A Conversation with Andrea Marcellus, Founder and CEO of ANDREA MARCELLUS

Fitness expert, author, and life strategist Andrea Marcellus is the founder and CEO of ANDREA MARCELLUS, a lifestyle brand with the mission to help busy, driven people maximize their lives.

For more than 25 years, Andrea has expertly guided clients in Los Angeles and New York to personalized health, utilizing her own unique, actionable set of principles to ramp up every area of their lives. Andrea is living proof that maintaining long-term health doesn’t have to be hard. Instead, Andrea advocates for breaking the fitness and weight loss “rules” by working out less, not more – and for treating food like a friend.

Andrea’s signature “in-the-moment” workouts motivate busy clients, including celebrities and athletes, to be their fittest, strongest selves – both physically and mentally. The keys are found in Andrea’s “5 Life Strategies,” actionable principles that serve as the foundational underpinning of the ANDREA MARCELLUS brand. The brand’s offerings include the ultra-customizable, AI-driven AND/life [TM​] app, which helps users create and integrate a personalized, long-term fitness solution; social media channels with live streamed exercise, food and life advice videos; and her first book, The Way In: 5 Winning Strategies to Lose Weight, Get Strong and Lift Your Life, a do-able roadmap to super-fitness, released in July 2019.

Known for her simple, fun and workable approach to fitness, Andrea has more than 300,000 social media followers. Andrea and her personable “no judgment” workout approach has been featured on The Doctors, CBS, Fox News, NBC, KTLA Morning News and in Forbes, Livestrong, Bustle, Mashable, LifeHacker, and more.

Andrea is an American Council on Exercise Certified Personal Trainer and received her Advanced Pilates Certification from IPC, Ivon Dahl. She holds numerous certifications including the original Johnny G. Spinning, TRX, CrossCore Training, Aerobics and Fitness Association of America (AFAA) Step and Group Fitness, and RIPP Training. An NYU graduate and screenwriter as well, Andrea’s comedic feature film A Nice Girl Like You starring Lucy Hale is currently in post-production.

Gio Kim (BT): I have seen your videos and read through your websites and it is truly inspiring. How did you get started in this area of work? Did this idea come to you because of personal experiences? What made you start this and what was the driving force behind this?

Andrea Marcellus (AM): During the summer between freshman and sophomore year at NYU, I had a really bad accident so when I got back to school the next year it was tough, the recovery was tough so fitness classes are what I did to cheer myself up in a way and jump-start myself. I'm not athletically inclined but I needed to feel stronger and in charge of myself, so fitness became a place of certainty for me.

I would fit in working at the gyms and teaching classes with my college schedule and with auditions; I had an internship at ABC casting, it was a lot. It was crazy, but I had built up a lot of mental strength. So, in the course of a year, I got a lot of experience. And fitness became a sideline for me always. My last year in New York, I worked for Clinique International. That was how I paid my bills; for fitness, I taught classes before and after work and auditioning. Then when I moved to Los Angeles, it was the same thing: I had always had a corporate job of some sort, but I always taught classes before and after work.

I did that until about my late twenties. And then I realized I'm good at this-- I'm uniquely good at this, and that this could be very lucrative if I turn it into personal training. So, I got additional certifications. Then, I started my own business at about age 28 or 29. And that's what I've been doing ever since. I'm 47 now. It was literally by accident. My mom used to always say life is long. She was an entrepreneur, and one of the greatest lessons I ever got from her was the concept of reinvention. I'm in a huge pivot right now with this business from what I saw my 2020 plan would be to this COVID time, but that makes the concept of reinvention so much more important.

BT: Going back to how your app focuses on mental attitudes, I was wondering how you balance finding what works with you personally in terms of fitness and life with what you bring to your followers and helping them foster good habits, because everyone has different learning styles, they absorb things differently. How do you help them and how do you help yourself?

AM: Well, you hit two separate nails on the head with that question. First of all, that's the art of teaching; you have to figure out who you're talking to and how they learn. And that's why I have two different ways to exercise on this app. Do oral cues help them? Or is it a combination of oral and visual? Or is it how I put things? Is it inspiration or is it just “show me as simple as possible”? And the second thing which is what’s really unique about my methodology is because it is truly the amalgamation of every failure I've ever had in fitness.

There’s a chapter in my book-- chapter 4 is called “What Kind of Eater Are You?” and it lists all these types. And what's so funny is they're very different. I find every one of them in me, and that's the point. Not only is every person different, we're different at different times in our life. We're different six times this week.

It isn’t creating hard and fast rules, but more, creating a code. And that's what my strategies are there. They're a code to live by, to follow, that keep you in a path and keep you in a lane that is, first of all, guided by the first principle, personal authenticity. That’s when you are really embracing what shines about you, not where you're at; it is who you are and knowing what your limits are.

BT: I think we're getting at the five life goals that you talk about. I was wondering how you came to the conclusion that these were the five that we should prioritize and exercise.

AM: Nothing has come easy for me in life whatsoever. I had some really significant challenges in life and a lot of disappointments. But I have this kind of interesting personality flaw that when I hear the word “no”, honestly, it's always just a “not yet” to me. That's my mindset.

