Hey, welcome! We are fit to be real.
And a little extra.
Oh my gosh, that's gonna change every time.
Today, we're gonna talk about us and we're going to introduce where we're from, how we got to this point,
and it's gonna be really real.
Oh, here we go.
I am Victoria.
Hey guys, I'm Carly.
And there she is, everyone.
Welcome to Carly.
If you haven't figured out by now, Carly is the extra portion of this podcast.
And that will never change.
Which is good.
I'll just keep getting more extra.
She's like guac.
But you don't have to pay.
Oh, wow, that's wonderful.
Okay, so we are sisters.
We are three years apart.
I am 30.
Who's older?
Okay, fine. I'm older.
Literally, nobody can answer you.
I know.
34.
Carly is older.
And we have an older brother.
We do.
He is exactly three years older than Carly.
His name is Bill.
We call him Billy.
And he owns a gym or is part of a gym in Kentucky called Butchertown CrossFit.
We'll get him on.
And he's gonna love to talk about CrossFit and all the benefits about that at some point.
So we're excited to have him on too.
Yeah, he has a lot of experience, which is good.
But yeah, we are from Springfield, Pennsylvania, Delco.
What parish are you from?
St. Francis.
That's how you know you're from Delco.
Oh, yeah, I'm from Delco.
What parish are you from?
That is true.
Philly is the closest thing for those of you who are not around here.
From our parish.
From our parish?
Are you pastor, Dinos?
I'm gonna, you want me to be real?
Oh, no.
I'm gonna do that a lot.
I've never had either.
You've never had Pat's or Dinos?
I've never been there.
These are cheese steak places, by the way.
They're famous in Philadelphia and you are either one or the other, really.
That is, that's kind of like the rivalry.
I'm so extra that I've had neither.
I know.
There's a lot of people disappointed in you right now.
Well, we'll change that.
I love a good cheese steak.
I do.
Life's about balance, everyone.
So we're in the fitness industry.
Segway.
But we didn't start in fitness.
We were in the theater world first and I'm, we're kind of still in the theater world.
Yeah, we do 21 shows a week at Seafit.
It is entertainment, for sure.
But no, we went to school for musical theater.
Our mom, we'll get her on here too.
She was a dancer, still is.
And dad is an opera singer and still teaches music and voice.
Yeah, we'll get him on here too.
He used to have a radio show.
He did.
I was thinking about that the other day.
He was like a podcaster before podcasts were a thing.
Yeah.
Which was called the radio.
So it was a thing, but he had a musical theater radio show back in the day.
I guess he could have helped me try to figure out when it took so long.
We love to do things the hard way.
Yeah, you'll learn that.
We're so real.
But yeah, we segwayed from theater to fitness in New York.
Yeah.
Well, we started dancing first.
That's true.
Our mom was a dancer.
She owns a dance studio and we started dancing when we were three and then that
transitioned into musical theater and we both moved to New York.
I went first and then Victoria came and joined me and we lived together.
Joined you.
I joined Carly and Andrew, who was her then boyfriend now husband of 57 years.
And we lived together in a one bedroom apartment on the upper east side.
We had bunk beds.
We had a we had.
No, no, no.
A loft.
No, it was you lived on the twin and Andrew and I had a double futon on the bottom.
That's true.
I didn't live there.
I slept there first of all.
That's true.
Oh my gosh.
Stories.
It was a time.
We'll get into those stories.
We'll have Andrew on.
He's the CEO of Seafit.
So yeah, we'll get him on.
That was before he bought me a scale for Christmas and after we got married.
Yes.
Andrew did buy by Carly's.
It was at your 25th.
No, it was before that.
Yeah.
But he bought me a scale thinking, oh, you're really into fitness.
You'll love to like learn about your BMI and all this stuff.
But I was not at my current weight right now and I was living on ramen at the time,
which listen, I was happy.
But I definitely did not want to scale for like my 22nd birthday.
I was lucky enough to be there for this exchange.
There were tears.
There was lots of uncomfortable moments.
