The fitness niche is the best-engaged broad cohort on Instagram and the second-best on TikTok. It is also the most heterogeneous — a marathon runner, a powerlifter, and a Pilates instructor are functionally different audiences glued together by a shared niche tag.
We pulled forty-one thousand fitness creators across both platforms. Here’s the cohort, broken out by the way it actually segments.
Mid-tier (100K–1M) is the workhorse
The mid-tier is where most brand spend lands and where the cohort is densest. Median engagement rate sits at 3.4% on Instagram and 5.1% on TikTok. Top-decile mid-tier creators run double that.
“The mid-tier engagement floor is higher in fitness than in any other broad niche we track.”
Where the cohort breaks
- Bodybuilding and powerlifting accounts skew toward higher view counts but lower comment depth.
- Running and triathlon accounts have the longest comment threads in the cohort.
- Pilates and barre have the highest save-to-like ratios and the highest sponsored CPMs.
- Calisthenics is the most male-skewed sub-niche by far.
The full breakdown — by tier, by sub-niche, by platform — lives on the fitness benchmarks page. The numbers update weekly.