Fitness Guru

She is also confident that Tracy Anderson Connect – all proceeds from which go to Madonna’s charity Raising Malawi – will be a success, but for different reasons. ‘I didn’t invent this just for an elite group. My favourite thing is to change every woman. I walk down the street and it’s almost like a super-hero feeling, like, “I could do this for that person.” It’s just about getting the content and information out there.

So I decided to use the internet to offer mini-moves all the time that people can add on to the DVD routines.’

Anderson is scornful of traditional exercise methods. ‘Conventional forms of exercise do not work,’ she says. ‘They don’t. Pilates isn’t going to work, bikram yoga isn’t going to work. In fact, I think it will actually decrease your performance as it makes you tired and dizzy. Lots of dancers have horrible bodies.’ She says that running gives you an ugly butt – ‘because, as with every other type of exercise, using the same muscles again and again will build too much muscle in certain places and bulk you up, and a bulked-up bottom is not a pretty one’ – and she bans Madonna and Gwyneth from practising yoga because she doesn’t want their attention deflected. But her biggest bugbear is trainers who claim that you only need work out three times a week. ‘Anyone saying that you can change on just three days a week is as bad as any scam diet book because it’s just not true,’ she says.

Another of Anderson’s mantras? You must move your body for a minimum of 30 minutes per day – and preferably an hour – six times a week at least. Anything less, she says, just isn’t going to be effective. Paltrow, who works out for an hour and a half six days a week, ‘works so hard – she’s a great example. After her second baby she definitely had weight to lose. She always gets her work-out in. There isn’t any excuse.’ Madonna, meanwhile, ‘is an athlete. That’s what I try to hammer into people’s heads, people who criticise her for training two hours, six days a week. She’s just like a baseball player or a soccer player.’

Anderson momentarily drops the girlish tones and sounds genuinely cross at the mention of the negative attention that Madonna’s body attracts. ‘She’s a great example. It’s heart-wrenching to me what is said in the press sometimes because it couldn’t be more inaccurate. Why take someone who is an incredibly good example and just say lots of negative things?’ She doesn’t blink when I suggest that overly exercised bodies can seem unfeminine – her method, she says firmly, produces ‘a hot body’.

When we meet, Anderson is dividing her time between New York, where Madonna is based, and Los Angeles, where Paltrow is filming Iron Man 2. She spends 10 days with each, working via video link with the other. (Ten days is how long she stipulates a person work on one routine before changing exercises to keep muscles alert and avoid bulking up.) This summer she will move to London for two months to train with Madonna as she prepares for her tour, then she will join her on the road.

All this, the new gym, the new staff to train and the updates for her website to film, sounds exhausting enough, but Anderson also has a 10-year-old son, Sam, who lives in upstate New York with his father, Anderson’s ex-husband, Eric. During the shoot there is much concern about what time M is leaving town the next day, how various training sessions will be scheduled, and whether that will give Anderson enough time to get on a seaplane to watch Sam’s baseball match. I wonder if she ever gets any time for herself. ‘I’m not in the mood to stop right now,’ she says. ‘When I stop I feel guilty. The only thing that I stop for is my son. Otherwise, when it’s possible, he comes with me.’ She does, however, find time for her boyfriend, to whom Madonna introduced her – Anderson describes him as an ‘amazing humanitarian and philanthropist’, and canoodles with him when he turns up at the end of the shoot.

The root to Anderson’s evangelism is her own body, for she was the very first person she transformed. She grew up in Indiana, and at the age of 18 went to dance school in New York, promptly gaining 2½st – something she blames on genes. ‘My father,’ she says with a raised eyebrow, ‘is very overweight.’ She was repeatedly told to lose weight, that she was too big to be a professional dancer, and that she was in danger of losing her scholarship.

‘I was in the counsellor’s office all the time and he had no fitness regime for me. I did pilates six days a week, I was on the treadmill, I was with a trainer and all that happened was I bulked up.

I was committed to doing everything they told me, and my body would drastically change with each type of exercise I tried, but it would never be what they wanted at school.’

Soon afterwards she married Eric Anderson, then a basketball player for the New York Knicks and 6ft 8in to her 5ft-nothing. While pregnant with Sam she gained more than 4st. By this point the couple had moved back to the Midwest and opened a gym in Indiana, and Anderson began her quest to find a fitness method to achieve the results she wanted. After questioning doctors, and doing a lot of research, she came up with her theory of working accessory muscles, rather than large muscle groups, of using diagonal rotations and 10-day cycles to keep muscles alert. After giving birth she experimented on herself, and within six weeks she had slimmed to her current size; she has stayed the same shape ever since. Tests on 150 customers at her gym confirmed her belief that she could ‘take any woman from any genetic background and turn her into this teeny-tiny dancer type’. For five years she devised individual routines that changed every 10 days for those 150 people. The result was a huge database of routines.

It wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling, and then, three years ago, she was hired to work with Paltrow on the set of Iron Man. Soon afterwards Paltrow agreed to share her with Madonna. They are the only two people with whom Anderson now works personally.

When she first started training Paltrow and Madonna, her method was so effective that she could eat whatever she wanted and still maintain her shape. ‘When I first met with them I literally was dunking a double stuffed Oreo into a can of processed icing, and I can’t remember which one it was, but whichever one I was with called the other one that minute and was, like, “This is insane. Do you know what she’s doing right now? Let me tell you what she’s doing – she’s killing herself!” ’ Now 80 per cent of the time she eats no dairy produce, wheat or processed food; she has a green juice (made of spinach, kale, chard, apple, lemon, ginger and parsley) every day and is writing a book of recipes that can ‘whip stubborn fat off you in the click of a finger’. She insists, however, that she eats a brownie made by her chef every morning, and that she is ‘butter-cream-frosting obsessed’.

It’s hard to believe that someone quite so driven in her quest for physical perfection would risk such a thing, and there is certainly no sign of those brownies on her person as she poses for the photo-shoot to the blaring sound of hip-hop. But perhaps that’s because, however hard she expects clients to work, you can be certain Tracy Anderson is working herself even harder.