I wanted an iPhone and I got a scale.
Both are digital.
Technically, he's not too far off.
Well, his presence haven't gotten any better, but that's also another episode.
I'm not editing that out.
So yeah, we live together in New York.
And then, but we taught fitness.
We did not do the restaurant.
So when you're in New York and you're going for theater, like the number one easy way
to make rent and to have a job is to work at a restaurant or a bar.
And we didn't do that.
You can work at night in a restaurant you auditioned during the day.
And the point is so that you get a job out of town.
So you audition in New York to hopefully cross your fingers, get a job somewhere else
in the country and get out of New York.
So that's what we did, except we didn't work in the restaurant.
We taught fitness at night instead.
Yes.
Well, when we first moved there, I was in college, so I wasn't teaching yet.
When you moved home with Andrew, she took Andrew with her.
I took him with me.
I stole Carly's job and the apartment.
Yep.
And then I started teaching fitness.
Fitness.
Yeah.
And we worked for a company called M Dance and Fitness.
What's up, Misty?
Yeah, that was awesome.
It we, we, all right, get this, right?
So you do a double sometimes.
You take two classes in a row.
We would teach full 60 minutes.
Yeah, yeah.
Then we would run across town, subway, I mean, sprinting to go teach two more classes,
60 full minutes of cardio.
Because back then we just didn't really do weight.
It was cardio, cardio, cardio, cardio.
That's why, by the way, side note, C fit means cardio fit.
That's where the name C fit came from.
For those of you always saying, is it Carly fit?
No, it's cardio fit because that's what I only did back then.
It was cardio and we would get our cardio in between our cardio.
Well, for those of you who have never lived in a city or Manhattan, the subway is not reliable.
So if you had to go down, remember we had to go downtown for some of them, not just
across town and oh, you sprinted with your backpack with the boom box or your iPad and
your music and you're running and you're fighting the street of people walking because nobody
is walking as fast as you want them to.
And for those of you who don't know what a boom box is, that's what we played music
on with CDs.
That's what we had to carry with us.
Wow.
Yeah.
But those were the days.
We loved it and we taught every day and eventually we were teaching more fitness classes.
Classes, sorry, I'm trying to get rid of my accent.
We were teaching more classes than we were auditioning because we were loving it so much
and we were super into it.
And when we weren't teaching it, we were taking other people's fitness classes and it sort
of just snowballed into wanting to do it for a career.
Yeah, that's true.
And you taught your own classes and then took it home.
So I left the fitness company I was working for and did it on my own, which was really
awesome but I mean, give it up to Misty.
It is hard starting a fitness business in New York.
Oh my gosh.
And I did it for about a year and I didn't love it because it's really difficult.
It's really hard.
Yeah, and there wasn't social media.
So you couldn't post.
You had to make flyers and put them in every studio in the city and hope that somebody
would rip the bottom and just come to your class because there wasn't any social media.
So I ended up, I wanted, you know, I got married, I wanted to have kids.
So I moved back to Delaware County and St. Francis Parish and my mom, our mom owned a
dance studio and said, oh, you can rent some hours at the studio and teach your own classes
at night.
So that's what I did.
And to be fair, Zumba was the start Zumba and our mom is named Carmella.
Don't wait.
Tell them what mom.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
So Carmella said that it was going to be a really good idea to get into this because
of the craze of Ty Bo, remember all those VHSs Billy blanks, like they were these fads
and Zumba was the next one.
So she said, I signed all three of us up.
We're going to go get certified.
The 14 hour day in like New Jersey.
I think we went to, you know, that really far away place called New Jersey, but it was
14 hours and we were like, oh my gosh, mom, no one's going to want to do this.
We're going to get certified.
We're going to get through this long day of like learning and taking a test at the end
and all this stuff and no one is going to do this ever.
And be like, what the heck is Zumba?
Why are we wearing puffy pants with strings and that are back in style right now?
Oh my God.
I'm so kept because I got to save myself a lot of money and target the other day.
You could zipper at the knee.
Yes, you could.
