Mandy DiMarzo rewrote the rules of strength, and she’s got a lot to share—her global BURN community is just the beginning
Visit Mandy DiMarzo’s website for BURN by Mandy, her workout program that took off during the pandemic, and images of strength abound: Mandy in a push-up, huge grin on her face; Mandy’s iron quads executing rapid-fire squats; a close-up of her arm, striking the ideal balance between sinewy and lithe.
It’s easy to get the impression that mandydimarzo.com—inviting visitors to “Find Your Strong!” and “Burn With Me!”—is only about the library of 2,000-plus videos that bring high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts into homes to sculpt and strengthen muscles everywhere. Or about a bionic woman whose body we covet but know is out of reach for mortals. But then, smack in the middle of all the aspirational imagery is a link to a TEDx Talk about a terrifying chapter in the life of a young woman who had the bone density of an 88-year-old. That woman’s name is Mandy DiMarzo.
Mandy’s story is as much about setbacks and doubt as it is about strength and success. For her, all of those elements are inextricably linked. What she brings to her BURN tribe (which is strongest here in Greenwich, where it originated, but now includes 80 countries) is not merely an exercise regimen; it is inspiration that starts with sweat and pours into every facet of life. And it is connection—to a community, a meaningful life, the challenging parts of your past that inform who you are now.
Mandy’s willingness to be vulnerable is why what she does—from fitness and coaching to retreats and speaking engagements—can be life-changing or even life-saving, not just body sculpting.
Movement With Meaning
BURN began pre-pandemic with a class Mandy proposed to Pamela Pell, who had just opened her yoga studio, The Studio Greenwich. “I told her, ‘I’d love to teach a workout that I’m doing to really connect the community in sweat,’” recalls Mandy. The Studio, which is also where Mandy sat down for this interview in comfy black sweats and a tee, is modern and sleek, with a perfectly manicured flowerbed outside and a Zen energy inside. It might be an intimidating locale—and clientele—for one’s first go at leading a fitness class, but the former Division 1 college soccer player says, “I took a leap of courage.”
Mandy grew up in upstate New York, in a small town called Clinton (home of Hamilton College), outside Syracuse. She took after her athletic dad and was playing sports from the time she could run. “If a young person can light up a playing field or locker room, that was her!” says Gil Palladino, Mandy’s dad, who coaches boys’ varsity soccer. “She loved her teammates and always put them first. She wanted to beat her competitors at everything!”
Soccer was a core part of her life at nearby Colgate University. BURN “was just born from this gut feeling,” says Mandy. “I took all of my learnings from being a soccer player. I craved movement that wasn’t about reps or sets but was about challenge. It was about teamwork, camaraderie and a connection. So, I developed this method and wanted to share it, because I felt like until my twenties, I always had a team, I always had a goal, I always had a scoreboard. And I thought, you can still do that as an athlete in your thirties and forties. You just need to change what that movement, team, goal and scoreboard is.”
Mandy refutes the mindset of “I used to be an athlete.” Being an athlete “doesn’t mean you have to be answering to a coach,” she says. Those looking for a coach figure find that Mandy expands their concept of what is possible.
“My classes are extremely hard and unpredictable. I do every workout with the class. I don’t just walk around and teach it. I’m in the trenches. Everybody is on their mat, and they’re going at their pace, but they’re connecting to each other in the room because they’re all experiencing the same 45-minute workout that changes every day like life does,” she explains. “So, that was the goal behind it. It goes deeper. I’m trying to show people that they have been strong all along, and if you just handle the very hard workout in there, you can handle anything that life throws you on the outside. It’s a very metaphoric movement.”
When the pandemic hit, Mandy began working with banks that offered her online program as a health option to employees. “I started recording in my garage: 45-minute workouts, 10-minute workouts, workouts for certain body parts,” she explains. “I built different libraries. The beauty of BURN is anybody can do it anywhere, because all we use are bands, towels or sliders.” Online members have access to all 2,000-plus workouts and challenges. “There are two different workouts up every single day,” says Mandy.
