Fitness
Inside the Exclusive, Obsessive, Surprisingly Litigious World of Luxury Fitness
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Each day, thousands of women, myself included, engage in a ritual. We flail our arms like orchestra conductors. We wiggle our rib cages. We get down on all fours and raise our knees to our ears. We roll on the floor. For up to 90 minutes, gathered together at studios or in front of our laptops, we perform The Method. We “do Tracy Anderson.”
The workout is not Pilates. It includes dance cardio, but it is not dance cardio. Though some moves are inspired by ballet, it is not the Bar Method. Anderson, who rose to fame training celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna, does not wish to be referred to as a trainer. She describes herself as a “self-made scholar” and an artist who has created a “canon of work.” The movements, she told me, are a combination of choreography (“being creative with the biomechanics of what’s possible in our body”) and science (understanding movement from “a body and energy perspective”).
Wander around the Hamptons or Tribeca and you might notice solitary men in T-shirts explaining their solitude: MY WIFE IS AT TRACY. Ordinary people like me can do prerecorded workouts online for $90 a month, but membership at one of Anderson’s studios is a status symbol, the fitness equivalent of waterfront property. Her empire includes eight locations: in Manhattan (one in Tribeca and one in Midtown), the Hamptons (one in Water Mill and one in Sag Harbor), Los Angeles (one in Studio City and one in Santa Monica), and Madrid. Her newest studio is in Bozeman, Montana.
Studio membership costs upwards of $10,000 a year. Many clients spend far more, opting for private sessions designed by the Prescription Team. If you want to train with Anderson in person, you can book a spot during “Vitality Week” (actually a long weekend) for $5,000. I know one woman—a successful entrepreneur married to an even more successful financier—who budgets $36,000 a year for her Tracy Anderson body. (For the record: She looks amazing.)
In addition to legions of rich wives and women who work in the beauty and fashion industries, fans of The Method include celebrities and entrepreneurs: Tracee Ellis Ross, Jennifer Lopez, the power Realtor Claudia Saez-Fromm, the New York City political lobbyist Suri Kasirer. When the cash-strapped developer Brandon Miller committed suicide last year, many blamed it on the pressure that he and his wife felt to keep up with their Hamptons neighbors. She did Tracy Anderson every morning.
I’ve heard rumors of powerful women threatening to blacklist people from joining the studio. I’ve heard that byzantine rules govern the hierarchy of spots near the front of the class. For years, the tabloids have been full of stories about feuds between Anderson and former trainers she believes stole her moves. She built an empire on the perception that she was a glamorous fitness doll, and now she doesn’t want to be perceived as a glamorous fitness doll. She wants to be taken seriously.
Anderson’s goal is to transform how people think about the mind and the body, and to prove that her workout is her own intellectual property, both an art and a science. She’s created “thousands” of moves, she told me, and “done actual studies.” She compared herself to Leonardo da Vinci, who, just like her, “used his scientific knowledge to enhance his art.”
Tracy Anderson devotees can buy clothes in her workout line, or her exact ankle weights, or Tracy Anderson magazine, which includes testimonials from famous studio members, plant-based recipes created by a team of chefs, and photos of Anderson modeling thousand-dollar designer sweaters over workout gear. Her Instagram features slick videos of Tracy Anderson, the trainer, performing Tracy Anderson, The Method, while wearing Tracy Anderson, the brand. Yet there is very little of Tracy Anderson, the person, available. She existed for me—as she does for so many others—in her workout videos as a silent body in motion, upon which we could project our feelings about our own bodies.
And then, one day last November, I came face-to-face with her. This was no ordinary celebrity sighting. For years, I’d been emulating this woman’s every move. When she wiggled, I wiggled. When she shook her hips, I shook my hips. When she went into a full split and rolled backwards onto the floor before scissoring her legs in the air, I … waited for the next exercise.
