The smart workout swap Jennifer Aniston made after years of cardio

She doesn't believe in 'no pain, no gain' 

Aniston now favours functional workouts over hardcore cardio. Image: Getty

The actor has stopped doing "painful" workouts and is more mindful when it comes to how she moves her body to keep fit.

Jennifer Aniston is one of few Hollywood icons who has maintained her effortlessly youthful glow over the decades spent in front of the cameras - but it hasn’t come without effort.

The 54-year-old has been known to have one heck of a rigorous workout schedule that includes everything from boxing and weights to Pilates and yoga.

But recently, she’s made a switch from her regular workouts, prioritising mobility over her previous HIIT workouts.

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Since her rise to fame on the hit sitcom Friends, Aniston has been committed to her fitness but admits that her initial approach to cardio wasn’t constructive for the longevity of her body.

“It was like run, run, run, run, run, boxing, boxing, boxing, boxing,” the actor tells SELF, explaining how she used to think if she wasn’t really feeling the strain on her body, she didn’t believe the exercise was working. “I really just pounded my body.” 

It wasn’t until later in her 40s that Aniston discovered functional fitness training, a type of exercise that prioritises movements that will directly aid the body in performing everyday activities.

Functional fitness training involves exercises that build strength and stability. Image: Unsplash

What is functional fitness?

Functional fitness training is built around the model of honing in foundational exercises such as squats, planks, lunges, and glute bridges. The training challenges these movements by encouraging you to execute them across various planes of motion, as you may do during ordinary day-to-day activity.

The aim is to effectively aid the body in performing these similar movements in quotidian activities such as unloading the groceries from the car or picking up your young children.

Through ordinary movements such as bending, pushing, twisting, lifting and pulling, functional training strengthens the core muscle groups that perform these movements and trains them to switch on and stabilise the body when these motions are performed sporadically throughout the day.

For Aniston, functional fitness was a game-changer. “[Functional training] sort of just changed my whole outlook,” she says, explaining that her new routine prioritises the use of resistance bands and sliders rather than weights to increase the intensity of her bodyweight exercises.

Since switching to functional training, Aniston’s routine focuses on range of motion, incorporating front-to-back, side-to-side, and rotational movements in her exercises to build whole-body strength, stability, and most importantly, mobility.

While she hasn’t given up on cardio completely, saying she incorporates runs on the treadmill into her weekly routine, but with an added focus on her form. She praises this for her body’s newfound strength and its ability to combat injuries, something which her body has struggled with before.

“[My body] feels strong… [it] doesn’t hurt like it used to.”

In introducing the new training model, Aniston has also cut back on the frequency at which she workouts, saying she now exercises between two and four times a week as opposed to the six or seven times she used to do.

This newfound consistency in her exercise routine plays a major part in the actor’s wellness practice, saying that the physical movements accompanied by an emphasis on sleep and hydration have lent to her feeling her best, holistically for the first time in a long time.

The traditional 'no pain, no gain' mindset of exercise is 'bullshit', Aniston concludes.

Originally published as The smart workout swap Jennifer Aniston made after years of cardio