I trained like Anne Hathaway for a month, and the results surprised me

Hathaway says working with trainer Monique Eastwood ‘changed my life’

I tried training like Anne Hathaway for a month, and the workouts weren’t at all what I expected (The Independent / Monique Eastwood)

Hours after the release of Anne Hathaway’s recent romcom The Idea of You, Google exploded with searches for her workout routine. As a fitness writer who happens to have a direct line to many of the best celebrity trainers, I was keen to get the lowdown on how Hathaway exercises and find out whether her workouts are manageable for the average person.

It turns out that Anne Hathaway’s go-to workouts are far from conventional. Rather than running, reformer Pilates or regular gym sessions, she (alongside Stanley Tucci, Emily Blunt and other A-list names) turns to dance-inspired routines from trainer Monique Eastwood.

“Monique has been my teacher since February 2022, and our work together has changed my life,” Hathaway tells The Independent, adding that the trainer has been “gifted with innate body intelligence”. High praise indeed.

Keen to experience this transformative effects for myself, I spoke with Eastwood, and she agreed to provide me with a month of workouts via her Eastwood Fit app. Read on for how it went, and how you can try Hathaway’s training style for yourself.

Anne Hathaway’s workout routine

Hathaway trains with Eastwood five times per week via video call, often rising at 5am to squeeze a session in before work.

“We worked together [for The Idea of You] and Annie is also doing Mother Mary, which is her dance film,” Eastwood tells me. “I think that was the reason she wanted to start working with me, to get more of a performance level to her training, and we’ve definitely done that. We’ve been together for quite a long journey to get her that body awareness, and she’s done amazingly. It’s fantastic to find someone with her level of commitment.”

Each Eastwood workout is different, but the average hour-long class contains a blend of ballet, dance, Pilates, yoga and resistance training, all performed at an intensity sure to set the heart racing. This, Eastwood says, “stimulates the body in many different ways” to develop balance, body awareness, core stability and muscular endurance. She also reckons it will lead to “a more profound understanding of how you move in the world,” which is particularly appealing to me as a notoriously clumsy person.

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How to train like Anne Hathaway

If you want to train like Anne Hathaway, try the movement flows in the video below. The goal is to perform each sequence 10 times on either side of the body.

“This short routine is ideal for engaging the glutes and core muscles while encouraging you to focus on holding your balance,” Eastwood says.

What happened when I tried training like Anne Hathaway

Approaching my first Eastwood workout, I felt confident. Being a fitness writer, I’ve experimented with all manner of exercise styles, so I figured a blend of Pilates, dance and yoga shouldn’t present any problems. I was wrong.

Half-an-hour later, I found myself lying topless on a yoga mat, breathing heavily and dripping with sweat. My thighs felt like I’d just hit a heavy leg session at the gym, despite lifting nothing more than a light resistance band, and my core was trembling. So how did this happen?

Eastwood’s follow-along classes more closely resemble choreography than a classic workout. She walks me through a series of flowing sequences, such as opening my hips into a plié, reaching overhead and bending to one side, then stepping from there into a deep curtsy squat. Then she applies Pilates principles by having me repeat these sequences a few times through.

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A tough start

It’s balletic, and Eastwood makes it look beautifully simple on screen. But I soon find my body, which is so comfortable squatting with a heavy barbell or sprinting, isn’t used to moving in this way. As a result, I struggle to keep up.

There’s one move in particular, shifting the hips from side to side, that refuses to compute with my brain or body. Eastwood looks like a dancer from the Taylor Swift tour, fluid and graceful. I look like the Tin Man, stiff and awkward, despite giving it a lot of heart. I’m somewhat relieved to learn that Hathaway’s experience with Eastwood started in much the same way.

“I will never forget my first session with Monique,” she says. “There were so many of her signature moves I couldn’t do properly – my knees wobbled terribly, I couldn’t balance at all, and forget about doing a downward dog – but Monique was totally undeterred. Through the screen, Monique assessed where I was weak without making me feel flawed.”

I might not have had the benefit of a one-to-one lesson, but Eastwood’s constant cues did help me improve my technique, and by the end of my first session I had loosened up a bit.

“I’m so bossy,” she laughs. “I’m always trying to talk during my HIIT classes, which is almost impossible, but I want to tell you what to do all the time because I’ve seen so many things over 35 years of training like this.”

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I enjoyed the ballet-inspired exercises, and Monique Eastwood’s 3D approach to movement (Harry Bullmore)

3D movement

For Eastwood, “training like this” can best be defined as “multidirectional movement”; she has me squatting, bending, twisting, stretching, reaching and more during our class. This is in stark contrast to most modern workouts, which Eastwood playfully refers to as “very up, down, up, down”. And she has a point.

The majority of popular strength training exercises, like squats and press–ups, are effective at building muscle, but they occur largely in the sagittal plane – in layman’s terms, they challenge you to move up, down, forwards and backwards. But our joints work in two further planes of motion: frontal (side to side movements) and transverse (rotational movements). The body also operates on a rough “use it or lose it” basis, so ignoring these movements can cause your joints and muscles to tighten over time, restricting your freedom of movement and increasing your risk of injury.

