The right moves

Exercise lessons from a "revolutionary" celebrity trainer.

Hollywood’s new fitness revolutionary” is the one responsible for 50-year-old Madonna’s astonishingly toned and limber state, and the neat-and-leanness of Gwyneth Paltrow. It was Tracy Anderson, the magazines say, who made Paltrow thin again, after her second child was born in 2006. When Madonna tours, Anderson works out with her two hours a day, keeping up with her other celebrity client via video chat. Paltrow appeared in an Anderson fitness DVD, and now she’s the silent partner behind a chain of fitness “studios” to run on the so-called Tracy Anderson Method.

What’s this “method”? Unless you’re an A-lister yourself, you won’t learn more than bits and pieces, even if you buy the DVDs. But the method owes a lot to Anderson’s background as a professional dancer (she studied at the Juilliard School in New York). After she quit, Anderson, who’s just five feet tall, began to study the human body and musculature, to figure out how to become very slim without harming one’s health. Her website says, “Tracy’s method has transformed the bodies of countless women to their tiniest, strongest points.”

Madonna and Paltrow may have more incentive than most to labour over their bodies, but they are also more challenging clients. So Anderson has said she must constantly be on the lookout for new moves and techniques to keep them inspired and her method “fresh”. This suits her fitness philosophy, according to which workouts which stress repetition are wrong. It’s important to vary one’s exercise activities even within a single workout. Apart from the standard resistance training, you need cardio — Anderson does dance aerobics. When running, break the rhythm with sprinting, skipping, even “galloping”.

Anderson also designed something called the Hybrid Body Reformer: exercise equipment that works out the smaller “accessory” muscles rather than just the big ones (which will make you bulk up rather than tone down) and uses a lot of moves from dance training. “Bands, bars and cubes” allow 2,800-plus different moves, and “change your rotations” so as to work out muscles from different angles. Looking at the list of movements, it’s clear that a number of them are related to hatha yoga and Pilates.

If you’re not a celebrity, learn the essentials: vary your workout, try yoga and dancing, or a sport that works out your entire body.