So you could make them like shorts, but like long shorts cargo.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
And, you know, we got to, we got to chalk it up to calm because it flew.
Yeah.
It was like it and that's really how we got started.
Yeah.
We taught Zumba.
Everybody loved it.
It was like the new dance craze.
And then slowly over the years, we sort of transitioned into, hey, we like our stuff
because we were doing more of our choreography than we were at Zumba at one point and sort
of just all meshed into one.
And we started, you know, branching off and doing our own, our own style of cardio.
And then hip hop and then, you know, all the things, but Zumba really, yeah, that was
day one.
All right.
Day two coming in hot.
You ready?
Yeah.
I'm, I'm actually, what's day two?
The rest of the 11 years that we've been open.
So we started renting my mom's space and then we grew out of that, which was awesome.
Do you remember the, she has a big, very steep stairwell and the little girl dancers that
were, you know, the ballerinas, they would be dancing and all the women would be lined
up outside the door because we were getting ready to do a cardio class, doing like a Zumba
class.
On the minute.
We knew how many people were going to come, could be two, could be 30.
We packed in shoulder to shoulder and we didn't have a service where you could sign up ahead
of time.
So we never knew.
Sometimes we did teach two people and sometimes we did teach 30 for 60 minutes.
And after about five years, we ended up moving to the space next door and that the originally
it was Seafit at Carmela's.
Then it was Seafit studio.
And then it became Seafit Fitness.
But then we did that and then now we're in our awesome new space and it's been 11 years
and we gradually grew, we gradually grew up.
Oh, wow.
I'm not sure if I did.
You're so extra.
I'm so extra.
I have to say at the beginning of the Carmela's dance Seafit life, I still lived in New York.
Yeah, you did.
And I would travel home every weekend to help teach.
During the weeks, Carly would take pictures of pieces of paper that were like an Excel
spreadsheet of people signing up and how they paid like cash or check.
Some people paid in check.
Oh my gosh.
And you had to just mark off what you what you paid with and she would take pictures
on, you know, was it a no-key-o-phone at the time?
It's very possible.
It was like my blackberry.
Yeah.
And I would have to like figure out the person's name because it was all, you know, parish
cursive.
And then I would like try to record.
So I did the books manually from New York and then I'd travel home and do the weekends
and then I'd go back.
Yeah.
And then I eventually stopped and I just moved home indefinitely.
I was like, please move home.
I need help.
It was I had melody tour.
I was pregnant with melody.
And that's when you came home full time and really took over the whole business side because
I hadn't.
We did not go to business school.
I'm not sure if we've ever said that.
I don't know if you guys can tell, but we don't know what we're doing.
We know a lot of things, but we're not great business people.
We lead the business with our heart, not our brains.
Wow, and that's the problem.
So podcasts.
But anyway, so yeah, my advice to anybody, go to business school.
I don't care what you want to do.
Guess what?
Your life's going to change.
You're going to change careers and you need business.
That's what I tell Melody all the time.
You can be a tiger trainer.
That's fine.
But you got to go to business school.
Melody's eight.
She's head of HR at Seafit.
So if you have a complaint, you can go to her and she will just talk to you about cats.
So that's how professional we are.
But I agree though, business school would have helped.
I would have hated it, but it would have absolutely helped at this stage of the game because we
have come a long way.
I mean, I went to four colleges.
I tell everybody that.
If I had a sweatshirt for every college I went to and every transfer my mom had to do
and all that paperwork, I owe her a lot.
But I made it and I'm extra.
I mean, I think at this stage of the game, you could get sweatshirts of all of those
colleges.
Yeah, I know somebody.
HBIC?
HBIC by Nicole.
That's who makes all of our apparel.
I might get her to make my college sweatshirt.
That's a story for another day.
So we've evolved a lot over the years.
Seafit itself, us individually and together.
Carly and I are very different people.
I say this a lot.
We are very different people, but when it comes to business and how we want Seafit to
go, there's not a lot of friction.
No, we don't fight about Seafit.
About Seafit.
