90 days, uh, we've added 34% more followers to what took us that, you know, 15, 16-year mark to get to. But that's not all. We got more leads in the last 30 days than I think we got in the entire history [laughs] of us being on Instagram prior to that. Again, like, over a decade. And we've gotten more sales in the last 30 days than I think we've got in history as well. So how does that work in the gym world? Well, I, I know because I work with a lot of gym owners, and since doing this presentation at GSD Con about a month ago, and then doing a, uh, a little bit of a longer segment on a power call in our, in our coaching program. We actually do power calls four times per week, where one of those calls we actually teach something really new in, like, marketing. And, uh, I did a version of this presentation. Uh, it's pretty much as dept- in depth as we went, but obviously there was a lot more conversation and side convos and some of the stuff which we can't have 'cause you guys aren't, like, here with me. I'm talking to you. But you're gonna get some really good meat here and stuff that you'll be able to use