If you’ve been on TikTok long enough, you may have come across @julielawfit. If you aren’t familiar with the name, recall the phrase “bettering yourself is hot” and you might remember. Julie Lawton is a 20-year-old UConn student studying Communications who creates her own fitness and lifestyle content. Since December 2021, Julie has consistently produced fitness tutorials made to get beginners active and in the gym, starting with her Shy Girl Workout series. After the series gained millions of views, Julie began to use TikTok as a new creative tool. In over two years of filming content, she has recently hit a new achievement of 500,000 followers on TikTok. Behind all this success in the social media industry, Julie has a deeper message and passion to share with her followers.
Julie claims it all started with her decision to transfer to the University of Connecticut. After it became official, she felt she had nothing to lose when starting to work out at her previous university. As she was driving back home after packing up her whole dorm, she realized it would be a great idea to record herself working out for others feeling the same way.
This was when the first Shy Girl workout series was born.
The TikTok series gathered attention and the fitness content grew from there. The original workout series took Julie an estimated 16 hours from start to finish to create. From refilming the content, multiple voiceover attempts, and different edit cuts, it was a long process to create the perfect video series. Today, Julie creates smaller workouts for beginners but has integrated her personal workouts and daily routines into TikTok. She will film her morning routine, intuitive eating, and how she manages to stay active every day. Her content creation schedule keeps her on track each day. She will set aside specific days to film chunks of her content or workouts specifically for her followers.
As her content has grown, Julie has noticed that the biggest social media challenge is that people will “take your body as your credibility.” The increasing trend of assuming a fitness influencer has more qualifications or knowledge solely due to their body type creates a damaging relationship between consumers of the content and the creators. Many followers assume that doing exactly what an influencer does will create the same result.
“Even if you do exactly what a fitness influencer does, you can never get the same result. You are two different people. You need to find what works for you.”
– Julie Lawton
Julie has leaned into more workout-heavy content while adding her fun twist. Julie often uses phrases like “Bettering yourself is hot,” “Gorgeous Gorgeous girls never skip legs,” or “Hot girls never skip upper body” to engage her followers.
Julie credits her balance between education and fun to her trip to California through the Werth Institute. There she heard an inspirational speech from Eileen Crossin who shared that TikTok pushes “edutainment.” There has to be a mix between having fun and learning something new. Ever since then, Julie has aimed her content to provide substance and meaningful messages. She shares that every video has a purpose and there should be no “fluff” content.
“Even if I can just help one person start their fitness journey, that would mean the world to me.”
– Julie Lawton
There is a deeper connection Julie is hoping to make with her viewers. A new direction that Julie’s content has shifted towards is promoting a fun lifestyle despite not drinking. Julie wants others to understand it is okay to take pride in your health despite the promotion of binge drinking in college. Although the typical college student is depicted as someone who lacks a healthy eating schedule and structure, Julie wants to counter that by taking control of her life.
Recently, Julie has shared her views and decision to stop drinking in The Chronicle for Higher Education. Julie shares that this was an immense honor to be asked for her opinions from a prestigious news source.
The content resonates primarily with her female audience, as Julie’s TikTok is 96% female and 4% male. Close to 47% of her followers fall in the age range of 18-24. The next largest is 41% at ages 25-34, 9% at 35-44, 2% from 44-54, and lastly 1% at 55+.
Now, Julie has even begun collaborating with other organizations and influencers. She notes that this past summer, she was able to work out with Allegria Iacovino or @legs.fit on TikTok. The ability to share her experience when someone who understood exactly what she was going through was a pivotal moment. The collaboration also resulted in a podcast episode between the two fitness influencers.
This past semester, Julie was able to work out with the UConn football team and take them through her Shy Girl Workouts.
The milestones have kept coming with each increase in following, in-person recognition, and partnerships with brands she has always loved like Ryse Fuel Energy Drinks. As her social media presence has increased, Julie still manages to engage with her followers as she always has. She noted being recognized in public still feels as amazing as the first time it happened. Julie makes an active effort to respond to every DM, recognize the names of followers, and engage with comments.
On the other side, with more recognition, Julie faces more negative social media interactions. Julie makes an active effort to make her social media platforms as positive as possible. Feedback or constructive criticism are things she keeps to increase the quality of her content, but plain negativity or cruelty has no room on her platform. Julie mentions she has no problem blocking a rude commenter.
Despite the increasing trend of turning content creation into a full-time job, Julie shares she has no intention of following in those footsteps. Julie shares that managing schoolwork and working out is key to her success. She wants to pursue a full-time career after college while expanding on social media.
Julie shares that her newest adventure is that she is in the process of obtaining her personal trainer certification to personally work with her followers!
If you keep following her social media through @julielawfit on Instagram and TikTok, you can stay up-to-date on what Julie is up to. Or even better, you can start your fitness journey with her.