Amanda Kloots career did not follow the neat path of a performer who landed one big break and never looked back.
She went from performing with the Radio City Rockettes and working on Broadway to building a fitness business, writing a bestselling memoir and becoming a familiar face on daytime television. More recently, that evolving career has included a partnership with Ethos, where she has brought her personal perspective to conversations about family, planning ahead and protecting the people who depend on you.
What makes Kloots’s career interesting isn’t simply how many different things she has done. It’s how one chapter often gave her the experience, audience or perspective that helped shape the next.
From the Rockettes to Broadway
Before television or fitness became part of her career, Kloots worked as a professional dancer, including performing with the Radio City Rockettes.
The job placed her inside one of the country’s most recognizable precision-dance companies, where timing, stamina and consistency were essential. It also gave her early experience performing at a demanding professional level.
Kloots later took that experience to Broadway, appearing in productions including Good Vibrations, Young Frankenstein, Follies and Bullets Over Broadway.
For years, her career revolved around auditions, rehearsals, demanding performance schedules and the physical discipline required to stay stage-ready.
She wasn’t yet the Amanda Kloots people recognize today. She was largely working as part of an ensemble, building her career one production at a time.
A Jump Rope Opened the Door to Entrepreneurship
Fitness had always been an integral part of Kloots’s life having spent many years as a professional dancer. It was at around 2016 that she started leveraging her years of experience into her profession.
Some of the first classes offered by Kloots featured something surprisingly simple, jump rope.
The highly energetic routine laid the foundation for the development of what would eventually become known as AK Fitness. She went on to develop dance routines, full body workouts and more fitness programs.
The shift was not just about leaving one career behind and entering another but about creating something out of her vision.
Where she was used to auditioning for other people’s productions, she got a chance to create the program, teach it and even build the audience for it.
AK Fitness Grew Beyond a New York Workout Class
AK Fitness didn’t remain confined to an in-person studio.
Kloots extended her exercise routines to digital formats and fitness products, enabling those who live out of New York City to participate in the routines she created.
As usual, her background in dancing played a critical role in her business operations. Everything she learned in terms of endurance and performances was the basis of her new career path.
However, in this case, she enjoyed much more freedom than before.
Personal Loss Changed Her Public Story
In 2020, Kloots’s life changed dramatically when her husband, Broadway actor Nick Cordero, became critically ill with COVID-19. He died from complications of the illness in July of that year.
Throughout the time that Cordero was hospitalized, Kloots communicated to her fans and spoke about how uncertain her family’s future was at the time.
It marked a shift in the persona she created through her performances and fitness videos to one which revealed much more intimate details of her life.
A year later, Kloots and her sister Anna Kloots released Live Your Life: My Story of Loving and Losing Nick Cordero, and the book became a New York Times bestseller.
The Talk Brought Her to Daytime Television
Another major career change came through television.
After appearing as a guest host, Kloots officially joined CBS’s The Talk as a co-host in January 2021. She remained with the daytime program until it ended in 2024.
This job required skill sets that were not present in her previous career choices. In lieu of choreography and structured physical fitness programs, Kloots would be engaging in dialogue in front of a nationwide audience, addressing issues in real-time.
Her personal experiences would become part of the dialogue as well. Kloots talked about being a mother, about coping with grief and rebuilding her life while raising her child, thus bringing elements of her personal life into her career which was once completely dedicated to performances.
Reinvention Became Part of Her Career
This period helped build the foundation for Amanda Kloots’s career, one production at a time. Currently, no particular profession is enough to describe Amanda Kloots.
The former dancer, whose career started with auditioning, later started a fitness business, authored a best-selling book, and spent many years hosting a show on national daytime TV. Every step in her life was distinct from the previous, but most were a natural continuation of what she already knew how to do.
Dancing gave her the basics of physical activity. Running her fitness business taught her how to cultivate a fan base through her voice. Sharing more of herself publicly expanded on this dynamic, while appearing on TV provided her with an entirely different medium.
This medium has continued to change throughout her life. Work with Ethos can be considered yet another example of how experiences with family and loss were transformed into a discussion of preparation for the unknown and protection of those who matter most.
While much of her career has changed since her days on stage, transformation never meant starting anew but mostly consisted of finding a new use for the skills she already possessed.