Wellness coach Danielle Esposito comments, “Mandy has built an incredible community through BURN. Her HIIT class is more than just a workout. She pushes you to dig deeper, not just physically, but in every area of your life. Even through a screen, Mandy has an uncanny ability to make every person feel seen and empowered.”
Jaffe Goldshore, a pediatric physical therapist, says, “I’ve been doing BURN since Day 1. I’m 49, and I can honestly say I do this workout every single morning. It’s the perfect mix of physical challenge, mental grit and emotional release. After years of spending hours working out, it’s been amazing to have BURN match that same intensity in a shorter amount of time.” She adds, “Mandy’s knowledge and commitment to a healthy mind and body is unmatched. She has gotten me through some of my hardest days.”
The Breaking Point
The depth of Mandy’s passion for her workout program and community is directly proportional to the depth of the despair that precipitated its creation.
She had a soccer ball at her foot from age four through college, anchoring her. Academically, she says, “I didn’t know where I fit in at college.” She settled on sociology and worked hard, trying to keep up with peers she felt were smarter than she was. But she had her support system close by to cheer her on. “My family could come to all the games for four years, which was special. As I look back, those were a great four years of my life,” she says. Her father recalls, “The day after her collegiate soccer career ended at Colgate, she wanted to meet me at the field and train!”
Mandy tried teaching after graduation. She worked at ESPN. She coached at the University of Rhode Island. Nothing clicked. “I thought it was going to be a lot easier than it was,” she says. Without soccer, she felt unmoored. Marathons and triathlons seemed like a way to push forward, train hard, chase the perfection she always thought was crucial to success.
“My identity was as an athlete,” she explains. “When that ended, I lost myself. I started to run because the only thing I knew was movement. I did five marathons in one year. I got so many injuries from it. I need the shouts in life; I don’t seem to listen to the whispers in that kind of intensity. I then decided to take on triathlons and qualified for the world championships. And through this obsession of exercising, my eating disorder was born.”
In 2024, Mandy stood on a TEDx Talk stage and recounted the darkest chapter of her life. “I gave the talk that I needed to hear in the depths of my shadows when I wasn’t willing to ask for help or to be in an inpatient facility. I wasn’t even really willing to admit it,” she says. “But if there had been a talk like that to give me some sort of ground to stand on and put my arms around to start to heal—that’s what I needed. That’s why
I felt the need to get on that stage.”
Mandy opens her talk with: “Every morning I was injecting myself with a needle into my thigh because I wasn’t able to bring a fork to my mouth.” Her body wasted away as she kept pushing it to perform at an elite level, running 110 miles a week. “A bone scan revealed that I had the skeletal structure of an 88-year-old’s fragility housed in a 25-year-old’s body,” she says. “I had mistaken constant pain for progress.”
Anorexia is the No. 1 killer of mental health disorders. The climb out is its own marathon. “I didn’t want this to be a label that followed me the rest of my life,” says Mandy. “I kept getting injured, and I kept getting sick. I had a reckoning—I didn’t want this to be how my story ended.” She began the gradual process of healing her body and recalibrating her mindset.
“I had to start slowly,” she says. “How did I want to fuel my body to move and to compete?
I just started to see food not as enemy but as fuel. But it’s a forever process. You don’t just wake up and you’re healed. It’s a constant choice, and, you know, this area is tough. There’s high pressure. Everybody’s gorgeous and thin and all that.”
Redefining the Scoreboard
“I thought there was a very linear way to get to success, and that was doing everything perfect,” says Mandy. “I had that completely wrong. A lot of what I speak to today with young athletes—whose number one and two issues are anxiety and perfection—is exactly that. True strength is found in rest, attuning to one’s body and complete acceptance of one’s self.”
