British singer Ellie Goulding entered 2024 fighting fit and ready for action. Goulding, 37, shared a video of herself sparring with trainer Ruth Raper, dressed in black Adidas shorts and a black tank top for her boxing workout. “No cap. Thank you @ruth_london_90 🤙🏼🙃,” she captioned the post. “Well done girl,” Raper commented. Goulding’s relationship with wellness has changed over the years—here’s how she stays fit, happy, and full of energy.
Goulding starts her day with a good workout before making a green smoothie. “My morning routine will be some kind of workout, whether it’s Barry’s [Bootcamp], yoga, or even a run outside,” she told The Cut. “I go between New York and London so there’s always interesting runs to do. At the moment I’m loving running to Goldie’s I Adore You. I’m such a big fan of old-school U.K. drum and bass. I usually use the Apple/Nike watch to track my runs. I’ll shove a bunch of things in a NutriBullet — kale, cucumber, water. I try and have a smoothie every day, it’s really filling with protein powder. I love using Vega, because it is vegan and tastes fantastic, and maca powder. Spirulina doesn’t taste great but can easily be masked by a banana and some almond butter.”
Goulding calls herself an “aspiring vegan”. “It’s challenging, but not impossible,” she told Shape. “You just have to eat or drink a lot of greens. I make green juice for myself almost every day. I put in things like bananas, avocado, spinach, broccoli, whatever’s in my fridge, really. Sweet-potato fries and salad are my absolute favorites. They make the perfect meal. I eat a lot of quinoa and nuts, too, but I also love eating chips. It’s actually easy to be a bad vegan because a lot of junk foods are vegan!”
Goulding loves both low-intensity and high-energy workouts. “There is a brilliant online yoga school called YogaGlo. For a monthly subscription you can take any class and you can choose the difficulty level and the duration. It’s perfect for someone always on the move,” she told The Cut. “Barry’s is so good. Especially if you start on the treadmill you have no choice but to get right into it. Your heart rate is up within a couple of minutes. Once your heart rate is up, it’s natural to be in the zone. I think if your heart rate is up, it’s connected to your brain in an animalistic sense — your brain is telling you that you’re ready to fight, you’re ready to go.”
Goulding knows when her body needs more rest and recovery. “[I] slowed down to the extent that I sometimes ‘did nothing’, which also included reading a book (which is of course ‘doing something’, but you get my point!),” she wrote in her book Fitter. Calmer. Stronger. “If I was feeling stressed, I would swap a run for a gentle yoga session. If I felt overwhelmed, I would go for a gentle jog in a park, focusing on breathing and keeping my pace slow. Only when I felt well rested, had eaten properly and felt like I had the necessary reserves of energy would I allow myself to go all out with a fast run or HIIT session.”
Goulding went from overexercising to developing a more kind and nurturing relationship with fitness. “It was obvious from looking around that it was possible to have a healthy relationship with diet and fitness, and in fact these things could underpin a happy and productive life,” she wrote in her book Fitter. Calmer. Stronger. “As I began to slow down, even occasionally doing nothing (a state which I now cherish), I became determined that I would find a way of balancing all of this so that healthy living was truly healthy and where my physical and mental health could support my life without completely defining it.”