At 84 years old, legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp maintains a workout routine that would intimidate people half her age. Rising before dawn, she hits the gym at 5:00 a.m. for a full two-hour session, a practice she’s sustained for decades. But perhaps most surprising is her attitude toward this daily ritual: she’s never enjoyed it.
“It’s not a ritual and I never enjoyed it,” Tharp told Andrew Huberman on a recent episode of the Huberman Lab podcast. “It’s a reality.” For Tharp, the gym isn’t about pleasure or some mystical morning routine. It’s about maintaining the instrument she needs to challenge, her body.
“You just set the mechanism for the day you’re going to have to do it,” she explained. “It’s kind of boring and it’s kind of lonesome.”
When Huberman pressed her about days when motivation wanes, Tharp’s response was characteristically direct: “If you don’t work when you don’t want to work, you’re not going to be able to work when you do want to work.” This simple philosophy has guided her approach to discipline for decades, stemming from childhood lessons on a Midwestern farm where work wasn’t optional, it was survival.
Tharp’s physical accomplishments are remarkable for any age. Even in her sixties, she could deadlift over 200 pounds—more than twice her body weight—bench press her body weight for three clean repetitions, and was taking up boxing to keep her reflexes sharp.
Her trainer is none other than Teddy Atlas, the renowned boxing coach.
What drives someone to maintain such punishing discipline well into their eighties? For Tharp, it connects directly to her art. As a dancer and choreographer, she needed an instrument capable of meeting the demands of her creative vision. The body, she insists, must be grounded before it can be challenged.
“You can’t just throw things off,” she noted. “They’ve got to be set before you can throw them off.”
This work ethic traces back to her upbringing. Her mother was a concert pianist who instilled the importance of practice and maximizing every moment. Time spent on her grandparents’ farm in Amish territory reinforced these lessons—you worked hard, or you didn’t eat. That Midwestern sensibility, with its emphasis on community and personal accountability, shaped Tharp’s entire approach to life and art.
Today, Tharp continues to work seven days a week, dismissing the very concept of weekends. While she acknowledges that bodies change with age and that working at 84 differs vastly from working at 40, she refuses to surrender to limitations prematurely. The key, she suggests, is accepting friction and meeting it at the edge of your capabilities—not retreating from it out of fear.