Meet taliyah joelle
By Charity Graham
If your Instagram algorithm is anything like mine, you’ll find that in between every wig install tutorial and makeup hack is yet another fitness influencer revealing their “holy grail” to the perfect body. And if you’re anything like I was when I first began working out, you’re saving each of those videos and ultimately overwhelming yourself with information
As it happens with every industry on social media, the fitness influencer scene is saturated with conflicting information from individuals with little evidence beyond their own sculpted body, leaving us to wonder if a 6-pack and perfect curves are enough reason to blindly follow their workout regimes. Luckily, influencers like Taliyah Joelle exist.
Courtesy of @taliyah.joelle on Instagram
Graduating second in her class at Hampton University where she studied Kinesiology, Taliyah Joelle didn’t come into the fitness scene as a rookie. With self-hatred fueling her initial desire to change how her body looked, her personal fitness journey didn’t have the smoothest of starts. In high school, the way she was losing weight wasn’t exactly the healthiest. As she ventured deeper into her studies at Hampton, however, she learned — by the books — the proper way to exercise, lose fat, and gain muscle. While growing further in her fitness journey, Taliyah studied hard in school with original plans to be a physical therapist in the Army. With each aced assignment, the better her own fitness results got. However, 50 days away at camp and an insightful conversation with her lieutenant colonel at the time revealed to Taliyah that the path that once seemed so certain to her wouldn’t serve her in the long run.
Following her graduation, Taliyah moved to Florida and was serving at Olive Garden when everything changed. When a viral video allowed her to gain 10,000 Instagram followers in a week, she put aside the anxiety most creators face before putting content out for the world to see and began posting gym videos based on her years of formal fitness education.
“That was all the validation I needed. I’m going for it.”
Taliyah on her decision to take content seriously
What she quickly noticed, however, was that in a world of videos proclaiming you can get abs after 8 days, her science-backed approach wasn’t accepted with open arms. With so much misinformation coursing through the average explore page and emboldening Instagrammers in her comments, the backlash she received from strangers drove her to re-evaluate her content’s purpose.
“I had to take a mental note. My whole purpose in this is helping women who don’t know anything about this stuff and giving them the most digestible information that they can possibly have,” Taliyah said while describing the early stages of her content.
Keeping that purpose at the core of her content creation, Taliyah’s fitness page that she shares with her best friend Ariel, @bodiedbytna, now boasts more than 220,000 followers. Her personal YouTube channel is home to about 287,000 of her “stinks” that look forward to her fitness and lifestyle uploads weekly.
“The beautiful thing about YouTube is that it really opened my eyes to the fact that I’m doing everything that society tells me to do and yet I was probably still going to be extremely dissatisfied and broke,” Taliyah said as she reflected on her pivot to content creation after college.
Between her admirable success on social media and her virtual coaching business, what began as a self-improvement journey is now a lucrative and fulfilling lifestyle for the 24-year-old.
