Elliot Page Says Exercise Never Felt Good Before He Transitioned, Now He Boxes

Photos posted this week show Elliot Page shirtless, thumb up, standing next to a trainer in a Brooklyn gym hung with vintage fight posters. Two videos follow, jabs and uppercuts thrown at a padded target while a coach calls out instructions. Fans reacted fast, flooding the comments with praise for a physique many hadn’t seen from him before.

Read on its own, a celebrity workout post rarely means much. Read against what Page has said for years about his own body, it means quite a bit more. He has spoken openly since 2020 about how exercise used to feel wrong in his skin, and about how that changed once he transitioned and had top surgery. That history gives this week’s gym photos a weight a casual scroll won’t catch.

A Gym Post That Turned Into Headlines

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Page shared the post Monday, tagging his New York trainer directly. In the photo, he wears red shorts and white sneakers, posing beside the coach after a session. Two clips follow, both from inside the ring, Page sparring in a southpaw stance while his coach watches and corrects.

His caption thanked the trainer for his teaching, then went further. “Training with Nolan has become an essential part of my life,” Page wrote, before recommending him to anyone in the city hunting for a coach. He closed the post with a warning dressed as a compliment: “If you’re in NYC and looking, I can’t recommend him highly enough. Just be warned, you may end up getting as hooked as I am.”

Meet The Coach Behind The Gloves

Page’s trainer is Nolan Hanson, who works out of Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn and has ties to Trans Boxing. Page called him “a brilliant teacher, not just in the way he breaks down complex movements, but also in his strategic understanding of boxing and his thoughtful approach to the psychological side of the sport.”

That last phrase matters more than a passing compliment. Boxing, in Page’s telling, works on him beyond the physical drills, touching something closer to mindset and mood. He has described feeling “hooked,” a word that shows up twice in his own caption, first for the sport and then for the coach teaching it to him.

Fans Pile On The Compliments

Comments on the post ran from admiring to outright disbelief. One follower called him “shredded.” Another joked he’d “gone from Juno to Zeus.” Actor Jerry O’Connell chimed in with a line about needing to unfreeze his own gym membership after seeing the photos.

A different comment nodded to something else entirely, referencing Page’s reported casting in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film “The Odyssey.” That connection between the gym photos and the film gives the post a second layer worth untangling.

An Odyssey Backdrop, And Backlash Page Didn’t Address

Page appears in “The Odyssey,” due in theaters July 17, alongside a cast that includes Matt Damon, Zendaya, Tom Holland, and Lupita Nyong’o. Reports named him for the role of Achilles early on, though his actual part in the film remains unconfirmed.

Casting news for the film has drawn criticism from outside the production. Businessman Elon Musk publicly attacked both Page’s and Nyong’o’s involvement, calling Page’s casting “one of the dumbest and twisted things” he had ever heard. Nyong’o responded with restraint in an interview with Elle, saying only, “This is a mythological story.” Page has not addressed the criticism in his own posts, and he has not framed his boxing training as preparation for the role either. What he has said is simpler: training with Hanson has become part of daily life, full stop.

The Caption Carries More Weight Than It Looks

Page has talked for years about a shift in how his body feels during exercise. Before he transitioned and had top surgery, working out rarely felt good to him. Afterward, he has said, it began to feel tied to his mood, his energy, and his comfort in his own skin.

That earlier context reframes what looks like a straightforward fitness post into something closer to a continuation of a story he has told publicly since coming out. Boxing photos from a Brooklyn gym read differently once you know what exercise used to feel like for him.

Training On The Road, Headset And All

Page isn’t shy about admitting he doesn’t love traditional gyms. In a 2023 interview with GQ, he called himself “not a gym guy” and described a workaround he uses while traveling, a Quest VR headset that turns exercise into something closer to play.

“If I was doing what I do for even just half an hour in my apartment, outside I wouldn’t last five minutes,” he told the outlet. “But I think because it’s almost like a game, you kind of disappear into it.” He added that the habit had changed things for him and that he’d gotten friends hooked on it too, a small preview of the same word he’d later use about boxing.

Top Surgery, And Finally Recognizing Himself

Page underwent top surgery in March 2021, roughly three months after coming out as a trans man. He told Time the operation “completely transformed” his life, not because surgery defines what it means to be trans, but because it let him look in a mirror and actually recognize the person looking back.

Earlier this month, he posted a shirtless selfie describing how summer used to trigger dysphoria, constant readjusting of an oversized shirt, discomfort in his own skin under the heat. He wrote that soaking in the sun now feels different. “It feels so f’ing good soaking in the sun now, I never thought I could experience this, the joy I feel in my body. I am so grateful for what gender affirming care has allowed me and I look forward to sharing more of my journey soon. #transjoy.”

Harder Chapters Behind The Confidence

None of this arrived without difficulty. Page’s 2023 memoir, “Pageboy,” walks through mental health struggles, relationships, and the particular strain of transitioning under public scrutiny. He told People he “kind of barely made it in many ways” through the hardest stretches, and that gratitude now comes from something plain rather than triumphant. “Today, I’m just me and grateful to be here and alive and taking one step at a time,” he said.

Page has also been careful to separate his own circumstances from what most trans people face. He described his experience as shaped by privilege that doesn’t represent the broader reality of trans lives, pointing to disproportionate rates of unemployment and homelessness among trans people, and violence against trans women of color specifically. Writing the book, he said, felt overdue given what he called a climate of misinformation about trans healthcare and identity, and he pushed back against the tendency to flatten trans stories into either tragedy or symbol rather than individual experience.

A Ring In Brooklyn, And Years Of Context

Set against that fuller account, this week’s photos stop reading as a simple flex. A man who once dreaded how his body felt during a workout now posts videos of himself sparring with visible confidence, thanking a coach he credits with more than technique. Nothing in the post spells that connection out directly. Page doesn’t need to. He’s already told the story, one interview and one memoir at a time, and the gym photos land as the latest page in it rather than a stray headline about abs.