Anderson greeted me at the door of her house in Brentwood, California, followed by a pack of beautiful dogs, including a cavapoo, standard poodles, and another breed I couldn’t place. It turned out to be the product of the male cavapoo and a female poodle that had fallen “madly in love,” according to Anderson. When they “anatomically could not express themselves to their fullest ability,” Anderson asked science to step in. “They deserve to be helped because they were trying so hard to procreate that his, like, his male parts were bleeding.” The poodle was artificially inseminated, and they went on to have eight puppies.
Her way of speaking—warm and Midwest-earnest—makes even something as outrageous as doggy IVF seem like a gesture of compassion. In that moment, all I felt was happiness for those dogs. Shouldn’t we all be able to express our love?
Anderson grew up on a small ranch in Noblesville, Indiana, surrounded by goats, geese, and turkeys. Her mother ran a dance studio. Her father worked in his family’s furniture business, but was also a poet and chess enthusiast. Anderson described the household as “sometimes middle-class, sometimes not.” One day she’d be told she could buy new school clothes; the next, she’d be told the family was out of money and she’d have to return them. Her parents had dueling ambitions for their daughter. Because she was good at chess, her father imagined her as a future lawyer. But because she excelled at dance, her mother imagined her on Broadway. For a time, her mother’s plan won out.
At 18, she moved to New York to study at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. It was the early ’90s. She found a job at the Gap and lived on $5 ATM withdrawals and H&H bagels with mustard and tomato because she couldn’t afford turkey. Just 5 feet tall, Anderson didn’t have the “dancer’s body” she was told she needed. She dieted, considered taking up smoking, and eventually, demoralized, left school.
She got engaged to the former NBA player and Hoosier legend Eric Anderson, whom she had met while playing a cheerleader in the movie Blue Chips. In a few years, they were married; living in Indiana with their son, Sam; and running a facility for youth sports and dance. They were young and inexperienced, and fell behind on rent and closed the facility. They opened a Pilates studio, then closed that too. In February 2005, judges ordered the Andersons to pay $334,375 in unpaid bills. In April, they filed for bankruptcy.
But Anderson also co-owned another studio that had a branch in Los Angeles, and she was developing her theories around fitness. She had long been fascinated by Olympians, such as swimmers and gymnasts, whose physiques were shaped by the repetitive motions of their sports, and wondered if she could design a series of movements to shape the dancer’s body that had long evaded her. After what she describes as a period of research and study, she came up with a program to strengthen the major muscle groups while working smaller “accessory” muscles through a series of repetitive rotations and movements. In L.A., she introduced clients to a piece of modified Pilates equipment she called the Hybrid Body Reformer. One of these clients happened to be the wife of Gwyneth Paltrow’s agent at the time, Anderson told me. Paltrow, who’d recently had a baby, complimented the woman on her body. When Anderson tells her own story, this is usually where she begins.
Anderson has been famous since 2008. That year, in London, paparazzi photographed her with Madonna and Paltrow, both in sweaty workout gear. Suddenly, she was not just a trainer to the stars but the trainer to the stars. These were the glory days of celebrity magazines and gossip blogs, and Anderson was ubiquitous, proselytizing about how to get J.Lo’s butt or Gwyneth’s … anything. “I’m giving you Gwyneth’s legs right now,” she told a beauty reporter during a workout. “Trim and Trimmer!” a headline read.
In 2008, Paltrow invested in Anderson’s business. Anderson started planning another studio in New York and headed to London, to train and tour with Madonna. That same year, she and Eric divorced, and she released the Tracy Anderson Method: Mat Workout DVD, which laid out her fully developed theories for the first time.
“Genetically, we are all shaped differently, and we all have our own set of problem areas,” she says in the introduction. “The good news is it’s completely possible to reengineer your muscular structure any way you want”: to get “teeny tiny” arms and “feminine” abs and thighs without “bulking.” Central to the workout was silent instruction—she demonstrates the moves without speaking—and a near-torturous number of reps with very, very light weights.
