Kendall Jenner Fitness Routine: How the Supermodel Stays in Shape

Kendall Jenner's training history reads like a tour of the studios that quietly built the modern supermodel body. Gunnar Peterson in Beverly Hills handled the early years, when the Kardashian-Jenner household paid him to keep half a family camera-ready. Justin Gelband at ModelFit in Soho did the New York Fashion Week prep cycles, the eight-week lengthening blocks that pushed her into the 2014 Marc Jacobs shows. Rob Piela's boxing gym on Gansevoort Street layered in the conditioning. Erika Bloom's Pilates studios on Madison Avenue and Tribeca anchored the recovery years after she stepped back from the runway in 2018. And since 2022, the Liana Levi Pilates studio Forma, which Hailey Bieber and Kim Kardashian also keep on rotation, has been the closest thing to a current home gym.

What follows is the working version of the routine, named where the names matter, with the schedule changes that came from her widely reported anxiety and the post-2018 retreat from a sixty-show-a-season pace.

Beverly Hills, with Gunnar Peterson

Peterson is the trainer of record for a generation of Hollywood, although his Sherman Oaks gym is closer to a private members' studio than a celebrity advertisement. He trained Khloé Kardashian through her early visibility, Kim Kardashian through the Vogue phase, and Kendall during the 2013-to-2016 stretch that overlapped with her runway breakout. The work was conventional strength and conditioning: dumbbells, TRX, kettlebells, sled pushes, a circuit format that ran roughly an hour, three or four mornings a week. Peterson's bias has always been functional rather than aesthetic; he prefers compound lifts to isolation work, and he treats hypertrophy as a side effect rather than the goal.

For Kendall, who arrived at the gym with the long, narrow proportions that runway castings reward, the Peterson program was about durability rather than size. A model who walks fifty shows in a fashion month needs ankles, knees and a posterior chain that can survive ten hours of standing in a 12-centimetre heel; that is the kind of thing Peterson programs for, and it is the foundation a great deal of the rest of her training has sat on top of.

ModelFit, and the New York Fashion Week prep cycle

Justin Gelband opened ModelFit on Bond Street in 2010, in the small window between the Crunch era and the SoulCycle era, and built it specifically around the runway body. The room is full-length-mirrored, the floors are sprung, and the equipment leans toward resistance bands, sliders, light hand weights, and ballet-inflected matwork. Karlie Kloss, Behati Prinsloo, Adriana Lima, Candice Swanepoel and Doutzen Kroes all trained there in the same period; if you watched the 2013 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show closely, you watched a roomful of Gelband clients.

Kendall went to Gelband for the Fashion Week build, which he ran in roughly eight-week cycles ahead of February and September. The work was less about how a body looked at rest and more about how it held the line of a garment in motion. Long, low-impact sets; lots of band-resistance leg work; postural drills for the walk; a heavier focus on the obliques than the rectus abdominis, because the diagonal line of the torso is what reads through a transparent dress under runway lighting. By the third week of a cycle she would be doing two sessions a day, an hour each, with the studio's signature heart-rate-controlled cardio in between.

For the parallel ModelFit story, our Candice Swanepoel fitness routine covers the same studio from the perspective of a model whose runway peak ran several years earlier.

Rob Piela's Gotham Gym

Gotham Gym, the boxing room on Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District, has been Rob Piela's project since 2010, and it has produced a quiet supermodel client list that includes Adriana Lima, Karlie Kloss, Bella and Gigi Hadid, Joan Smalls and Kendall. The sessions are private, an hour long, and structured around four-minute rounds of pad work bracketed by jump rope, shadow boxing and core circuits.

Kendall started training with Piela around 2016, and continued in stretches through the next several years. Boxing is a curious fit for runway work, because it sits at exactly the intersection of cardio and coordination that the walk needs. A model who has spent a year doing pad rounds will move down a runway with a different posture from one who has not; the chin sits, the shoulders settle, the gait acquires a kind of low-grade alertness. Piela has talked publicly about the way models progress at the bag, and his observation that the slimmer clients hit harder than they look is consistent with the general industry finding that running shows is physically more demanding than non-models tend to assume.

The 2017 anxiety arc, and what the schedule did next

By the end of 2017, Kendall was talking publicly to Vogue and Harper's Bazaar about anxiety, sleep paralysis, and a level of exhaustion that the previous three runway seasons had taken out of her. The change in her training schedule came shortly afterwards. She walked very few shows in 2018, almost none in 2019, and the daily routine pivoted toward longer recovery work, more yoga, hot Pilates, and the meditation rotation she has mentioned in roughly half her print interviews since.

That shift is worth taking seriously because it changed what the body in her photographs was being trained for. The 2014-to-2017 register was a high-volume, high-impact runway schedule; the post-2018 register was a campaign-and-cover schedule, with longer-tenure assets and less reason to keep peaking. The training got less metabolic and more postural, which is also broadly the trajectory Anna Wintour's longer-tenure cover models tend to follow once they stop walking sixty shows a season.

