Kendall Toole On Burnout, Boxing & The Courage To Start Over

When Kendall Toole left Peloton last summer, fans were stunned. She'd become one of the platform's most beloved instructors, known for her energy and emotional honesty. But behind the scenes, Kendall was navigating something more complex than anyone realized: she'd outgrown the role she was playing.

"I need to have an antagonist in my life," she told me, half-laughing at the admission. "When things get a little too comfortable, when I'm too comfortable, there's more growth and stretching to be done."

It's a confession that explains everything. The woman who once lived in a friend’s tiny basement, surviving on a hot plate and sheer determination, had found herself in a different kind of confinement—one lined with success, recognition, and a version of herself she no longer fully inhabited.

"I was evolving as a woman and as a trainer, and my perspectives were evolving and growing, but I was serving a particular role and a particular character," she explained. "It almost became more of a character than it became myself." 

Kendall's departure wasn't just about leaving a job; it was about rejecting a version of health culture that's become increasingly problematic. "Fitness is becoming less human," she said. "And what's ironic is it's the most human thing we can do is move the bodies that we get to have and honor the brains that are in our body. But we always feel the pressure to either hit a PR or perform for a metric."

She's talking about something many of us have felt but struggled to articulate: the way health has morphed from self-care into self-surveillance. We track everything—sleep, steps, heart rate variability, recovery scores. We skip social events because they'll mess with our metrics. We turn movement into data points and then judge ourselves based on the results.

"Data has no moral value," Kendall said. "It's just information. But when we look at data through the lens of shame or guilt—which often in health and wellness comes coupled with these narratives we've believed about ourselves—it becomes another means with which we judge ourselves."

Kendall's answer lies in variety and authenticity. She's never been just a cycling instructor; she boxes, practices Pilates, does strength training. Cycling, she admitted, isn't even how she primarily trains herself. "I wanted to show people you can be aggressive one day and get your rage out—bold, high impact, sweating—but you can also be calm and focused on a Pilates day when your body needs something different."

Her connection to boxing, in particular, reveals this philosophy. She didn't find the sport through fitness culture—she was pulled into it by a mentor who recognized she needed it mentally. When she first threw a cross that cracked against the mitts, something shifted. "I wasn't thinking. I wasn't in my head for the first time in a really long time. All of what I felt converted into power." Anxiety, frustration, all the noise in her head suddenly had somewhere to go that wasn't inward.

"Feminine rage needs an outlet," she said. "I think all women should have something to hit, to be honest."

Kendall's been public about her struggles with anxiety and depression for years. But what sets her apart is how she integrates mental health into everything she does, not as an afterthought or a trend, but as fundamental.

She practices gratitude daily. She does breathwork when she's stuck in traffic and spiraling. She acknowledges that self-confidence isn't something you capture once and keep forever—it's built through recognizing your impact on others and actually receiving their feedback instead of deflecting it.

When Kendall sat down for contract renegotiations with Peloton, visions didn't align. She saw an opportunity to go deeper with a smaller community rather than broader with a massive platform. "I don't wanna try to be everything for everybody," she said. "I want to help support this community that I deeply care about."

It's a choice in an industry obsessed with scale, reach, and follower counts. But Kendall's clear on what matters: "It's one thing to have a platform and to have a lot of reach and a lot of notoriety. But it's a whole other thing to have more of a depth in how you're connecting to those people."

Walking away from Peloton wasn't the end of something; it was Kendall choosing to build the thing she couldn't find. A space where fitness, mental health, and nutrition aren't separate silos but interconnected pieces of being human. Where you can show up differently on different days without apology. Where data doesn't define you, and movement doesn't have to mean anything beyond honoring the body you have right now. 

It's a vision of health that feels increasingly rare: one that trusts women to know what they need, that celebrates our complexity instead of trying to simplify us, and that refuses to turn self-care into another performance metric.