If I didn't get a part, it never occurred to me that I'm not good enough. It would be like, “Wow, I'm sorry I can’t help you make your project better.” And I hope I don’t sound egomaniacal, because I know I’m not the best at anything. I guess I just don’t get shaken by “no”. It's about not personalizing things. I just think, “Oh, that person is on their own path. That's it.” It’s something I learned, because life was not easy growing up. I did not have things going along through my teens and 20s in a way that you would have expected.

Yet, every day, I have a ton of energy. I'm jazzed to get going. I’m always excited about the thought of what's going to happen that day. And I asked myself, “How am I like that? How did I survive?” It’s to the point where if I told you some of the really challenging hardships I’ve had, it’s mind-boggling how I am the way I am. That's where I got the life strategies.

BT: If you had to choose one of these life strategies that you find particularly difficult to hold or maybe one that you find the most pivotal in your life, which one would it be?

AM: It's a really good question because, you know, they change. But the hardest one is the last one, which is “Allow In The Extraordinary.” I'm so driven and I'm always moving forward, forward, forward, forward. So, for me, I have to remind myself, stop, breathe.

But other people have a hard time getting started. And for them, you know, some of the other principles, like the third one, which is “Strategize Habits” can help them get started. The second one, “Personal Authenticity”, I think, is the one that helps people learn to be okay with what they’re not, letting go of acting. Learning to be able to see yourself very clearly and to be able to embrace positives, but also to let go-- that's personal authenticity. And I think that's probably the most important because it means you're defining your own life and you're writing your own story as opposed to letting your story be written as a reaction to the people around you. That’s when I think you can really be at your best.

BT: I really resonated with the “Opposition Stability”, could you expand on that one?

AM: That’s a really powerful one. Oppositional Stability is, honest to goodness, how I get everything because fundamentally, it's grounded in empathy. It's generosity, it is putting your ego aside even when you're really hurting, which is really hard to do. You have to ask yourself ‘Do you want to be right or you want to get along?’ Is it ‘I have to really be 100 percent understood why my point is correct’ or is it understanding the other perspective? It constantly keeps your ego in check.

And that's what I'm envisioning for my brand, to show that these strategies apply to, as you said, literally everything. The brand mission is to help busy, aspirational people maximize their most precious personal resources, which, I feel, are time, energy and funds. That's the brand.

BT: I follow a lot of fitness accounts myself, and I think what makes your brand stand out is that it is inspirational; it isn’t just like 10 exercises to help you lose weight fast. It is helping the person become the best version of themselves. So, going off of that, I'm wondering how you leverage social media and having things online to continue to spread your message?

AM: Yeah, it's the biggest tool, obviously. And it's really challenging because I'm trying to build a fitness business without booty shots. I have a very large demographic from like 25 to 60, but I resonate really well with millennials too, because in my 20s and 30s, I was so hard on myself. Your physical confidence and mental confidence go hand-in-hand. And when you build physical strength, you’re building mental strength.

When you put that together, you become a very, very powerful person with your mindset in the right place. And that's one of the key differences with the brand and my approach to fitness. Yeah, you'll get fit, but that is just myopic. It's really myopic, just really old thinking, because we're really starting to understand that we are 360-degree people. We don’t get fit because of certain exercises, it’s a strategy; it comes from active life, not just in fitness.

There are no top exercises. It's the lies that get put out that frustrate me. And on top of that, they don't have anything to do with building you up from the inside. Lasting fitness comes from strength that comes from the inside. It's really a perspective.

BT: For the women who follow you, what do you want them to take away from fitness and life, but also if they want to enter into the industry of health and wellness?

AM: It’s a struggle even for me, because when you have a holistic message, it takes longer to get out. It's not flashy. It's not a soundbite. You have to skate that line between marketing and universal truth. And you have to be highly differentiated to stand out in the very crowded field of fitness, especially in an entrepreneurial way. And you have to offer people, in my opinion, for a lasting business, something that's true, that resonates, that really hits them in the heart. That’s what I mean by universal truths.

It's also a long, slow haul to build up to that. It's really a super, super challenging niche. I have a lot of advantages, but still, it's very challenging. Getting a business is really the hardest thing you'll ever do because you have to wear so many hats; the learning curve is enormous. I think you'll measure success in mistake mitigation multiplied by time, divided by funding.

BT: That's the only equation that we need. It seems like the message that you're trying to send is that you need to be in it for the long haul, that this isn’t a short-term thing.

AM: That's my message about everything; you have a long-haul approach because the long-haul approach keeps a perspective. It's less emotional. Just like the “oppositional stability”, it cuts through emotion when you have that big perspective. You’re less judgmental in the moment and less snap-responsive to pressure. If you're going to be in a business, you always need to be thinking where you’re going to go.

I tell this to people all the time: we are in control of absolutely nothing, and especially in building a business, it is not the goal to be in control of everything. It's about being in charge of yourself always. So, in terms of fitness, I talk to people about these strategies to put you in charge of yourself, because when you feel in charge, you feel confident and you're always looking forward.

Charge, that’s the word. What I'm really always trying to do is help people be in charge of themselves, no matter what the subject is, so that they can feel peaceful. They can feel at their best and they can put their best foot forward.