The celebrity-lifestyle-obsessed late aughts were an ideal environment for what Anderson was selling. Fixating on “problem areas” was seen not as self-loathing, but as self-empowerment. Talking explicitly about working hard just to get skinny sounds awkward now that we live in an era that celebrates wellness and body positivity. Anderson seems to regret her role in the 2000s skinny-industrial complex, when she would tell people, “Let’s go; you can get teeny tiny!” But she said she had no choice: “I had to contribute to it too, or else nobody would do my workout.” Besides, “you can’t change a culture before it’s ready.”
Now any one of Anderson’s clients could be on Ozempic or Wegovy if she wanted to, and Anderson has to offer something beyond thinness. But although the way she talks about the moves has changed, the moves themselves have not.
Clients go to her because they “know that their body’s going to look the best that it can look,” she told me. “And they’re not going to go anywhere else, because they know how smart I am.”
Anderson is 50, a thrice-married mother of two. She doesn’t like to talk about hard times, but she’s definitely had them. Eric Anderson died in 2018 of a heart attack. “He was such an incredible human being and he was such an incredible father,” she told me. She said she always thought they might end up back together someday. Having to tell Sam that his father was dead was “the worst moment of my actual entire life.”
Two years after Eric died, during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the father of Anderson’s younger child, Penelope, died too, of a brain tumor. “I did not have the relationship with Penny’s dad that I had with Eric,” she told me. But she took Penelope to see him before he died, and thanked him for the gift of their daughter: “Penny’s part of both of us. And she’s extraordinary.”
When I pressed her to say more about what she’d learned from her experiences of loss, she told me she’d become “very understanding of people’s journeys”—even “the people that steal from me.” She said she always asks herself, “Gosh, what happened to them as a child? ”
The fact that Anderson has experienced death and divorce, debt and failure, is one reason I was drawn to her. I could relate. I divorced as a young woman, and I ran a small business through the Great Recession, and I was sick to my stomach for years worrying about the possibility of bankruptcy. Starting a business, losing a business, starting a new one—this is what entrepreneurs do. I also knew from experience that if you’ve spent years fighting for your business’s survival, you don’t take kindly to anyone you see as stepping on your turf.
I came to Tracy Anderson sometime in 2009 or 2010. My grandfather, who’d raised me, had just died, and I had been working frantically to save my company. In the process there had been a lot of stress eating and crying on my sofa, and the resulting weight gain created a new wave of sadness as I felt lost inside myself and my grief. I had seen Anderson in celebrity magazines and turned to one of her DVDs.
The Method made me thinner. But it also made me feel incredible. The choreography was so unusual—and the work so intense—that it required my full concentration, which eased my anxiety and helped me feel present in my body. Unlike yoga, where you were constantly being instructed, or fitness classes, where you were being “motivated,” Anderson didn’t talk at all, something I found incredibly soothing.
I have strayed over the years. I craved the dark, loud music of SoulCycle; I wanted to try running a marathon. I was making a TV show and was so sedentary, for so long, I developed sciatica and a slipped disk. But I’ve always come back to Tracy Anderson. (“Most of them always come back,” she told me.)
Anderson herself interested me, but I was hardly a member of the #TAmily, as fans have branded themselves online. (The hashtag is shared, a bit awkwardly, by the Tamil diaspora.) You’ll see gushing comments about how Anderson changes women’s lives, or questions about what brand of sneakers she’s wearing. “What a gift to learn from you,” one fan wrote on Instagram. “You talk to us like that beautiful sister that loves you so much and wants the very best for you,” wrote another.
Anderson says she doesn’t want to be a guru. Of the women who credit her with changing their lives, she said: “No, no, no, no, no. You don’t have me to thank; you have you to thank.” But in many ways, she encourages her clients’ feelings of intimacy. Occasionally, she’ll get on Zooms with dozens of studio members that are then preserved in a section of her website called “Conversations.” Women ask Anderson for advice on their diets and workouts and lives, but for a lot of the time, Anderson simply listens. If her Instagram videos are slickly produced, these calls are remarkably DIY. And long. One call last year ran for five hours.
Other aspects of the business remain frustratingly (or charmingly) mom-and-pop. Products—such as Kenko, four-pound minimalist weights made of Canadian maple—appear with great fanfare and then are rarely spoken of again. Members who pay (a lot!) to livestream classes often complain that they start late. Had someone forgotten to turn on the camera?
