Kendall Toole is stepping into her next chapter shaped as much by mental resilience as physical performance. During her tenure as an instructor at Peloton, Toole coached millions of members worldwide through live and on-demand classes. Her high-energy rides, unfiltered emotional honesty, and relentless encouragement became an anchor for people returning day after day, especially during the pandemic. At the same time, she was also helping fans get through grief, stress, and uncertainty.
But as time passed on, while Toole was filling other people’s cups, her own was slowly running empty. It’s where the inspiration for her latest exercise endeavor, Never Knocked Out (NKO) Club, was created.
“As much as I loved what I did, I was very tired and burnt out. I’m a full-energy, full-tilt person, so I felt like I wasn’t myself. I felt in my body, but out of my skin,” she tells Muscle & Fitness. “I noticed my joy for training was starting to leave.”
What unsettled her most was numbness. “There was a level of just deep exhaustion. So I started feeling really numb to things,” she admits. “I think an important sign is not a lot of feeling. It’s the absence of feeling. It’s the absence of passion or pleasure or fulfillment.”
For athletes and high performers conditioned to push through that kind of detachment is easy to dismiss. Toole learned to see it as a warning sign that her nervous system was overloaded, long before anything visibly fell apart.
But instead of sinking deeper, she chose to rise above it and step into growth.
“When we’re finding ourselves detached or more apathetic, more numb, that’s a great alert system to say, okay, it’s time to change. It’s time to grow,” she says. “It’s time to either add weight, either physically, but also add a new challenge mentally. So take time to go to the other parts of ourselves and see what needs some effort. And that was a big point for me.”
Kendall Toole Wants To Address What Modern Fitness Culture Often Dismisses
Modern fitness culture is built on output. More intensity. More discipline. More data. When our mind takes over and doubt rises, the default solution is often to train harder.
Toole saw a missing framework for mental resilience was recognizing when the mind, not the body, is what needs attention first.
“There’s been this fissure and gap between physical fitness and mental fitness,” Toole says. “And you can’t have one without the other. It’s absolutely impossible.”
That realization became the foundation for NKO Club, her self-funded platform that blends on-demand strength training, boxing, Pilates, cycling, and mobility with breathwork, gratitude journaling, nutritious recipes, and short mindfulness practices. The goal she says is sustainability.
She purposely made the mindfulness practices snackable. “I’d love to meditate for 20 minutes. I am nowhere near being able to do that yet,” she laughs. “So we started with five-minute resets. Little wins on the brain actually make a massive impact because our brain is constantly changing and growing through neuroplasticity.”
Rethinking Resilience
As an athlete, Toole understands resilience. But she’s learned that it can become a liability when every internal signal is treated as something to conquer.
“A lot of people in health and fitness, especially us athletes, take pride in our resilience,” she admits. “But there are times when part of being resilient is allowing the feeling to exist, and sitting with it.”
She compares mental strain to physical injury. “You can’t fight something that needs to have its place,” she says. “It’s no different than an injury.”
The challenge, she explains, is that mental injuries often don’t come with visible markers first, so people tend to muscle through warning signs they would never ignore physically.
She encourages people to lean in to recognize what she calls “injury days” for the mind. These days that require rest, gentler movement, or space, has reshaped how she trains and lives.
A Life Lesson That Changed Everything
Toole’s awareness is rooted in a much darker season of her life. Eleven years ago, she experienced a period of suicidal ideation marked by profound disconnection.
“It felt like my head wasn’t connected to the rest of my body,” she recalls. “Like my brain was trapped upstairs, and my neck down didn’t feel real.”
Not only did she almost take her own life, the trainer admits to M&F that can barely recall any moments in the months that followed.
“I don’t remember Christmas. I don’t remember New Year’s, I don’t remember my birthday,” she shares. “I don’t know if my brain didn’t store those memories simply because it was trying to protect me from a very dark time, but I’m grateful in hindsight that I don’t have those months, because it is what got me into therapy and got me really working on myself and then built the trajectory for my life now.”
How She Trains for Emotional Longevity
Today, Toole’s mental fitness practices are intentionally practical. She doesn’t believe in perfect routines or extreme protocols. She believes in consistency and early intervention.
“If my central nervous system isn’t doing well,” she says, “my body tells me.”
Those principles are embedded into NKO Club, which treats mental fitness as a trainable skill rather than a personality trait. Her core practices include:
1. Morning mental reps
While Toole says being a morning person was never really her thing, she sees tremendous value in becoming one. She knows that if she doesn’t have her morning habits locked in, those negative thought patterns and seeds of doubt can have way more of a hold on her.
“The first thing I do when I wake up is a three-minute meditation, getting into my body,” she says. “Then I open up the NKO app, do my gratitude journal, while my brain is still malleable, and I can implant some good stuff.”
She overrides the habit of scrolling in the morning, and instead puts on music, a podcast, or practices prayer to set her mind up for a day of success.
2. Breathwork baked into the workout
Toole practices being intentional about her breath in and around training. Members of the app will see how she combines “mind” and “body” sessions. For example, she coaches nasal breathing in the 10-second recovery windows of her 15-minute HIIT class “to oxygenate the frontal lobe so that we can be more present.”
3. Using the body as an emotional dashboard
Through the awareness that’s built over time, Toole recognizes her body’s early warning signs when her nervous system is running on overtime.
“If my central nervous system is not doing well, I feel it in my brain, upper traps, and lower back,” she says. “I can literally tell, ‘okay, my mental health isn’t great, because my back is lighting up.’”
On those days she leans into mobility, hip work, stretching, and slower modalities like Pilates sculpt. Layered movements force her brain into the present.
Protecting your humanity
Toole is blunt about what today’s environment does to our minds. “It’s laborious to try to have a deeply human experience in today’s world, to try to protect your humanity.”
For athletes who pride themselves on never missing a set, Toole is throwing down a different kind of challenge. Train to notice the crack before it spreads and have the courage to stop, breathe, and feel, so you can keep showing up for the long haul.
“If you’re feeling the disconnect between your physical body and your mind, that’s always an important sign,” she points out. “But movement and breath are the best way to transition from being in that state of overwhelm and disconnect, and then pulling yourself back to your own humanity.”
About the app NKO Club is now live and offers a seven-day free trial, followed by a $29.99 monthly subscription. Membership includes:
- 50 workouts across strength, cycling, boxing, Pilates, and mobility, with 10+ new classes added weekly
- Tracks curated by Toole across genres, in partnership with Feed.fm, but you can also sync your own playlist to any workout
- Guided gratitude journaling, affirmations, and breathwork classes
- Balanced recipes that fuel body and mind, with a built-in grocery list for easy planning and shopping
- Social, motivational features connecting members to one another as they share their goals and progress, with the promise of real-life events in cities around the country.
- Personalized in-app recommendations that adapt to your goals and preferences