Luckily, Eastwood’s class covers all three planes of motion in abundance, and by the end I feel notably less stiff. Smaller supporting muscles around my shoulders and hips are also called into action far more than usual, and over the course of the month I notice this has a positive impact on my regular muscle-building staples in the gym like shoulder presses.

“You don’t want your big superficial muscles always being the ones doing the work,” Eastwood says. “You want other deep-lying muscles to be able to stabilise you. I want you to have a more balanced body; that’s really my philosophy.

“When I see clients I’ve taught for 10 or 15 years, I cannot tell you how amazing they look because they are like dancers. They have that dancer strength.”

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‘Pilates can be a bit boring’

I can’t help wondering how Eastwood’s humbling hybrid approach came about, so I quiz her on it.

“I was on stage as a dancer and loved the discipline and focus,” she says. “Then I fell pregnant with my children, so I ended up teaching all the local mothers in village halls. I did a Pilates course which contained me a bit better, because dance is quite free, and it made me really start thinking about my anatomy and the reason behind each movement.”

However, during classes, Eastwood noticed some of her clients entered something she calls “sleepy mode” when they were doing certain lying down exercises. “Pilates can be a bit boring if you can’t absorb all the information,” she explains.

“I thought, ‘Right, I’ve got to change this up and make them move a little bit more’. I needed to make a difference to people’s bodies, and pretty quickly, so I started to move them like a dancer with the Pilates philosophy; the lateral breath, the containment, the alignment.

“And then I thought, ‘You know what, I want to build a little bit more muscle and strength, so I’m going to lift weights while I do it’. I love yoga as well, so there was a little bit of yoga thrown in to give you that stretch between the power moves too.”

The result, I found, was exhausting. My muscles were challenged in a way they hadn’t been before, despite the absence of heavy weights – I never lifted more than a 5kg dumbbell in each hand during one of Eastwood’s sessions. I also had to consider my balance and coordination throughout. However, this full-on approach banished boredom to the back of my mind, with the varied elements keeping my brain switched on for the entire class.

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How to use Eastwood’s training

Eastwood’s classes cover a lot of bases, and if you want to use it as your primary form of exercise like Hathaway, you can. But for me, she recommends a different approach.

“People love what they love, and I just want you to train and stay strong,” she tells me. “I want you to train forever. I’m 57-and-a-half and I’m still training hard, the same way I’ve trained for the last 35 years.”

In line with this, Eastwood instructs me to keep lifting weights and running (as I love to do), then add a few of her technique and HIIT classes into each week. If all goes as planned, the activities should share a mutualistic relationship.

“I always say to people, use me as a technique person, then go back to your other stuff,” Eastwood says. “If you’re a tennis player, your tennis will be incredible because you can now take more power from your deep core. Your golf swing will be better, and you’ll be more agile for skiing. You’ll also find you’re able to lift heavier weights and do it more efficiently because you’re really using all your back and core muscles.”

It’s not just how you feel and perform that Eastwood promises to improve either. She also says her style of training can help build a lean, strong body.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I know what people want to achieve,” she says. “I love to get the best out of my clients, and I do get the best out of them. Then they start to trust you and believe in you. They’re always amazed, because when I look at them now, they’re so strong. It’s such a blessing to see that achievement.”

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There were a lot of plank variations in Monique Eastwood’s workouts (Harry Bullmore)

The Verdict: Training like Anne Hathaway for a month

Change takes time, and in the grand scheme of things one month isn’t very long at all, so don’t expect a dramatic before and after photo at the end of this feature. But I did notice some differences during my time training with Eastwood.

Firstly, I was able to move more freely by the end of the four weeks. Regularly accessing unfamiliar positions during her classes (including shifting my hips from side to side) sent a clear message to my body that I didn’t want to lose these movements. The body, amazing as it is, adapted accordingly and gradually relearned how to recruit a wider range of motion around the joints in question.

I also noticed how the effects of Eastwood’s exercises carried over into my regular training. By developing my mobility and paying more attention to smaller supporting muscles around the shoulder and hip joints, I felt stronger squatting and pressing a barbell overhead, even hitting a new split jerk PB a few weeks in.

However, more importantly than any of this, I had a lot of fun. I firmly believe the best workouts will boost your health, fitness and mood, and Eastwood’s classes delivered on all three fronts by providing me with something new, challenging and enjoyable. That’s why, for those bored by classic workouts and looking for a different way to stay in shape, I think Eastwood’s approach could be worth looking into.

Hathaway certainly thinks so, listing her introduction to Eastwood as a key moment from the last few years in her inaugural post on Tiktok.

“As I have become physically stronger and more flexible, my outlook on life has improved," Hathaway says. And that, for me, is worth more than any transformation photo going.

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