Dun, dun, dun.
And still, we've evolved and it's changed and it's grown and it's become branches on
a tree.
It's just gone in so many different ways and it has so much more potential to keep going.
But I have to pat ourselves on the back and say that we have had the same motto and same
mantra the entire time.
That fitness should be fun.
You should forget that you're working out, especially in what we do in the dance fitness
world and circuits and boot camps and stuff like that.
It should be fun.
You shouldn't want to dread working out.
And it's also, it's not a show.
It's not you don't have to look your best.
You don't have to do the best.
You don't have to, you can just be you and be real.
And if you make mistakes, you make mistakes.
And if you feel ridiculous, so be it.
And that's awesome.
But real is where this podcast came from because that is, we have been preaching that
since day one.
And I think that the community that Seafit has made was just a bonus.
We never thought people would become lifelong friends from a fitness class.
I mean, that was never something that we were striving to do.
And it just, fun people find each other and people with like minds and people that like
to do the same things, they find each other.
And I think that's really a cool benefit of Seafit.
We're just working out in general is that you find really fun people.
Did I say fun?
Do you like fun?
Is that what you're going for?
Fun?
Listen, anybody that comes to class has to know it is not a show.
I look not my best all the time.
Victoria will say all the time, I mean, you've looked worse.
Yeah, that's true.
Except that's coming from me who doesn't try at all.
That is not true.
And that's something you're going to find out.
That is not true.
You try to not try sometimes.
That's elaborate.
I don't have to.
I just said it.
You don't try, but sometimes you try to not try.
Welcome to my world, everyone.
Welcome to my world.
Okay.
Well, you're not wrong, but I also have no idea what you just said.
So there's that.
But that's the point though.
That is, sorry, I made her.
I made her deviate from my train of thought.
Deviate was a big one, but yes, big word.
Yeah.
I understood.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Okay, I'm going to put you on the spot.
Oh my God.
I know she loves impromptu spontaneity, which is the same thing.
Okay, I'm calling this Carly on the spot.
Game three, three favorite things about Seafit, whatever it is.
Oh, well, you could have texted me this beforehand.
That's not spontaneity.
Another big one.
All right.
Three things that I love about Seafit or teaching.
Well, my number one is when I've said this before, when you can feel that somebody loves
working out or dancing or the dance that you just worked for weeks and Justin didn't take
it and they loved it so much that they were like, yes, that just made my day.
I feel so good right now.
That is absolutely number one best thing about teaching because that makes me feel like the
work that I did that I put into, you know, it takes a lot of work to put into these dances.
That somebody appreciated it and they feel good about it.
That's my number one.
Number two favorite thing about teaching is when you see somebody's progress or they've
been coming for a while and they're like, oh my gosh, I went to this wedding and I, not
even like, I looked really great when they say, I felt so confident in my dress.
We just had somebody say that to us recently and I loved the way that she said it.
She said, I walked in there and I was so confident and it wasn't about weight.
It wasn't about how they look to the confidence.
I think that is absolutely number two.
That makes me feel like, oh, I did a good job because if I was able to help you with
that confidence, that's the best.
Yeah.
I was like, wow.
And number three.
Wow, I'm gonna pat myself on the back.
Oh, go in the office and just give myself a little hug for that.
Extra.
Yeah.
All right.
My number three about my favorite thing about teaching, honestly, I'm going to be a little
selfish here.
Getting on the stage, which yes, I built for us because remember, we were musical theater
actors.
We do love being on stage.
We are singers.
We are dancers.
So we must have enjoyed it at some point.
I enjoy being up on stage, looking at smiling faces, people that are happy just like I did
when I was on stage in a show.
When people would look like they were enjoying your show, I enjoy that on the stage at Seafit.
You weren't supposed to be looking out at the audience.
You're supposed to be in the moment being a character.
That's why I wasn't a good actor.
I was like, oh, what are they snacking on out there?
Probably why I didn't make it as an actor.