The list of injuries Mandy suffered is mind- boggling: eight broken noses, three femur breaks, a torn hamstring, multiple concussions, a ruptured groin and feet so pummeled they both have screws in them. Mandy shuns heart-rate monitors and watches when she exercises now. “I go by the feels,” she says, which sometimes means just a walk with her dog and a six-minute dumbbell session.
“My goal when I speak to these young women is that they go beyond their worth being tied to numbers and perfection and see how failure is a part of their story,” says Mandy. “My story sounds successful, but really, it’s a bunch of failures and detours and missteps that have gotten me here.” She teaches that “the scoreboard that measures the impact you make each day, that’s the scoreboard that matters.”
Speaking to aspiring entrepreneurs at her alma mater, Mandy shared that she had no perfect business plan. “This whole process has been agile. I never set out to start a company or workout brand,” she says. “This is the community that started in Greenwich. They began to inform my decisions: ‘Hey Mandy, can you come up with some 30-minute workouts?’ Great. Let’s build that out. ‘Hey Mandy, I need a workout that only uses my resistance band.’ Great. We’re going to create it. So, instead of needing it to be this perfect product before I launched it, I launched it and then iterated along the way. It was all informed by this community and what they wanted. I’m still iterating. I’m still figuring it out. It has been just a really wild ride that I’m proud of.”
After 20 years in Greenwich, Mandy now lives back in Clinton, on a 100-acre farm with her three dogs. She likes her quieter life. She limits her social media. Two women manage that and the tech aspects of the business. When this issue comes out, Mandy will be on her way to one of the retreats she offers in the Hudson Valley. She also holds pop-up classes in Greenwich monthly and is donating half of all BURN by Mandy proceeds in 2025 to Pippy’s Pals Rescue (pippyspals.com).
“They pull abandoned dogs off the euthanasia list and carefully match them with their forever families,” says Mandy. “I actually foster-failed and kept one of the dogs that I fostered,” she says. “I can’t keep failing like that, because I’ll be the dog lady at the farm.” Surely, the dogs agree: Failing leads to good things.
mandydimarzo.com
Instagram:@burnbymandy
Let’s Talk About It
The hidden toll of perfection in the age of social media
According to the NIH, 50 percent of teenage girls have unhealthy weight control habits and eating disorders,” states Mandy in her TEDx Talk. Social media—which is so in our faces—has exacerbated a problem that is kept in the shadows. “The topic of eating disorders is still taboo,” she says.
She tells athletes: “This body of yours, you only get one. It has the ability to do so many wonderful, awesome things. All you need to do is support it. There is damage you can do that you can never undo. I look back now, and I had such a harsh approach. I wasn’t respecting rest or restoring my body or fueling it the right way.” How
did Mandy overcome that?
“I knew that the only one that could change this direction was me,” she says. “So, as much as I had so much love and support surrounding me, at the end of the day, it was how I wanted to show up and live my life.”
She reassures parents that they are not to blame, but they can be part of the solution. “Offer a safe space,” she suggests. One approach is “journaling back and forth,” she says.
“To this day, my dad and I share a journal. This month I have it, and I write in it, and then he takes it. That started in the depths of my eating disorder, where he was able to communicate to me things that maybe he couldn’t in a conversation. Maybe there are some things you want to tell your kid, but it’s hard to have that conversation; but they’ll read it, and they’ll listen.”
Learning to honor her body was a process. “It started with little tiny steps, but with any big goal, it’s not these big giant leaps, it’s these mini- micro- moments that you make over and over again,” she says. “Show yourself some grace and kindness and try to build strong routines.” Mandy shifted from tracking calorie intake and calories burned—“a very negative approach”— to “writing down strong choices I made: I tried a new food, I took a rest day, I tried a yoga class.”
Mandy’s dad, Gil, advises parents, “Pay attention to what your children are doing, saying and how they are training. Help them with balance in their lives. Converse with them about things that may not seem related to their sport but are in the periphery—what they are taking in, what they aren’t taking in.”
Free and Confidential Hotline
allianceforeatingdisorders.com
866-662-1235