Many of Anderson’s peers have been bought out by wealthy corporations or private-equity firms. Barry’s (formerly Barry’s Bootcamp) was co-founded by Barry Jay in 1998 and is now owned by Princeton Equity Group, among others. SoulCycle was founded in 2006 by a spin instructor, Ruth Zukerman, and two of her clients before it was acquired by Equinox in 2011. Even CrossFit—known for its spartan gyms—was taken over by Berkshire Partners.

“To me, being bought someday by private equity is not in my—I don’t even hold space for that,” Anderson told me. “I’ve had people with their M.B.A.s mess up my business,” she said. “Fancy educations—Wharton on there, Stanford on there, Harvard on there.” But they didn’t have the right mindset, she said. Was she a control freak? “I’ll tell you what I was,” she replied. “I was a wild fucking stallion.”
Now she is married to Chris Asplundh, a scion of the Pennsylvania-based billion-dollar tree-trimming empire Asplundh Tree Expert. (Mehmet Oz is a relative through marriage; he used his in-laws’ address for his voter registration before his failed bid for a Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat.) Asplundh bought out Anderson’s other investors. “This is a family business now,” she told me.
Anderson’s employees describe themselves as a family, too. Steven Beltrani, the company’s president, walked her down the aisle when she married Asplundh. Employees’ Instagram accounts are full of loving posts about one another. But every family has its fissures.
Megan Roup was hired to work for Anderson in 2011. Roup was a member of the #TAmily for six years—schooled in The Method and given access to training manuals and Anderson’s celebrity contacts. All of these surely proved valuable when Roup left and opened the Sculpt Society, a mostly online fitness class.
Roup quickly amassed many clients, some of whom—including the Victoria’s Secret model Shanina Shaik—had formerly trained with Anderson. When the pandemic forced fitness online, more people found their way to Roup. Anyone familiar with Anderson would recognize many of her signature moves in Roup’s workouts. Roup’s website stated that she had “seen something missing in the fitness industry,” and sought to fill this void. Anderson saw contractual violation and theft—and the latest in a long string of betrayals.
For nearly as long as Anderson has been famous, she has worried about her former trainers stealing her moves and clients. For good reason. By 2014, so many Anderson apostates were operating in New York City alone that one blogger took the trouble to rate them according to their “Level of Tracy-ness.” Anderson describes herself as “low conflict.” But most anyone who does her workouts and listens to the chats she delivers after class will be familiar with her bitterness toward the “rip-off trainers” who keep “stealing” her work. The frustration, at times, sounds more like paranoia.
Anderson didn’t name names publicly, but the tabloids were happy to report on her scuffles: The Daily Mail, for example, quoted an anonymous source saying that Nicole Winhoffer, who launched a DVD collection with Madonna’s backing, was “overweight” before she started training with Anderson, and that she didn’t “understand the reasons behind the moves, just the motions.”
In 2022, Anderson brought a lawsuit against Roup and her business through her parent company, Tracy Anderson Mind and Body, for breach of contract and copyright infringement, among other claims. Anderson attributed her new aggressiveness toward Roup to finding “my voice,” and the wisdom she’d gained in her 40s. Also likely helpful was the cash infusion her new husband offered the business.
But by bringing the case to court, Anderson has subjected her own workout to new scrutiny. When I set out to profile one of the most famous women in fitness, I never imagined I would have to learn so much about copyright law. Yet here we are. Copyright is designed to protect creative expression. Performance choreography is considered creative expression and has been protected by copyright law since the 1970s. Physical fitness is not. In their defense, Roup and her team relied on a copyright-infringement case brought against rival studios by Bikram Choudhury, the inventor of a series of yoga poses performed in a hot room. The court had dismissed Choudhury’s case on the rationale that the poses involved were not creative art, but “functional” movement.