But that I think that's one of my that is it's one of my favorite parts about teaching
is getting on stage and doing a really fun dance or doing a really good circuit or Seafit
weight weighted workout and just seeing everybody.
And I mean, it's not a show, but sometimes I don't want to do it.
So when we get up there and we don't want to do it, it's your faces that really help
us get through and make it enjoyable for us.
Yeah.
Very good.
How did I do?
Very, very well.
I'm just going to let you all know this is not scripted.
I don't know if you can tell that.
Oh, it sounds so well done.
I'm shocked.
All right.
Now that you've had time to think about it, Victoria, I don't usually say your name.
Yeah, that's weird.
I know.
I'm not a fan of Korea.
Oh, good.
You said it again.
That's good.
What are your three favorite things about teaching or Seafit, instructing or V fitting?
All right.
Number one, and I say this all the time and you say this all the time.
So I'm kind of surprised you didn't say it.
Similarly to what you just said, I think at the end, the best is when you can see somebody
walk in having a bad day and they you can see it on their face.
You can see it in their energy and their demeanor.
And then by the end of class, that is completely shifted and they walk out feeling way better
than they walked in.
And that's just the power of, I think, the community.
Carly being on stage.
I got some jokes.
The stage is not the stage was not my doing.
If you've been to our studio, there is a small stage.
I had nothing to do with that.
She wasn't there when we measured it out.
Yeah.
I wasn't there for a lot of things.
That was for sure not my doing.
I agree, though.
That happened recently and somebody said, now I feel like I can take on the day.
And we were like, yes, that's why we do this.
And tell us.
Tell us that.
Let us in on that.
Number one, we're people too and we do have bad days and there are a lot of days that
I get up there and I'm like, oh my gosh, I just tired.
My body's tired.
My brain is tired.
By the end, I'm like, let's do it again.
I know.
Well, somebody said the other day, a see fitter said, oh my gosh, how do you guys do this?
You must be exhausted.
I said, we are, but so are you.
I don't work at a hospital overnight shifts.
Everybody's tired.
Everybody's job is important.
Everybody's doing the same grind and everybody's tired.
So if we can all remember that and just remember that we are real people and sometimes we definitely
don't want to jump up and dance to like shots, it will make you feel better after.
So if you can think about that before a workout, it'll definitely help you.
All right.
Number two, that's the hardest part.
Okay.
Number two, honestly, this isn't like a monumental one, but now that I've moved home and I mean,
I've been home for a good amount of time, I don't listen to music.
So it's my only chance to kind of hear what's out there to make new dances and to make new
playlists and Carly does most of the playlist.
As you all know, I have absolutely no control.
I love that part of the job is that music is the job.
Music is the job and music can absolutely change not only the workout, but your mood.
And I love that that can pick you up without really trying to put the effort in.
And I have absolutely no idea what's going on in the world in the music world these days
because I don't listen to that good old radio in the car anymore.
So you don't know that good for you by Olivia Rodrigo.
Is it new?
I do know that it took everything you had to get that name out correctly because she
wasn't actually 100% sure that that was true.
All right.
Third favorite thing is that I can say this for the dance cardio is that we do in a specific
way.
We do this more so our weighted classes, our hit classes, anything that involves a progression.
So when you're making up the class for that moment or the week or whatever it is, and
you can think of the challenge that it will be for the class and the specific people that
you know come regularly and you have to think about, wow, will they be able to do this?
Will this be a frustration or will this be something exciting to get through?
What will it be?
And then you plan it, you set it, you're in the middle of doing it and you watch them
rise to the challenge.
And then yes, afterwards they love to hate it and hate to love it, but they feel so much
better and then you feel selfishly, it's definitely, you know, it's a two-way street there that
I feel like, wow, I'm so glad I pushed it.
Yeah.
And you feel accomplished like, okay, I put in the work and it worked.
And then they put in the work and that's even better.
You know, it's really fun when it goes the opposite way and they hate your dance that
you've been working on and they say, oh, I hated that one.
And you're like, okay.
You think that's nice.
I've only worked so hard for so many hours and really struggled over this.
