FOLLOW YOUR HEART
Houston fitness goddess Carmen Morgan did, and now she uses her teaching and dancing skills in the social-media arena
Carmen Morgan has a chiseled body that would make even JLo jealous.
But that’s not the only reason the 33-year-old Houston fitness trainer has amassed more than 600,000 followers on Instagram. She’s close to rivaling workout guru Shaun T, the man behind the killer “Insanity” fitness program, who has about 800,000 followers.
Morgan’s secret is that she offers simple, easy-to-follow exercise videos, has a cute rescue dog named Joey who often stars in her posts and she starts off each video by dancing. It’s a no-fuss formula that she says resonates with her mostly female audience.
“I just started with a simple approach,” Morgan said. “I did all of my videos on a boring gray wall, and I love to dance, so I make it fun. Then I approached fitness from an education standpoint to make it easy to understand.”
In each workout video, her goal is show how to do exercises, from an easy warmup to leg lunges, correctly and safely.
“Because my background is in education, everything I do, even now, is about teaching. I’m not one of those trainers who believes it has to hurt. There are ways to train smarter,” she said.
Just five years ago, Morgan left her job as a middle school art teacher because she was spending more time “working out in the gym than grading papers.”
“Fitness was my main source of happiness,” she said.
Morgan became a certified fitness trainer. She started training a few of her neighbors in the apartment complex where she lived. Her first Instagram post, in 2014, was of her doing a headMorgan continues on D6