A federal judge in California tossed out Anderson’s copyright claim for similar reasons. Anderson calls her program a “method,” the judge pointed out, and methods are exempt from creative-copyright protection. In addition, he wrote, Anderson says her Method is the result of research and markets it as “designed for the purpose of improving clients’ fitness and health.” Functional movements, in other words, just like Choudhury’s.
Anderson ultimately settled with Roup on the breach-of-contract count for an undisclosed amount, but she is appealing the copyright decision. Amanda Barkin, an IP attorney at FKKS in New York who has been observing the case, told me that Anderson’s accusations will be hard to prove. Roup is “allegedly incorporating these choreography and other elements from The Method that she learned through, like, the confidential employee handbook,” Barkin told me, but those moves are also “all over TikTok, so I don’t know how confidential a lot of it is.”
I wondered, when speaking with Barkin and reading the court summation, if I detected a whiff of dismissal. At the end of the day, these are just women’s workouts—things of vanity—so what’s the big deal? A male attorney, writing about the case on the FKKS blog in 2023, noted that although Anderson faced an uphill battle, at least she had the glutes for it.
In a statement, Roup’s lawyer, Nathaniel Bach, called Anderson’s lawsuit “ill-conceived and frivolous” and insisted that Roup had “developed The Sculpt Society on her own.” But the judge’s decision to toss out the copyright claim, he wrote, was “a significant victory both for Megan and the whole fitness industry, as the Court’s rulings reaffirm that no one can claim ownership over physical exercise or dance cardio.”
Whether or not some of Roup’s moves are based on Anderson’s Method, the big question is if anyone can invent and own a fitness move in the first place. Evan Breed was a professional dancer for 10 years before she became one of Anderson’s master trainers. She told me she could understand why Anderson would object to someone “copying exactly the choreography of her dance cardio.” But that doesn’t apply to the more basic movements—the arm workouts and the muscular-structure work done on the mat. Dancers like her—and like Anderson and Roup—“grew up doing those rib isolations, moving your ribs side to side, moving the hips side to side.” The arm exercises, she said, are essentially what you do while warming up for a ballet class.
Anderson isolated the movements and shifted them down to a mat. But they did not come out of nowhere. Perhaps those Anderson accuses of theft feel they’re only doing what she did herself, and continuing her practice of reinterpretation.
Why, I wondered, did Anderson keep emphasizing her workout as a research-driven method, if that was exactly what was going to hurt her copyright case? Why did she insist on having it both ways? Maybe it was that original tension—between the Broadway chorus girl and the sharp attorney—playing out all over again.
There’s nothing particularly unusual about a trainer arguing that their program is more effective than others, but Anderson’s emphasis on her own research is notable. She started out with insights, she said, but she wanted proof. And so, in 2001, she began what she frequently refers to as “the study” or her “clinical study,” gathering “five years of quantitative and qualitative data from 150 women.”

She recruited mothers who would drop their kids off at the Indiana youth center that she and Eric opened, along with other women, and provided them with choreography to shrink their problem areas. After the center shut down, she told me, she kept following up with the same women: For five years, every 10 days she would measure them in more than 28 different places and provide them with new moves. What she discovered in that process, she says, is the foundation of her Method.
Anderson insists that clients are coming to her because of this research. And it’s why she doesn’t feel bad about charging so much for it.
And yet the study is not, of course, an actual clinical study—it was not performed by independent researchers and was not submitted for peer review at an academic journal. When I followed up with Beltrani, the president, to ask if Anderson could share the data with me, he told me they were proprietary.
Even so, Anderson argues that only the close-minded would ignore her findings because she’s an outsider to the scientific establishment. What bothers her most is the idea that others are copying her moves without properly understanding the science. “To create my life’s work has taken so much research, so much focus, so many people believing in me financially. For me to be able to test, experiment, create, and do this, and for anybody, especially a woman, to come in, work for me, learn from me, leave, take me off their résumé, and steal from me?” Anderson’s voice was full of passion as she called this “morally bankrupt.”
Although Anderson wouldn’t send me any of her data, she said, when pressed, that they included records in notebooks and Polaroid shots. She also agreed to put me in touch with one of the women she’d trained in the early days of her career.
