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Kelly Matsunaga, a single mom and fitness icon who teaches barre and Pilates classes to hundreds of thousands of women online, was never meant to be a businesswoman. She shouldn’t have worked at all.
Matsunaga, 34, has always been taught and told only two things: to be a wife and a mother.
Matsunaga, who grew up in a Mormon family but has left the church, remembers making plans for his future with his parents when he was growing up in Jacksonville, Florida.
“We sat down with my parents and talked about it being my job to be a wife and be home with my kids,” she said.
She married at the age of 20 and became pregnant soon after. However, their married life was turbulent. She said her husband was emotionally abusive. After nine years and three children, she left him.
With $6 in her bank account and no plans or career experience — “I wasn’t allowed to actually work,” she says — Matsunaga moved her children to her parents’ home in Arizona in 2019. Then the pandemic hit, and Matsunaga turned to her hobby even more than ever before, and that hobby became something even bigger: making workout videos.
With encouragement from her online workout students, Matsunaga officially launched her fitness website, Fit By Coach Kel, in 2021, with 10 videos (recorded on her iPhone) and 30 subscribers. Currently, Matsunaga has approximately 500,000 subscribers on YouTube and over 450,000 followers on Instagram.
“I’m very passionate about movements that help people feel confident,” she said. “It just connects you to your own strength, and seeing yourself accomplishing difficult things helps you develop love and trust in yourself.”
“It’s more than just fitness.”
Ballet has always been a big part of Matsunaga’s life. Since she was 2 years old, she was “always wearing a tutu and running around the house.”
“I really grew up with all my eggs in that basket,” she said. Her dedication earned her a full-ride dance scholarship to Brigham Young University, where she met her husband.
As a young mother, Matsunaga traded in her ballet shoes for a yoga mat. She started coming up with an at-home fitness routine to post on YouTube, but said she “didn’t take it too seriously.”
“It was a very casual video,” she said with a laugh. “The kids were running around and the dog was sleeping on the yoga mat.”
However, after the divorce, Matsunaga had to think about how to make money. Her parents finally accepted that her situation as a single mother of three children required her to work. She taught dance and fitness classes at various local studios, but she wasn’t making enough money to support her children.
She got more serious about her workout videos and tried to grow her following on Instagram. It worked.
“The response was really crazy and unexpected,” she said. “Eventually, I came out with the news, like the divorce, and these women… they swooped in. They just became my biggest cheerleaders.”
Students come to Ms. Matsunaga not only for her training, but also for her honesty about womanhood, motherhood, and mental health.
“It was much more than just fitness. It was almost like therapy,” Matsunaga said. The women message her “almost every day” and talk about their abusive marriages, juggling motherhood with other responsibilities, and the transition to single parenthood.
Matsunaga said the women bonded through sweat, music and movement.
“It’s a really rewarding job,” Matsunaga said.
Teach your daughters what they wanted to know
Matsunaga loves that her daughters always watch her work. It’s something we rarely saw women do growing up.
She hopes this will give her daughters the confidence to forge their own path.
If she wants to get married and have children someday, Matsunaga says, “I will never give up on that.” But she never wants them to end up in a post-divorce situation where they have no career experience and have always been financially dependent on a man.
“They just look at me and it helps them understand that it’s acceptable,” she said. “It’s acceptable for them to have hobbies. It’s acceptable for you to want to work and find joy in working and supporting yourself.”
Madeline Mitchell’s role covering women and the care economy for USA TODAY is supported by partnerships such as: extremely important and Journalism funding partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Contact Madeline at: memitchell@usatoday.com and @maddiemitch_ With X.