The recovery side of the routine has stayed pretty consistent since. Infrared sauna two or three times a week. Cryotherapy occasionally, although she has been more sceptical about its results than several of her contemporaries. Lots of magnesium, lots of sleep, and a public relationship with the Calm meditation app that goes back to roughly 2019.

Erika Bloom Pilates, then Forma

Erika Bloom has run her Pilates studios in Tribeca and on Madison Avenue since 2007, and the work there is closer to classical Pilates than the contemporary reformer-as-cardio version. Bloom's clients run heavily to the editorial side of the model roster, Karlie Kloss most visibly; Kendall trained there in the 2018-to-2022 window, roughly twice a week, on a mix of reformer, Cadillac and chair. The room is small, the sessions are private, and the cuing is the kind that improves a runway walk over a year rather than a week.

The 2022 move to Forma Pilates is the most-talked-about studio relationship of the post-pandemic phase, partly because Liana Levi's clients are visible in a way Bloom's were not. Forma's signature private and small-group sessions run in Los Angeles, with a smaller New York footprint, and the Kim Kardashian–Hailey Bieber–Kourtney Kardashian crossover has made the studio a kind of California luxury Pilates flagship. Kendall is on the roster three or four times a week when she is in town; the work is still classical reformer Pilates at its core, although Levi runs it at a higher metabolic intensity than Bloom does.

The combined effect of two decades of Pilates exposure shows up in the way Kendall holds the line for a campaign now. The shoulders sit, the rib cage is closed, the gait is square; that is mostly Pilates work, and it is also the part of her training that has proved most transferable as the bookings have shifted from Versace runways to Estée Lauder and L'Oréal campaigns.

The diet, with the appropriate caveats

Kendall has been on and off plant-based since around 2016, with a vegetarian phase, a brief vegan phase, and a current omnivore-with-strong-plant-bias version that she has discussed in passing through Vogue's morning-routine and beauty-secrets video series. The working pattern is unsurprising: a coffee and lemon water start, an early protein-and-greens lunch, a snack around set, grilled fish or chicken with vegetables in the evening. Not many carbs around shoots. Not much alcohol around the same. The 818 Tequila brand she launched in 2021 is, by her own admission, a managed exception rather than a daily ritual.

Charles Passler, the Manhattan nutritionist who runs Pure Change and counts a long list of Victoria's Secret-era models among his clients, is the named professional in the diet conversation, although Kendall has been less public about the structure of her plan than, say, Behati Prinsloo or Josephine Skriver have been. The pattern is the standard 1,800-to-2,200-calorie working register that the high-fashion campaign cycle tends to settle into, with extra protein around training and slightly more carbohydrate around the shows that still occur.

What a representative week looks like

A representative week, drawing on the studios named above and on Kendall's own published comments through Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and the Estée Lauder press cycle, runs roughly as follows. Monday and Wednesday: Forma Pilates with Liana Levi or another senior instructor, an hour, late morning. Tuesday and Thursday: Gotham Gym with Piela when she is in New York, or a comparable boxing-and-conditioning hour in Los Angeles. Friday: a longer hike around Calabasas with the family dog, or a yoga class. Saturday: rest, or a slow Pilates mat session at home. Sunday: a full reformer session, infrared sauna, and recovery.

No real cardio sits in the schedule in the conventional sense; the rotation between boxing and Pilates does the cardiovascular work without putting the joints through long-distance impact. Daily weight training in the Peterson sense has fallen away as well, although the foundational years on a barbell have left her with enough usable strength for the campaign register she is shooting now.

For an editorial-side comparison, our Jasmine Tookes workout routine covers the Anna Kaiser AKT-led version that runs in the same era, and the broader supermodel workout routine piece runs across the cohort.

What the routine tells you about the modern model body

Kendall's training is unremarkable in its components and useful precisely because it is unremarkable. It is not extreme; it does not borrow from CrossFit, F45, marathon training or the contemporary heavy-lifting register. It is the same Pilates-plus-boxing-plus-walking routine that has supported high-fashion bodies for two decades, refined by good trainers and a sustainable schedule. The most distinctive thing about it is the absence of intensity for its own sake.

A generation of new models keeps trying to copy what they imagine a Victoria's Secret body was built on, which is rarely the workout that built it. The supermodel routine works because the schedule allows recovery, because the trainers are competent, and because the underlying body has already been selected for proportions that respond well to long, low-impact work. None of those conditions are easily transferred to a non-model audience, and the workout content that pretends otherwise is mostly content rather than fitness advice.

A more useful takeaway is structural. A working career in a body-public profession asks for routine that survives a decade of shows, a season of pregnancy, a year of anxiety, a campaign cycle in three cities. The routine Kendall built between Peterson, Gelband, Piela, Bloom and Levi was built specifically to survive those things, and the fact that it has done so quietly is the best evidence that it works.

Aspiring models will get more out of studying the schedule than the exercises. The exercises are findable; the schedule is the part that requires judgment, and the judgment is the part that careers are made of. The longer version of how that career is built sits in our model career guide on the decisions that matter.