Tracy Anderson Method: How I fell out of love with the Noughties’ most notorious celebrity workout

A lady dressed all in black perches on a mat in a wood-panelled room. She is a tiny determine at the centre of this laminate dice; her immaculately waved blonde hair barely strikes as she performs a sequence of workout routines, and her expression stays emotionless, except for the odd pout. Welcome to the Tracy Anderson Method Mat Workout.

One of the American train guru’s first health DVDs, it was launched in 2008, when her ascent to fame – or fame adjacency – was simply starting. And a number of years after that, I’d discover myself loading up the Mat Workout on my laptop computer every single day, able to embark on an hour of tortuous contortions with the lady greatest identified for kicking Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna into form. 

There can be squats and variations on crunches – all stuff that you just would possibly see taught in any pilates class at your native gymnasium. But there’d even be loads of extra esoteric drills too: a prolonged part dedicated to pulsing the waist from left to proper, as an example, and arm actions seemingly higher suited to a haunted interpretative dance.

I puzzled if I’d ever be capable to grasp the Britney Spears-esque ab isolation workout routines. Whether I’d inadvertently screwed up the ballet-style leg lifts through the use of an Ikea swivel seat as a assist, slightly than the correct eating chair that Anderson really useful. And, most of all, whether or not I’d ever find yourself with the “teeny tiny dancer’s body” and “long, lean muscles” that she spoke of in monotone. 

Because, for me, “the method” was not about getting match. This was an period when skinniness was every thing, and my DVD – certainly, Anderson’s whole ethos – appeared to encapsulate that. “Joseph Pilates set out to make the core of the body really strong,” she advised The Guardian in 2009. “I want to make every woman look like a Victoria’s Secret model.” 

For me, and presumably, for numerous legions of different Anderson attempters, it was a primary foray into health as an unique cult: a regime that was maybe geared to make you are feeling higher than different individuals by advantage of doing it, slightly than the extra mundane goal of feeling higher about your self. 

Back in the Noughties, you won’t have identified Anderson by identify, however you in all probability would have recognised her from paparazzi photographs in gossip magazines, the place she’d seem flanked by Paltrow and Madonna, her celebrity shoppers trying bedraggled after two-hour exercises. These intense classes, we realized from breathless articles, concerned a wierd combine of dance routines, exercises on a specifically refurbed reformer pilates-style machine, and an uncommon array of props, akin to ladders and a dice suspended from the ceiling (stated dice as soon as reportedly fell down and broke Anderson’s nostril). They passed off in a heated room, with a sprung ground designed to reinforce the calorie burn.  

Anderson’s origin story goes one thing like this. As a younger lady, she dreamed of changing into a ballerina. But when she moved to New York City to review dance, she gained weight quick, and was advised by her instructors that she’d by no means guide jobs in a notoriously cutthroat and image-obsessed trade. So she put these ambitions to at least one aspect. Later, when her skilled basketball participant husband was recovering from a again harm, she began speaking to his numerous sports activities drugs specialists and physios about find out how to drop extra pounds. Or not simply find out how to drop extra pounds – however find out how to achieve a dancer’s slight, lithe determine. “I wanted to know if I could take a woman from any genetic background and turn her into a teeny-tiny dancer type,” she advised Harper’s Bazaar in 2009; it’s been her unabashed mission assertion ever since.  

She later carried out a five-year research on 150 girls with completely different physique varieties, making an attempt to know what kind of workout routines made them stronger and leaner. She went on to open a small health studio in her residence state of Indiana, however her huge break got here when Paltrow heard about her from a good friend. The actor had simply given start to her second little one and needed to lose some weight earlier than taking pictures Iron Man. Soon she had ordered one of Anderson’s souped-up reformer pilates machines to be put in in the lodge the place she was staying; apparently it needed to be dragged up 64 flights of stairs.

Paltrow then raved about Anderson to Madonna, who employed her as a private coach, and her mystique solely grew. She would reportedly do alternate stints dwelling with the actor and the musician, so she might at all times be on name for a workout. “My philosophy was that we needed to move our bodies in this way pretty much five to seven days a week to be effective, so that meant I needed to be where they were,” she later advised The Times.  