Julie McComb is a mom and teacher with a bakery business in Westfield, Indiana, and she’s remained friendly with Anderson ever since she started training with her in the mid-2000s. Back then, McComb was new to the area, and Anderson was Indiana famous.
Chatting with her dentist during an appointment one day, McComb mentioned that she liked to work out. The dentist said, “I have to tell you about this girl. She’s amazing. She’s fabulous. She’s the best in the area.” She has “this whole philosophy,” the dentist added, “and she’s done all this research.”
“I remember her lifting my shirt up,” McComb told me, and Anderson saying, “ ‘Oh, we’re going to take care of this, and we’re going to do this, and we’re going to shrink this in, and get this smaller,’ and her hands were all over my body.” McComb started to laugh, she told me, because “my problem areas were always—even when I was in high school—the sides of my hips. I said, ‘Tracy, there’s nothing we can do about this.’ ”
But Anderson made her personalized workout routines every couple of weeks, and she used a tape measure to track her progress, “and Tracy literally took me from a size eight to a size zero.”
When McComb became pregnant with her son, she did The Method all through the pregnancy. Anderson recommended her own ob-gyn. It was such an incredibly easy birth, in McComb’s telling, that she looked up at the doctor, surprised that it was over already. “He laughed,” she told me. “And he says, ‘Julie, that’s because you’ve been working out with Tracy Anderson.’ ”
McComb had known that Anderson was gathering research but wasn’t aware that the measurements she took from her were part of the “study” she’s been talking about ever since. But she didn’t seem to mind. She told me she’d had a minor stroke and some surgeries for a heart arrhythmia a few years back, and had largely stopped exercising. She’d gotten back into The Method after that, but then dropped off again. She would have liked to do online workouts, but she and her family had moved into a smaller house and there wasn’t enough space. She feels bad about gaining weight, she told me, but what she truly misses is how The Method made her feel, and “the environment and the sisterhood that we all had when we were there.”
She said, “It was more than a workout.”
For months leading up to my visit to Brentwood, Anderson had been promoting her latest product, HeartStones—a set of 2.8-pound beveled spheres beset with a circle of rose quartz that were meant to be lifted through a series of slow-burn, tai chi–like movements. They were made of iron, and they were going for $375. I could not imagine why even the most devoted of devotees would buy them. “Sis you have lost your damn mind,” read one comment on Instagram. I hoped to ask Anderson about the HeartStones during our meeting.
But first we talked about climate change, and inequality, and the reelection of Donald Trump. Anderson rarely discusses politics publicly. She knows that she serves women on both sides of the partisan divide. When she posted on Instagram about supporting Kamala Harris last fall, one angry user wrote on her website that Anderson had “abused her position,” adding that she was supposed to be “a trainer, not a guru.”
But Anderson sees politics as a wellness issue. “I cannot stand the hate. I cannot stand the division,” she told me. “That is so unhealthy for us.” Over lunch (a vegan fried-green-tomato salad) she talked about “how our nervous systems as women have been epigenetically so compromised” by living in a “system that is so corrupt and unfair.” Then we had to pause: A package from Goop had been delivered in the mail.
She went on to talk about how she had “creatively unlocked” women and enabled them to learn to “hear their bodies” and their “nervous systems” so that, when a woman’s husband asks, “What’s for dinner tonight, honey?” she can say: “Fuck you. Get your own fucking dinner.” She also expressed a wish that she could make her workouts more accessible to “people that are making a difference, like teachers, you know what I mean? Nurses, people who are underpaid and making a difference? They need it.” (She didn’t offer any specifics, however, for how she might do this.)
We talked, at last, about the HeartStones: She recommends that anyone who wants to lose weight start with the HeartStones, “because they have to hear their body.” They have to stop hating their bodies, their metabolism, “the fact that exercise might have been challenging for them.” If they hate themselves, they will “always feel miserable. They will not feel better even if they’re thinner.” It seemed like sound advice, though I still had no idea how the weights themselves were supposed to achieve these goals. I think she could tell I was skeptical.
