The Class attracts celebrities with an emotional take on fitness
Gwyneth Paltrow and Emma Stone are crazy about the fitness sessions famed for making celebrities laugh, burp and cry.
A ctor Emma Stone admits to feeling “terror” the first time she tried it. Gwyneth Paltrow says it’s “like 10 hours of talking therapy in just one hour”. Drew Barrymore does it sitting tearfully on her carpet, letting out long burps and laughing hysterically.
Welcome to The Class, Hollywood’s favourite workout. Designed to unite body and mind and to help to “process emotion”, it’s a cross between a fitness regime and a spiritual experience.
And what was once available only to those able to attend its sold-out Los Angeles or New York classes has now gone global, with a digital studio broadcasting it to 71 countries so that we mere mortals may suffer.
I first heard about The Class a few weeks ago, when my Instagram algorithm began “serving” me its new adverts, in which its celebrity devotees rhapsodise about it. There have also been collaborations with Alicia Keys and Harry Styles. Its non-famous attendees are similarly evangelical, with one saying it is “like a slow breakdown”, which, to be fair, is how I feel about most group exercise.
So what is all the fuss about? After being shown Stone’s advert for what seems like the 100th time, I signed up for a free trial of the 60-minute “signature” workout – Paltrow’s favourite, I’m told. Which is how I find myself in my living room, essentially dry-humping my gym mat.
The Class is a mishmash of yoga, Pilates, meditation and mat-based exercises such as burpees and jumping jacks. There are also less traditional elements such as freestyle dance cardio (yelp), grunting, sighing and weeping, more on which shortly.
It costs about £30 ($58) a month for access to the digital library and live-streamed classes with names such as “Burn Off Fire” and “Tapping for Emotional Freedom”.
The Class was founded in 2013 by Taryn Toomey, a 44-year-old former Dior executive, to whom I speak over Zoom. It was after having children with her financier ex-husband, Mark – the couple have two daughters aged 11 and 13 – that Toomey decided to shift direction.
She visited Peru to study “ceremonial work” under the guidance of a shamanic healer and trained as a yoga instructor, adding other elements such as breath work and cardiovascular moves.
She began teaching in an annexe room of her New York apartment building, for friends and other residents, charging $US100 a month for three classes a week. Within two years it had become a word-of-mouth hit, with supermodel Gisele Bundchen becoming a regular. In 2017 Toomey opened her NYC studio, which has healing crystals embedded in the floor. A Santa Monica outpost followed in 2022.
“I think the reason people love The Class so much is because you just come with whatever you have (to deal with) that day,” Toomey says. “The teacher will take you through a journey. You can celebrate, you can contemplate, you can express – it’s the difference between taking it out on someone and getting it out of the body. It’s just a different form of therapy.”
If some of the language around The Class sounds as if it could have come from the Duchess of Sussex’s Archetypes podcast, with its talk of authenticity and manifesting, it’s perhaps not a coincidence. Toomey was one of about 20 friends to attend Meghan Markle’s New York baby shower in 2019. It’s unclear how they met – Toomey wasn’t at Harry and Meghan’s 2018 wedding – but their friendship has made headlines.
In 2019 the couple were criticised for promoting The Class in a post about mental health awareness on their official royal Instagram page. Then, in 2021, a few days before that Oprah interview, the duchess was pictured wearing a $US1295 lapis lazuli necklace from Toomey’s jewellery brand, which The Class website says aids “in the revelation of one’s inner truth”. Powerful stuff, clearly.
“A friend actually gave that to her. That was not me,” Toomey says, taking a deep breath when I ask about their friendship. “I very, very much believe in the power of women staying together when they are in the centre of their heart and compassion and alignment. So I don’t know how to answer that question.”
I’m not sure how to understand that answer. “I really respect people’s privacy,” she continues.
“When you lay your head down at night you want to feel good about the things that you did. I don’t want to spend time regretting my actions.”
What Toomey will say is that she has become friends with many of those who have taken The Class, because “they feel like they know you”. “If you take my class you can probably feel the rawness of who I am. I’m vulnerable to a fault,” she explains. “I really had to learn how to put some healthy boundaries in place in my life because I share everything. I think what really gravitated this global community together is that it’s a space that’s, like, ‘Come as you are’.”
Or, as Paltrow put it in an interview with her pal Toomey for the Goop website: “It helps me so much to process my emotions in a way that’s so visceral.”
The bit that Paltrow admits to having found “difficult and embarrassing” at first are the sounds you’re encouraged to make during the workout. It does feel cringe-worthy to adhere to Toomey’s instruction to “let it out … yawn, burp, yelp” as she bounces around – grunting, sighing and making “brrr” noises. The 30-odd people in the studio following her in a free dance are throwing their arms around like toddlers: shaking, stomping and whooping as Toomey tells us to be “unique, funky and original”.
It’s total Hollywood bonkersness and yet, when I do manage it on the third attempt it feels freeing – well, as free as you can be when you’re worried about the neighbours spotting you through your front window.
Toomey is well aware this particular feature of her class is the one that raises eyebrows. “Sometimes people talk about The Class like: ‘Oh, it’s the screaming and crying class.’ We’re actually not screaming. We’re just using different sounds to move pockets of energy from inside your body to the outside. There’s a release that happens,” she says. “Once you get some of the pent-up energy out of the way, sometimes what you realise underneath it is that there’s just a little bit of grief or sadness, or weeping with joy. And crying is such a cathartic thing. Crying is how a heart heals.”
And cry they do. “I think that there’s a lot of healing that goes on around people’s bodies, that they understand the body is a sacred temple, it holds their soul.”
Ah, the sacred temple. This is a refrain Toomey uses often during the meditation sections, as we place our hands on our hearts and abdomens and attempt to “move into the sacred temple of the heart”. Looking at the Americans on screen, utterly absorbed in what they’re doing, I wonder whether I’m being way too British about it all.
“There’s no one who is too repressed for The Class,” Toomey says with a laugh. Though she has no plans to set up a bricks-and-mortar studio in the UK. “The field is very uptight,” she adds, diplomatically.
As for me? In the hours after my session I feel relaxed but achy – something my regular Pilates class doesn’t achieve. I even find myself being drawn back for another class, curious as to whether I can let go a bit more next time. Perhaps that’s the secret.
The Times
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