That's a real feeling.
Yeah.
People's opinions are a tough part of the job, but you know what?
We're stronger for that.
Yeah.
We're really stronger.
But that's a good one because I do agree with that.
You work really hard.
You think, can they do it?
Can they do it?
And then they do it.
Yeah.
And then they hate you for it.
Name that movie.
They're gonna be fine.
Yes.
Thank you.
That was, wow, I felt that, yes, through the couch here.
That's great.
So now that you know, you might have already known all of that, but if you didn't know,
now you know.
So from going, if you don't know, now you know, there's gonna be a lot of that.
But moving forward, we're not gonna be talking about us.
You know us.
You'll learn more about us.
Some things you don't want to know, some things you want to know, but it's not about
us.
It's not about Seafit.
It is not about just fitness.
We'll be talking about the daily struggles that people deal with every day when it comes
to like taking care of yourself and getting through the day so that you can make it to
that workout where you can go get your facial and not feel guilty about it.
I don't know who I'm talking to when I say that, but you know.
Herself.
She's talking to herself.
Talking to myself.
And everyone else.
Listen, guilt about taking care of yourself is a real thing and we'll definitely talk
about that.
But it's definitely gonna be about you and being real and it's not so much about Victoria
and I, although I do have a lot to say.
Yeah, man.
You really do.
And now I have another platform to do it on.
Oh no, I'm sorry everyone.
I'm so sorry.
So at the end of every episode, we're going to give you a real tip and a real extra tip.
Guess who's is who's.
Just from this one first episode, guess who's is who's.
You're going to enjoy these so much.
You're going to be looking forward to them every week.
All right, real tip of the day.
We're calling this the you do you boo boo.
We are calling.
We just called it that.
Yeah.
Yep, it's happening.
So what you're going to do is you're going to grab a journal or if you don't want to do
that, you get your phone.
There's a notepad in there.
And at the end of each night, briefly, you write three things that were wins in your day
that were really positive or just like, oh, so glad that that happened.
And you also write three things that maybe didn't bring you that happiness that you thought
or things turned out differently and just three things that like didn't fly.
And you do that throughout the week.
And at the end of the month, you get to look back and see you all of the things that worked
for your days and worked and you want to do more of those things.
So the next month, you put more of the happy moments back into your days and then you can
kind of slowly phase out the things that don't serve you anymore.
And it's like the easiest way to do it.
All right.
Are you ready for the real extra tip of the day?
It's already started.
So I'm always going to make that tip that she just gave you just a little bit extra.
So when you're seeing and you're looking back at those things that did not bring you happiness,
you see it all.
Maybe it's you went to a fitness class that you don't love, but you just you want to do
it because it's a weighted workout or you just did not have a good day at work.
Put on an outfit that makes you really confident or makes you really happy.
Put on your favorite mascara.
When you do the things that do not bring you happiness, make sure you are wearing or feeling
your best and see if that little extra bit will make it that much better.
And either bring you more confidence, make it more doable and say, hey, I don't like
this workout, but I love my outfit or I did not like that day at work, but my hair looks
good.
So those are just little ways throughout the day that you can bring more happiness and
joy to your life without having to do such big changes that are just sometimes unattainable.
Small habits make big change.
Consistency is key.
Are we just saying phrases?
Can we?
No, we're done.
All right.
Well, that's a wrap.
First episode in the books.
Stay tuned for a bunch of topics.
We've got so much coming up.
And we're so excited to talk to you about it because we know that it's stuff that you're
all dealing with or want to know about.
Yeah.
So we just want to remind you that you are always fit to be real and always allowed to
be a little extra.
You should see her when she's saying it.
You should see her.
For legal reasons, we have to tell you that this podcast is meant for entertainment and
educational purposes only.
We are not healthcare professionals.
For all of your health, wellness, fitness and self care needs, please refer to the medical
professional in your life, your primary care physician, your therapist, a certified coach,
whoever it may be.
And then let us know what they say because I guarantee we need to know what to do.
Okay?
Okay, bye.