When you look at the fitness industry on social media, there’s plenty of content for competitive gym rats and total beginners, but what about everyone in the middle?   

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Rachael and Christina have set out to use their combined backgrounds in fitness and nutrition to help everyone reach their fitness goals!  Because of their 17 year age gap, Rachael and Christina are able to bring a more holistic experience to people of all experience levels. While they’ve amassed quite the social media following today, we have to go to their backgrounds to see how this all started and where it’s going.  

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Rachael (age 47) was always an athlete and dancer, but her business background is in television reporting and public relations. When her teenage twins were born, Rachel stepped back from the corporate world to find a position that offered more flexibility.  This led to her getting certified as a fitness instructor and teaching classes at a local gym.  Christina (age 30) has also always been into personal fitness because she was an athlete in college.  Their paths collided a couple years after Christina finished college, when she took one of Rachael’s fitness classes.  Rachael was impressed with Christina’s knowledge of training, so she urged Christina to get licensed and come work at the gym with her.  That’s exactly what Christina did, so the two started working together and have been great friends ever since!

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For quite some time, Rachael and Christina’s focus was entirely on in-person training, but that all changed when COVID rolled around in 2020.  Everyone was pushed indoors, but they still had plenty of clients who wanted to continue training.  To meet that demand, Rachael and Christina ran classes on Facebook Live and Zoom, which ultimately led to them opening up their Instagram, Youtube, and website where they offer more fitness services.  Over the past couple years, we’ve seen a fundamental shift in the dynamics of group fitness.  It used to be that everyone would gather in the gym for a giant class, but now people are able to roll out of bed and onto a virtual class.  Even through this shift, Rachael and Christina like to focus on keeping fun and authenticity as a core part of their online content, since if they’re having fun on camera, then it’s a lot easier for everyone in their classes to do so as well.

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You’ll notice that TikTok isn’t on their list of platforms, and that’s because the platform fundamentally contradicts what Rachael and Christina try to accomplish through their content.  Their goal is to release authentic and well crafted content- things that provide deep informational value to their community.  TikTok’s super short-form content that’s built to be scrolled past in a couple seconds doesn’t fit well into this, so for now it sits on the side lines for Rachael and Christina’s content strategy.  YouTube, on the other hand, has been a major driver of traffic to their website.  A major contributor to this has been direct and fan engagement. If you look at any video’s comment section, you can see them responding to and hearting nearly all of the comments.  This is something I consistently see the most effective creators I talk with doing, since when you as a creator engage with part of your audience through the comments, other viewers are more likely to want to jump in on the conversation as well, starting a massive virtuous cycle.

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Trying to consistently provide so much quality authentic content and engaging in back and forths with followers in the comments is a great way to grow an online presence, but it’s also a great way to burn yourself out. Rachael and Christina understand this well, so they schedule out times for them to take a break from the content and each other (even though they’re besties) to recharge. Before the break they batch-record content so their community isn’t left hanging during their rest time, so they usually plan these breaks out about 3 weeks in advance. This recharging is primarily mental, not physical.  In fact, the workouts Rachael and Christina do are the exact ones they post, so they’re getting the exact same fitness experience they’re providing to their followers!

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Striving for authenticity can be a blessing and a curse. While it provides a breath of fresh air to followers in a world filled with disingenuous content, it also blocks off some opportunities for quick growth.  The biggest example of this is through brand collaborations. If you look at Rachael and Christina’s pages, you’ll see very few brand promotions, since they both have a strong stance on only promoting things they believe in.  That locks Rachael and Christina out from some revenue in the short-term, but over the medium and long-term, staying true to their beliefs pays off many times over through a more trusting and engaged audience.

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Right now, Rachael and Christina are preparing for the launch of their New Year Fitness challenge, which is one of the quarterly challenges they do with their community to help people push themselves that extra little bit and have fun doing it.  In the medium to long term, Rachael and Christina are looking to start hosting live events, like in hotels or resorts.  It’s one thing to engage through a screen, but the energy is entirely different when you have everyone together in the same room working together.  If you’d like to work up a sweat with Rachael and Christina yourself, you can find them on Instagram @rcfitness.official, Youtube @RCFitnessOfficial, and on their website: https://www.rcfitnessathome.com/.

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