Check Out Allie Bennett’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Allie Bennett

Hi Allie, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I got started making content when I was probably 13- I posted everything I saw on Instagram with the Valencia filter slapped on it, hoping it would somehow make me famous (it didn’t!). When I graduated from high school in Wilmington, I headed up to UNC Chapel Hill to pursue what I thought was going to be a cognitive science degree. Somewhere that first semester, I saw that there was a Hollywood Internship Program for students in the Communications department, so I switched gears entirely. Somewhere in there, I decided to apply to the screenwriting program, and one of the friends that I met through there spoke my name in the right room after we graduated – we weren’t able to actually go to Hollywood for our internship program due to graduating in 2020!) and I was asked to apply for a job making short-form content for a creator that I watched all the time who had just moved to Raleigh! After applying and interviewing and pinching myself because it felt too good to be true, I got the job.

As a born-bred-dead Tar Heel, moving to Raleigh was never something I thought I was going to do, but I fell in love with both the city and my partner (an NC State alum and Raleigh native!) shortly after moving up here. After randomly posting myself walking to the beat of a song on the treadmill one day in June 2021, I found my niche in the online content world that I had been tirelessly searching for since I was a teenager. I kept that going for about a year but a eureka moment one day in 2022 (I consider it the best shower thought I’ve ever had) made me realize I could put the songs that I strut to in ascending speed order to make a full workout so people could work their way up in speed without realizing it. I posted the first one, the Taylor Swift Treadmill Strut (the T.S.T.S.), in April of 2022 and it was an instant hit with my audience, going viral while I was sitting at work that day! It eventually became bigger than myself – the Today Show, Ryan Seacrest, and multiple other publications reached out within three months – and I left my job to make content for myself! It’s been an incredible uphill climb since then, but we’ve been invited to the White House, had an interview on Good Morning America, taken over every Orangetheory Fitness studio in the world with our Treadmill Strut collaboration, hosted local events to bring people together and collect product donations, and done a photoshoot in Portugal for one of the biggest sportswear brands in the world just because of my silly treadmill videos!

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It’s been a long time coming, but I feel like this was always going to be what I ended up doing! Not being able to go to Los Angeles to do my internship program and having to live with my parents after college seemed like it would end my career at the time, but it put me in exactly the right place to accept my dream job a few months later. Making a career for yourself online is a daunting process because you have to trust that you’ll keep things interesting enough for your audience that they’ll want to stick around while also making money, but having seen how it works and had that experience working for another creator made me much more confident that I’m capable of it!

People will always be annoying in comments online, but I’ve learned that most of the time it’s because they have nothing better to do than consume the content you put out there while they lurk behind a faceless profile picture. I’ve had to overcome a lot personally, whether that’s turning my recovery from an eating disorder into a fun way to explore non-calorie-tracking forms of exercise, like the treadmill struts started out as, or having to deal with personal backlash when I came out as a Lesbian, but I know who I am and what I stand for, so nobody out there can make me feel a type of way about it. If you don’t like something about me, you don’t have to watch my videos- I’ve always said that I’m too busy having fun to care who’s watching!

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m best known for my Treadmill Strut workouts, which have been my claim to fame since 2021! I make playlists with songs in ascending BPM order (usually) that you can walk to the beat of and get a good sweat in while feeling like you’re a runway model! There are over 150 playlists in my arsenal of different lengths featuring all sorts of artists and themes, from Taylor Swift to house music to “songs that make you feel like a hot villain in a 2000s movie strutting down the hallway”. In 2023, on International Walking Day, I partnered with Orangetheory Fitness to do a Treadmill Strut class, and it was the only workout done in studios around the world that day!

My fitness content is centered around how it makes you feel, not how it makes you look, which is something that I was having a hard time finding for myself growing up. I was a dancer, so I had a lot of body image issues that manifested into something bigger eventually, so I want to help those who are in a similar boat as I was- wanting to move my body but not knowing how to do it in a way that made me FEEL good.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I quit my full time job to do this on my own WAY before I was ready. I hardly had enough coming in from brand deals to cover my rent, but I knew I had something I couldn’t give up. I’m a risk-taker only when it comes to sticking up for myself! Nobody gets to put their hands on something I created. I believed in myself, and it definitely worked out for the best!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @alliehbennett
• Other: tiktok – @alliehbennett