More and extra celebrities jumped on the bandwagon. The likes of Jennifer Lopez, Victoria Beckham, Shakira and Victoria’s Secret mannequin Alessandra Ambrosio had been all named as Anderson devotees. Tabloids claimed she’d espoused a “baby food diet” to her well-known clientele, however Anderson debunked this. She wasn’t asking her followers to replenish on child meals jars, she defined – however she did generally suggest puréed meals as a substitute for a juice cleanse.  

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So what does “the method” really entail? According to Anderson’s web site, it’s “its own physical language”. But in much less grandiose phrases, it’s basically a mix of dance-based cardio and mat workout routines, utilizing small, repetitive actions and avoiding heavy weights. Anderson famously claims that ladies shouldn’t carry something heavier than 3lbs – that’s just below 1.5 kilograms – to forestall their muscle tissues changing into “bulky” (that individual adjective is anathema to Anderson, because it’s the reverse of the “dancer” physique she goals for).

Her routines residence in on the smaller “accessory muscles”, she says, slightly than the bigger ones that different regimes would possibly goal, and she or he recommends that her shoppers change up these routines each 10 days, in order that their our bodies don’t turn out to be accustomed to the strikes. Oh, they usually’re suggested to do the workout six instances per week, and to keep away from extra typical varieties of cardio train (for concern of “bulking” – though who would have time to suit extra cardio into their week after their six exercises?) 

It’s an strategy that has received over reams of disciples, celebrities and civilians alike, who credit score Anderson with overhauling their our bodies. Paltrow was so impressed that she invested in Anderson’s enterprise for years and supplied glowing testimonials for her train movies; she’s referred to as Anderson her “pint-sized miracle”.

But not everybody agrees with her tackle health. Steering girls away from all however the lowest weights has proved contentious: research have proven that energy coaching can have loads of advantages, together with higher cardiovascular well being and bone energy. The eerie silence of her courses – “method” trainers are advised to instruct solely with their our bodies, slightly than with verbal cues – has proved divisive too: critics have claimed this makes the classes robust to comply with, and signifies that errors in type and posture would possibly go uncorrected.  

The entrance of my Anderson Mat Workout DVD featured an endorsement from Shakira, describing the technique as “smart, creative and empowering”. I want it was one of these lofty adjectives that made me gravitate in the direction of it years in the past. But it wasn’t – as an alternative, it was the promise of thinness, made specific in all that spiel about changing into “tiny”. This was the early 2010s, earlier than the creation of physique positivity, when train was introduced as nothing greater than a tortuous instrument for getting skinny, a path to a selected aesthetic. But even then, the promise felt notably blatant. It was as if she was, as we’d put it now, saying the quiet half out loud.  

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When the health world began to tentatively embrace physique positivity in the 2010s, after we had been advised to aspire to “strong not skinny”, Anderson might need dropped a bit of in the cultural consciousness; the pap photographs stopped when she parted methods with Madonna. But she definitely didn’t disappear. Instead, her empire of studios has slowly expanded, with American outposts in fancy neighbourhoods in New York, Los Angeles and the Hamptons (membership is at the moment $900) plus a venue in Madrid. In 2015, she launched a streaming subscription web site (as a result of who makes use of DVDs now?). 

You can see shades of Anderson’s affect in nearly each trendy workout cult that performs upon the concept of train as standing image: the stylish, understated studios, the bizarre health tools that should be doing one thing good, the impenetrable psychobabble that accompanies every session.

And she exhibits no indicators of slowing down. She has pivoted to embracing the extra woo-woo aspect of wellness, launching a set of weights embedded with rose quartz crystals, and earlier this yr opened her very first London studio at Surrenne, a Knightsbridge members’ membership devoted to longevity. Joining prices £10,000 per yr, with an extra sign-on charge of £5,000.  

I didn’t final lengthy with my at-home tackle the “method”. I purchased the Total Cardio Workout, too, however was far too inept to grasp the choreography. Yet I nonetheless stored the DVDs with me via numerous home modifications over the subsequent decade or so, as in the event that they had been a golden ticket to a greater, thinner self that I might unlock, if I put the hours in (and managed to discover a laptop computer with a disc drive). 

Eventually, clearing out my possessions earlier than a giant transfer a number of years in the past, I left the DVDs on the backyard wall for a passer-by to take; a couple of hours later, that they had been snapped up, gone to a brand new residence. I marvel if I ought to have binned them as an alternative.