I am perspiring profusely. Not the moderate sweat of running for the bus or sitting in the sun on a balmy day. We’re talking droplets making their way down my temple and into my ear, a drenched sports bra, some genuine concern for my hydration levels running through my head. Beyonce’s Ya Ya is thudding out of the speakers, and I realise that while I may still technically be in London, fitness entrepreneur Tracy Anderson has successfully parcelled up her West Coast vim and vigour and delivered it to a subterranean series of marble-bedecked rooms in Surrenne, a wellbeing and longevity members’ club that’s opening in Knightsbridge on April 14, with annual membership at £10k, on top of a joining fee of £5,000.
Tracy Anderson is one of the few fitness pioneers who’s nearly as famous as the people she’s worked with — a list that includes Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Lopez and Olivia Wilde. She came to prominence in the early Noughties, where pictures of her walking down the street alongside a sweat-drenched Madonna were common tabloid fodder.
The Tracy Anderson Method she created over years of studying bodies became something of an LA legend, with her workouts fusing different disciplines trickling down — it is likely that if you’re a fitness devotee, you’ll have done a signature Anderson move even if you’ve never been to one of her classes. The sweating kicks off shortly after I begin the session with Kristin, a trainer who’s taught the Tracy Anderson Method in LA for seven years. I see beads of it visibly forming across Kristin’s ribcage as she perkily lifts weights and kicks out her legs and I, rather less vigorously, mimic her while feeling reassured that she too is clearly finding the series of moves created by Anderson challenging.
My mind flashes back to Tracy promising me only the day before, during our chat over Zoom, that “I do not feel doing my method is hard work at all. I’m never going to abuse your body,” and I decide that maybe this is just a hearty warm-up — but no, the intensity remains throughout the hour-long session. During it, I get a taster of the legendary method, in which “accessory muscles” — the ones that rarely get their moment during other classes — are put through their paces in a series of what feels like dance moves with little tiny adjustments.
At one point, I am bopping side to side while punching the air, then turning my arms in what feels like a tiny movement at first but soon turns into a real burn. On the mat, I stab and kick at the air with my feet in a constellation of patterns meaning each little section of my thighs is worked out. Mercifully, Kristin doesn’t chatter away — another Tracy trademark (“chatting during exercise disrupts your neuroplasticity and your mind’s ability to regenerate, become healthier and let go of calcifications of stress”) — and so for the second half I whisk myself away mentally to one of those films where someone has to learn a dance and the toil of getting fit is sped up into a montage. This is it, I tell myself as my muscles scream, this is my montage moment.
Feeling like I’ve just been on a short, sharp trip to LA, I emerge beetroot red back into the streets of London, once and for all fully disabused of the idea that celebrities don’t work really damn hard for those bodies of theirs, and message my friend “I am in a black cab home — my legs couldn’t carry me to the Tube.”
But actually, if I were going for the sort of body Tracy has sculpted — and her clients have also included Tracee Ellis Ross — I’d get up the next day and do it all over again. “Your body needs exercise regularly. You need to be moving 5-7 days a week,” Tracy tells me, beaming into my sitting room from a retreat in a nature reserve in the US, and she looks rested, glowing, toned — precisely what you’d expect from someone who A-listers turn to for advice.
The reason Tracy’s method can be integrated into daily life is because it knits together her relentless research into how to effectively move without doing any damage (one study she conducted early on involved 150 women and took five years) combined with her mission to innovate: “I originated something new — everyone was just going for building muscle or a lot of repetitive movements… nobody was really looking to modernise. None of them could give me balance in my body.”
I emerge beetroot red back into the streets of London, once and for all fully disabused of the idea that celebrities don’t work really damn hard for those bodies of theirs.
This concept of balance comes up a lot during our conversation, Tracy keen to move away from the common practice of trying to emulate someone’s body — even those she’s helped create — calling holding up some particular physique as a paradigm of perfection “equally as toxic” as criticising someone’s appearance. “It was always very, very difficult for me to see headlines saying that you do these three moves and you can have Gwyneth’s body or J Lo’s body or Madonna’s body;” she would rather people seek harmony rather than a quick fix, incorporating movement into a life enriched by other things.
She is scathing about the idea of offering advice in tidbits: “I think people looking for tips and tricks have allowed themselves to get to a place where they’re uncomfortable for whatever reason, and now they want to get comfortable as fast as they possibly can.” So she advises: “The best thing they can do is start to change their core values and character and make a real lifestyle change with the way they move, the way they nourish themselves, the way they look at relationships and happiness.”
While she may be unwilling to dish out easy fixes (damn), she happily runs me through her routine. The first is that sugar is mostly off the menu (“sugar’s terrible. — except for it tastes delicious. And for me that’s about balance. If I want a glass of wine, I just won’t have cake or cookies or whatever”). She is 49, and tells me that despite having remarkably smooth skin she has a resistance to having injectables: “I made a choice in the last year not to have anything in my face… to just hold tight to the beauty that the process of a natural life span.” To her, skin tone and muscle tone have a direct relationship: “so many people abuse and neglect their bodies and then wonder why their skin tone isn’t great.”
I think Americans have lost their minds — they’re not really obsessed with being healthy as much as they’re obsessed with pretending to be healthy or obsessing over it
Throughout our chat, Tracy refers to herself as “an originator” and, given that she’s created over 200,000 moves for her workouts I’m inclined to agree — and am not surprised lawsuits have been necessary to stamp out rip-offs.
We round off our chat with my wanting to know why Tracy has launched in the UK now — does she think we should be emulating the American approach to fitness? Or is it that her London clients encouraged her? “It was just the right opportunity,” she shrugs, “and I think Americans have lost their minds — they’re not really obsessed with being healthy as much as they’re obsessed with pretending to be healthy or obsessing over it. I don’t think people in London should be chasing what Americans are doing. Anyway, I’m a one of a kind fitness experience.” My crying muscles today certainly agree with that last bit.
