The planet’s hottest personal trainer, Tracy Anderson, reveals her celebrity body sculpting secrets – and what it’s really like working with Her Madgesty and pals....
Meet Tracy Anderson: the personal trainer who has finally silenced the scariest lady in showbiz. For the past three years, Madonna has handed all control of her body over to this size six slave driver – in return, Tracy has given her the most talked-about physique on the planet. ‘People say to me, “Madonna must really boss you around” and I tell them “No! She’s the most docile, sweet, quiet little student”,’ laughs Tracy. ‘She’ll follow everything I want. Madonna never slacks off. She’s like a gym nerd.’
Tracy’s method requires nothing less than total submission from Her Madgesty. ‘I said to her, “I’m going to be bringing crazy equipment into your house, and you can’t work with anyone else”,’ explains Tracy. ‘So she dropped all her other training and committed to me. She doesn’t tell me what she wants to achieve with her body – I tell her,’ says Tracy. ‘She trusts me, so she does it.’
That or Madonna doesn’t have the energy to talk back with Tracy’s schedule of two-hour workouts, six days a week. ‘We do 75 minutes of muscular structure work and 45 minutes of dance aerobics,’ explains Tracy. ‘I change the regime every 10 days. She’s an unbelievable mover so it’s easy for her. I’ve had her in all kinds of crazy positions.’
Madonna’s body has been showcased recently in photoshoots that have split the nation between, ‘Doesn’t she look amazing for 50?’ and, ‘Put your legs together, grandma’. Does it annoy Tracy to hear her creation being attacked?
‘Everyone’s entitled to their opinion,’ she says. ‘As her trainer, what matters is that I like how she looks – and I do. I challenge anybody to see Madonna in person and not want her body. What she’s achieved is not unnatural. If your body looks old at 50, it’s only because you’re not making the effort. Madonna will keep her physique forever because she’ll always keep up my programme.’
To ensure there’s no slip in standards, Tracy restricts her body-honing services to just one other client, Madonna’s best pal Gwyneth Paltrow. ‘She was my first celebrity client, Madonna was my second and that’s just how it’s stayed,’ says Tracy. ‘Gwyneth did her first workout with me then called Madonna and said, “You have to try this, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done”.’
You might’ve had Gwyneth down as a wet macrobiotic blanket, but according to Tracy she’s the handful of the duo. ‘Gwyneth is cheekier than Madonna, that’s for sure,’ she grins. ‘Some days she’ll be like, “Do I have to do cardio?”’
Gwyn and Madge now have Tracy on a timeshare arrangement (and no, they never fight over who has first dibs). ‘One of them always has priority,’ explains Tracy. ‘I’ll go on tour with Madonna or I’ll be with Gwyneth when she’s preparing for a film, and I’ll video train the other.’
Tracy has a zero-tolerance policy to skiving, even now her star pupils are in peak condition. ‘Would I let them go down to three days a week? Oh no! It’s not healthy to not work out six days a week. I’m obsessed with their bodies. I never stop thinking of how to make them a bit better.’ Now we mere mortals can get a taste of Tracy’s techniques with her new workout DVD. ‘It’s the same dance aerobics formula Madonna and Gwyneth do,’ she says. And yes, you can expect a similar transformation – as long as you’re willing to put in the six-days-a-week graft.
‘Nothing less is going to work if you want to become the perfect version of you,’ says Tracy. ‘But I wouldn’t have put a DVD out if it wasn’t going to give the same results you see in my poster girls.
‘I didn’t just make up fun dances,’ she scoffs. ‘I spent five years doing research to show the body could be reshaped against its genetic build. My method can give any woman what I think is the hottest female body, what I call “skinny ripped” – lean but sexy and healthy.’
Her method is revolutionary, she says, because it targets the small ‘accessory’ muscles that hold the key to a woman’s shape. ‘If you go after those smaller muscles, you’ll get beautiful little lines of definition everywhere. Plus these muscles knit everything together and keep skin tight to the muscle. If you lose weight without exercising, you’re in for a disaster.’ Tracy insists her method can turn around anyone’s body, even when surgery looks like the only answer. ‘The skin will always come back to the muscle if you work hard enough. Even if you have loose skin after having babies. I’ve done it a million times. The only thing I can’t do is make your boobs bigger.’ she laughs, ‘Otherwise I’d have done it with mine.’
MADONNA’S BODY SECRETSBelieve it or not, Tracy reckons her regime has made Madonna less muscly, not more. ‘She can build muscle very easily, so when I started working with her, we really wanted to stay away from getting bulky. We wanted her muscles to be leaner. She was going on tour so she’s got to be like a professional athlete too. I work a lot on the butt, because she doesn’t wear anything under those fishnets and everything shows. If there was the tiniest bit of cellulite I’d be like, “Uh-uh, NO’. My method is about toning the skin as well as the muscles.’
You might think Madge looks like Popeye on steroids here, but according to Tracy the camera does lie. ‘Her arms are actually teeny tiny in real life!’ she insists. ‘Here she’s just come out of the gym, and I’ve just done really awful things to her arms which make the muscles swell afterwards. So all these paparazzi shots make her arms look much more muscular than they really are. I personally love the definition Madonna has on her arms. I work them really hard, but I want them to be tiny too, so we never lift anything more than 3lbs.’
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