How Xponential Fitness Produces Training at Scale for 3,000+ Studios

Industry Context

In boutique fitness, training is the product. For Xponential's franchise network, the content that teaches instructors how to deliver classes isn't supplementary material — it's what franchisees pay for. Quality has to be high, content has to stay current as methodologies evolve, and training has to reach instructors across dozens of markets. A production model that costs tens of thousands per project, ties content to individual on-screen talent, and requires every update to be a full reshoot can't support that.

The Challenge

Before Synthesia, training content ranged from iPhone footage in empty rooms to full professional studio shoots — and both created the same core problem:

• Content that couldn't keep up: iPhone-recorded talking heads were quick to make but inconsistent in quality and hard to update. Studio productions looked polished but ran $10K-$30K, took days to film, and were tied to specific on-screen talent — meaning when that person moved on, the instinct to reshoot rarely got acted on.
• Every revision was a production event: A single updated term or rebranded methodology meant rebooking talent, rescheduling studio time, reshooting, and re-editing. Updates got delayed, and training lagged behind the business.

"Any revision would need a reshoot, rebooking of the talent, rescheduling the studio, and a re-edit. It took days, so people put it off, and the content fell out of date. With Synthesia, if I get a revision note, it's done by the end of the day." — Matt McCabe, eLearning Media Designer, Xponential Fitness.

The Solution

Xponential chose Synthesia for its best-in-class AI voices, visual lip sync, and a sales process that took time to understand their specific needs. The YogaSix bridge training — a paid program for existing yoga instructors learning YogaSix's methodology — is one example of how the team put it into practice, and it illustrates the wider workflow they've built across brands:

• Script-first production: Matt McCabe, eLearning Media Designer, locks scripts in Google Docs, then uploads them to Synthesia, producing one to two videos per day. The result: 96 training videos for YogaSix versus roughly 20 with a traditional studio shoot.
• Custom avatars built for the brand: The team created a fully custom avatar that matches the look of a real YogaSix instructor. Veronica Najera, Vice President of Education at YogaSix, has her own personal avatar, giving the brand a consistent, recognizable presence across content.
• Embedded in a larger eLearning ecosystem: Synthesia videos sit inside SCORM-packaged eLearning courses, with video production and course development running in parallel — enabling faster delivery without sacrificing quality.

"The biggest shift compared to anywhere I've worked before is that video is no longer the bottleneck. In L&D, that has always been the case. It isn't anymore." — Matt McCabe, eLearning Media Designer, Xponential Fitness.

The Impact

Xponential's L&D team delivered the YogaSix bridge training faster than expected, aligned with a key brand initiative, and raised the bar for what a small team can produce at enterprise scale.

• 96 training videos produced for YogaSix bridge training
• 5x faster than traditional production — one to two videos per day vs. approximately one week per video
• 95% first-pass brand QA approval — only 5% of videos required any revision
• Same-day revisions — the rebook-reshoot-re-edit cycle eliminated entirely
• 5 brands, 3,000+ studios, 31 countries — all served by a small L&D team that can now say yes to projects at the pace the business demands

"What we're building is core to how franchisees experience our product. The scale of it wouldn't have been possible with the resources we have without Synthesia." — Emilie Porter-Rand, Director of Learning and Development, Xponential Fitness.

Want to see how other teams are building with Synthesia? Explore more case studies.