How I finally ditched the Noughties workout regime that captivated a generation

A woman dressed all in black perches on a mat in a wood-panelled room. She is a tiny figure at the centre of this laminate cube; her immaculately waved blonde hair barely moves as she performs a sequence of exercises, and her expression stays impassive, aside from the odd pout. Welcome to the Tracy Anderson Method Mat Workout.

One of the American exercise guru’s first fitness DVDs, it was released in 2008, when her ascent to fame – or fame adjacency – was just beginning. And a few years after that, I’d find myself loading up the Mat Workout on my laptop every day, ready to embark on an hour of tortuous contortions with the woman best known for kicking Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna into shape. 

There would be squats and variations on crunches – all stuff that you might see taught in any pilates class at your local gym. But there’d also be plenty of more esoteric drills too: a lengthy section devoted to pulsing the waist from left to right, for instance, and arm movements seemingly better suited to a haunted interpretative dance.

I wondered if I’d ever be able to master the Britney Spears-esque ab isolation exercises. Whether I’d inadvertently screwed up the ballet-style leg lifts by using an Ikea swivel seat as a support, rather than the proper dining chair that Anderson recommended. And, most of all, whether I’d ever end up 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 fit. This was an era when skinniness was everything, and my DVD – indeed, Anderson’s entire ethos – seemed to encapsulate that. “Joseph Pilates set out to make the core of the body really strong,” she told The Guardian in 2009. “I want to make every woman look like a Victoria’s Secret model.” 

For me, and presumably, for countless legions of other Anderson attempters, it was a first foray into fitness as an exclusive cult: a regime that was perhaps geared to make you feel better than other people by virtue of doing it, rather than the more mundane aim of feeling better about yourself. 

Back in the Noughties, you might not have known Anderson by name, but you probably would have recognised her from paparazzi shots in gossip magazines, where she’d appear flanked by Paltrow and Madonna, her celebrity clients looking bedraggled after two-hour workouts. These intense sessions, we learned from breathless articles, involved a strange mix of dance routines, workouts on a specially refurbed reformer pilates-style machine, and an unusual array of props, such as ladders and a cube suspended from the ceiling (said cube once reportedly fell down and broke Anderson’s nose). They took place in a heated room, with a sprung floor designed to enhance the calorie burn.  

Anderson’s origin story goes something like this. As a young woman, she dreamed of becoming a ballerina. But when she moved to New York City to study dance, she gained weight fast, and was told by her instructors that she’d never book jobs in a notoriously cutthroat and image-obsessed industry. So she put those ambitions to one side. Later, when her professional basketball player husband was recovering from a back injury, she started talking to his various sports medicine specialists and physios about how to lose weight. Or not just how to lose weight – but how to gain a dancer’s slight, lithe figure. “I wanted to know if I could take a woman from any genetic background and turn her into a teeny-tiny dancer type,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2009; it’s been her unabashed mission statement ever since.  

She later conducted a five-year study on 150 women with different body types, attempting to understand what type of exercises made them stronger and leaner. She went on to open a small fitness studio in her home state of Indiana, but her big break came when Paltrow heard about her from a friend. The actor had just given birth to her second child and wanted to lose some weight before shooting Iron Man. Soon she had ordered one of Anderson’s souped-up reformer pilates machines to be installed in the hotel where she was staying; apparently it had to be dragged up 64 flights of stairs.

Paltrow then raved about Anderson to Madonna, who hired her as a personal trainer, and her mystique only grew. She would reportedly do alternate stints living with the actor and the musician, so she could always be on call 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 told The Times.  

More and more celebrities jumped on the bandwagon. The likes of Jennifer Lopez, Victoria Beckham, Shakira and Victoria’s Secret model Alessandra Ambrosio were all named as Anderson devotees. Tabloids claimed she’d espoused a “baby food diet” to her famous clientele, but Anderson debunked this. She wasn’t asking her followers to stock up on baby food jars, she explained – but she did sometimes recommend puréed food as an alternative to a juice cleanse.  

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So what does “the method” actually entail? According to Anderson’s website, it is “its own physical language”. But in less grandiose terms, it is essentially a blend of dance-based cardio and mat exercises, using small, repetitive movements and avoiding heavy weights. Anderson famously claims that women shouldn’t lift anything heavier than 3lbs – that’s just under 1.5 kilograms – to prevent their muscles becoming “bulky” (that particular adjective is anathema to Anderson, as it’s the opposite of the “dancer” physique she aims for).

Her routines home in on the smaller “accessory muscles”, she says, rather than the larger ones that other regimes might target, and she recommends that her clients switch up those routines every 10 days, so that their bodies don’t become accustomed to the moves. Oh, and they’re advised to do the workout six times a week, and to avoid more conventional forms of cardio exercise (for fear of “bulking” – although who would have time to fit more cardio into their week after their six workouts?) 

It’s an approach that has won over reams of disciples, celebrities and civilians alike, who credit Anderson with overhauling their bodies. Paltrow was so impressed that she invested in Anderson’s business for years and provided glowing testimonials for her exercise videos; she’s called Anderson her “pint-sized miracle”.

But not everyone agrees with her take on fitness. Steering women away from all but the lowest weights has proved contentious: studies have shown that strength training can have plenty of benefits, including better cardiovascular health and bone strength. The eerie silence of her classes – “method” trainers are told to instruct only with their bodies, rather than with verbal cues – has proved divisive too: critics have claimed this makes the sessions tough to follow, and means that mistakes in form and posture might go uncorrected.  

The front of my Anderson Mat Workout DVD featured an endorsement from Shakira, describing the method as “smart, creative and empowering”. I wish it was one of those lofty adjectives that made me gravitate towards it years ago. But it wasn’t – instead, it was the promise of thinness, made explicit in all that spiel about becoming “tiny”. This was the early 2010s, before the advent of body positivity, when exercise was presented as nothing more than a tortuous tool for getting skinny, a route to a particular aesthetic. But even then, the promise felt particularly blatant. It was as if she was, as we might put it now, saying the quiet part out loud.  

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When the fitness world started to tentatively embrace body positivity in the 2010s, when we were told to aspire to “strong not skinny”, Anderson might have dropped a little in the cultural consciousness; the pap photos stopped when she parted ways with Madonna. But she certainly 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 currently $900) plus a venue in Madrid. In 2015, she launched a streaming subscription site (because who uses DVDs now?). 

You can see shades of Anderson’s influence in almost every modern workout cult that plays upon the idea of exercise as status symbol: the chic, understated studios, the weird and wonderful fitness equipment that must be doing something good, the impenetrable psychobabble that accompanies each session.

And she shows no signs of slowing down. She has pivoted to embracing the more woo-woo side of wellness, launching a set of weights embedded with rose quartz crystals, and earlier this year opened her very first London studio at Surrenne, a Knightsbridge members’ club dedicated to longevity. Joining costs £10,000 per year, with an additional sign-on fee of £5,000.  

I didn’t last long with my at-home take on the “method”. I bought the Total Cardio Workout, too, but was far too inept to master the choreography. Yet I still kept the DVDs with me through countless house changes over the next decade or so, as if they were a golden ticket to a better, thinner self that I could unlock, if I put the hours in (and managed to find a laptop with a disc drive). 

Eventually, clearing out my possessions before a big move a few years ago, I left the DVDs on the garden wall for a passer-by to take; a couple of hours later, they had been snapped up, gone to a new home. I wonder if I should have binned them instead.