When it was time for me to leave, Anderson packed up some gluten-free chocolate cake that her chef had made and some flowers that had been on the table and—oh, also, why not throw these in?—a set of HeartStones from her personal stash. She asked her husband to walk me to my car, and it was only on the drive home that I realized I’d just accepted a gift of significant value from the subject of a profile—something forbidden by the ethical codes of journalism. I had to return the HeartStones! But this was Los Angeles; I was already on the 405—I couldn’t just turn around. I decided that I would mail them back.
But not before I tried them. I wanted to dismiss them as silly and frivolous and overpriced. They certainly didn’t transform how I think about myself or my metabolism. But holding them had the soothing quality of a weighted blanket; the movements slowed my breathing and opened my chest and back. When friends came over, I would show them the HeartStones, tell them the price, watch them laugh, and then make them hold them. I’d show them a few movements. They’d mimic me mimicking Tracy. No one wanted to give them back. Including me: I forked over the money to keep my weights.
Like much of what Anderson is selling, the HeartStones remain a mystery to me. If they have any grounding in science, I have no idea what it is. But they feel nice, and my arms look better.
Anderson is still appealing the case against Roup, though when we spoke a few months ago, she expressed some doubts. She didn’t really care about Roup, she told me; she cared about fighting a system that tries to “narrow artists.” What if, she suggested, “I want to make a Broadway show about what I’m doing?” Then she could copyright the products of her creative genius, and no one could rip off her moves anymore.
I’m still not sure if she was kidding.
This article appears in the July 2025 print edition with the headline “The Tracy Anderson Way.”
Fitness
I’ve seen some bizarre exercises online. If I were an influencer, this is the one workout I’d recommend | Devi Sridhar
Are you still keeping up with your 2026 resolution to exercise more? Or perhaps you’re just trying to survive the winter doldrums, with exercise the last thing on your mind. Whatever it is, social media is alight with fitness influencers showing off all kinds of bizarre and viral exercise trends.
Take squats, a core exercise move. Those don’t seem good enough any more, so now we have Zercher squats (holding a barbell in your elbow crease like a metal baby), squats on vibration plates, squats while throwing a heavy ball and on and on. Some of these exercises may in fact be good, some useless, but because influencers can’t be seen to be doing the same thing every day, the key thing is that they’re novel and can be sold as “the little-known secret exercise that everyone should be doing”.
Then there’s adding a gimmick to an existing exercise. There’s goat yoga, puppy yoga and – my favourite new trend from the US – snake yoga, in which snakes such as pythons slither around the room and on to mats and yogis while they’re in downward dog thinking about spiritual intentions or, more likely, what’s for dinner. The marketing is that being around snakes in yoga can help overcome a fear of snakes while also building flexibility. Cross two things off your to-do list at once!
Here’s my public health take: fear of snakes is rational. About 5.4 million people are bitten by snakes each year. Evolution spent thousands of years instilling that fear in us – for good reason.
Why do bizarre fitness trends go viral, and why do they appeal to something within us? I think it has to do with boredom, the need for novelty and Fomo. Exercise can feel boring: going out running for the same 5k or heading to the gym to the same equipment and space. This is true also for yoga, which can feel slow and lack excitement.
The idea of trying something new is appealing, plus there is a constant push by certain fitness influencers implying that they know something we don’t. Some of them play on health anxiety and a desire to optimise with the “best” exercise to maximise your time and results: how to get a six-pack in two weeks or how to lose 10kg in five days (both pretty much impossible, by the way). Plus they’re telling us to buy a supplement or try a new juice cleanse that will be the missing piece to make us feel better by March.
Fitness trends sell that hope of feeling better. Take Hyrox, a hybrid endurance event where super-fit people pay good money to push sleds, throw wall balls, burpee-jump across the room and run between various stations. It’s impressive to watch and looks great on social media – which feels essential these days – and it’s a clear way to show your friends how fit you are. But it also reflects the push towards extreme, complicated and injury-prone exercise.
