If you’ve ever wondered how the likes of Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci, and Anne Hathaway stay fit and healthy while juggling home life and grueling film schedules, the answer is Monique Eastwood.
The UK-based fitness guru keeps them trim and honed with tailored routines that everybody can emulate through her app, Eastwoodfit.
The app brings the Eastwood Movement Method (EMM) into living rooms with a focus on short, high-energy routines. The emphasis is on building strength and endurance and developing movement, grace, and body control.
Eastwood, 59, deliberately shuns a glossy, highly polished app and insists on unedited content to ensure that EMM remains “raw and authentic”.
For the price of a few cappuccinos, monthly subscribers get unlimited access to hundreds of pre-recorded workouts and live routines, usually streamed on Friday mornings, that Eastwood performs alongside her community in real-time.
Most app classes are 30-40 minutes, based on Eastwood’s belief that short routines that target the entire body are most effective.
Being able to use the app “on the go” and weave a quick routine into busy schedules is a big plus for film stars such as Rachel Weisz, 56, who is using EMM to get strong, fit, and action-ready for a return to The Mummy franchise, with filming for the fourth installment due to begin in August.
“It’s all about brain to body coordination and lots of multi-directional movement to stimulate your core like a dancer. Many of my clients are in their 40s, 50s and 60s. The aim is to develop not just a strong body but a body that’s capable of mobility, flexibility and grace.”
Workouts require minimal equipment (dumbbells and a mat) and are designed to be convenient.
The app includes a community page for users to interact with Eastwood.
“It’s really important to me to be authentic,” she says. “The app is a bit like reality TV, it’s very raw, I’m with you in real time. It’s not an edited or polished app at all.”
“I firmly believe that mental and physical wellbeing are equally important, and a core principle of the Method is to harmonise both. The focus is on the importance of everyday movement and high intensity workouts with tailored exercises to improve flexibility and body alignment.”
Blunt, 43, is about to hit theatre screens in the US for the much-anticipated sequel to the 2006 smash hit comedy, The Devil Wears Prada.
Eastwood has been her fitness mentor since 2014, when the British actress prepared for a starring role in the action movie Edge of Tomorrow, alongside Tom Cruise.
Blunt’s co-stars in The Devil Wears Prada movies, Stanley Tucci and Anne Hathaway, are fans of EMM, as are Felicity Blunt, Emily’s sister and wife of Tucci, and Greta Gerwig, the actress and film director.
Eastwood’s success is the culmination of many years working in dance and building a foundational knowledge of the human body.
She trained as a professional ballerina at the prestigious Bush Davies British Ballet school and enjoyed a professional dancing career that spanned 10 years.
In 1990, Monique combined her love of dance with her knowledge of Pilates and fitness to create EMM.
Until 2020, much of Monique’s fitness training was face-to-face, but the Covid pandemic persuaded her to launch live, Zoom-based workouts.
It means that while she is based in the UK, Eastwood helps people all over the world to achieve their fitness goals via her EMM app.
