‘Abbott Elementary’ Star Lisa Ann Walter, 61, Says This Low-Impact Workout Keeps Her Flexible

When Lisa Ann Walter returned to film season three of the hit ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary, she wasn’t in her usual routine.

The cast hadn’t been on-set in months. Instead, they’d been hitting the picket lines as part of the combined 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes. Plus, Lisa had been on-tour doing stand-up comedy and spending time with her family for the holidays. As a result, she was “stress eating” and wasn’t feeling her best.

So during the first week back filming, Lisa tried cutting her portions back, but took it too far—her blood sugar was crashing, and she just felt “sad.” Her boss, Abbott creator and star Quinta Brunson, immediately noticed something was up.

“She goes, ‘Your energy is different,’” Lisa recalls to Women’s Health. Once Lisa told her about the diet, Quinta went into mom mode. “She goes, ‘You can’t do that. It’s not good for your body and it’s not good for you.’ She was right. God bless her—for being her age, she’s a very smart young woman.”

From there, Lisa said she made a “conscious decision” that she was “not going to go to an unhealthy place” in her health.

“I enjoy food. I love to cook. I love to go out and eat dinner,” she says. “I also don’t want to be a nasty, cranky b*tch at work, so I’m going to have balance. I think that was a really important decision.”

Lisa, who spoke to Women’s Health on behalf of her partnership with Centrum for their “Hot Conversations” series about menopause, has totally revamped her view on wellness over the last decade or so, incorporating stretching and lots of sleep into her life.

Here’s what to know about Abbott Elementary star Lisa Ann Walter’s workout routine, diet, and self-care rituals.

She does a mix of strength and flexibility workouts.

When she was younger, Lisa said she had an unhealthy mindset around wellness, under-eating and working out for at least an hour, all in the hopes of losing “the mythical, magical 10 pounds that was going to change my life.”

But after finishing menopause a decade ago, Lisa said she couldn’t lose weight, no matter what she tried. Her ob-gyn said she would have to be restrictive, which she didn’t want to do.

Instead, Lisa decided to focus on flexibility workouts, because she “didn’t want to get to a place where I was creaky.”

“That’s the thing I noticed was different—my knees,” she said. “I always say I can get down like Megan [Thee Stallion], but I can’t get back up!”

Now, Lisa does a dance class two to three times a week and works with a trainer one to two days per week for strength.

She doesn’t restrict herself.

Lisa isn’t a fan of rigid diets. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she made her mother three delicious home-cooked meals a day, “including bread!” And like her Abbott character Melissa Schemmenti, she’s also a fan of Sunday night dinners with her family, which includes daughter Delia and sons Jordan, Spencer, and Simon.

Plus, after that conversation with Quinta, Lisa said she’ll always prioritize fueling her body over crash-dieting.

“I’m so grateful that I’m in a show where my boss literally says, ‘Stop trying to lose weight. I don’t want you cranky at work. You need to look like a teacher in America—and oh, by the way, you look great.’” she says. “I’m like, ‘You know what? I do!’”

She prioritizes sleep and stretching.

Although Lisa doesn’t have a problem with energy (she calls herself a “non-stop girl”), she now makes sure she gets at least seven hours of sleep every night, especially on filming days.

“I never used to do that—I was up until the party was over,” she says. “When you get up at 4:30 or five in the morning, you have to make sure that you have energy for a whole 12-hour day.”

In addition to her flexibility workouts, Lisa starts off every day with some stretching, much to her own chagrin. “People used to talk about, ‘I get up and I touch my toes,’ and I was like, ‘Boring!’” she says. “Now I’m like, ‘I’m going to touch my toes and make sure my palms are completely on the floor, because I’m short, so I can still do it.’”

Although Lisa was “never a yoga person,” she and co-star Sheryl Lee Ralph are planning on attending a class together at the Warner Bros. studio’s gym.

She’s also focused on getting the word out about the wide-ranging symptoms of menopause, since she said there were “no conversations” around them when she went through it in her late 40s. Once, she broke out in a hot flash during an important audition, but refused to say anything for fear she wouldn’t be seen as “sexy”; another time, she experienced a mysterious pain in her shoulder, which she later found out years later was actually a symptom of menopause.

Lisa encourages women to not think of menopause as an end, but as a beginning—she’s feeling more excited than ever about the future of her Abbott and her career.

“I do not feel the need to force myself to be in a different stage of life,” she says. “I feel comfortable here.”