I’m going to say something you don’t want to hear, especially if you love Hyrox or snake yoga: none of this is necessary. If your goal is to feel strong, move better, stay pain free and live longer, you need three things: cardio exercises, resistance training and mobility training.
You don’t need weights, reptiles or cameras. It sounds simple, but what makes exercise hard isn’t the actual movement. It’s finding the time and routine to make it sustainable and part of your daily life. Which brings me to the most untrendy thing I can offer you: a 13-minute workout you can do anywhere, with or without weights. This is my default on busy days, and when I’m at home I have an 8kg sandbag on hand to add in.
All you need is a timer on your watch or phone. Start with three minutes of cardio to get warm and your heart rate up, whether it’s jogging on the spot, jumping jacks or just marching. Then it’s three minutes of legs, rotating between five each of narrow squats, broad squats, backward lunges, forward lunges and calf raises. Then on to three minutes of upper body, moving between five each of narrow push-ups, wide push-ups and tricep dips. Time to move on to core with a one-minute plank (either on your hands or forearms) and one minute of glute bridges (lifting your hips off the floor while lying on your back). For the final two minutes, just stretch out, whether that’s standing and reaching for your toes, lying on your back and moving your legs right and left like windshield wipers or sitting cross-legged and folding forward.
That’s it. Do this a couple of times a week if you can. Will you see it go viral on socials? No. Will it get sponsored by a supplement company? No. Will it increase your healthy life expectancy and make you feel happier? Public health evidence suggests yes. The real challenge, it turns out, isn’t finding the latest hack or trend. It’s sticking with a (snake-free) routine, even when the novelty wears off and 2026 resolutions fade from memory.
Fitness
The exercise more important than walking – especially if you’re older
Walking is brilliant. It’s accessible, affordable and enjoyable, plus it comes with many health benefits, which is why it forms the backbone of most government exercise guidance.
But it is strength that underpins all movement. If you don’t have the strength to get out of your chair and put one foot in front of the other, what good is being told to walk more?
This was the key takeaway from recent research led by Dr Michael LaMonte and his team at the University at Buffalo, which shows the immense value of building skeletal muscle with strength training. It found that, in more than 5,000 women aged 63 to 99, greater strength levels were strongly linked to a lower risk of death from any cause.
Maintaining muscle should be seen as a savvy investment. Muscle allows you to stand, move and remain independent, all while offering further perks that extend far beyond physical function. It powers our breath, regulates blood sugar levels, emits anti-inflammatory myokines and constantly chats with other bodily systems to keep things running smoothly. In short, muscle is the medical marvel you already own.
Here is how to maintain your body’s largest, and in some ways smartest, organ for decades to come.
Why strength training matters
There is a wealth of research on the merits of aerobic exercise, such as walking, running, swimming and cycling. This is a major reason why it dominates government physical activity guidelines. There is far less research into strength training, and much of the data available centres around young, fit men.
By looking at the impacts of strength training in previously understudied demographics, such as women aged 60 and above, studies like this one from the University at Buffalo could change future exercise recommendations for the better.
“When women go through menopause and lose their body’s own secretion of oestrogen, the loss of skeletal muscle mass increases rapidly,” says Dr LaMonte. “We typically see a change in their body composition, where they start losing muscle and holding fat in the belly area, particularly. That’s not healthy.”
Both men and women also tend to become less active as they grow older, which can contribute to sarcopenia – the age-related loss of strength and muscle. Both menopause and sarcopenia are inflammatory processes, Dr LaMonte says.
Read more: Sitting all day wreaks havoc on your hips and spine – here’s how to stop that from happening
This shift impacts fitness. “Muscle strength is fundamental for getting the body from point A to point B, especially when you’re working against gravity.” But it also throws off chemical signalling between skeletal muscle and other systems in the body, such as the heart.
“Fat tissue tends to secrete chemicals called cytokines that are pro-inflammatory,” Dr LaMonte explains. “There’s quite a bit of evidence to show that, when skeletal muscle contracts, it secretes counterbalancing cytokines that are anti-inflammatory.
“This was discovered by a scientist named Bente Pedersen in the 2000s. She published a compelling series of papers showing that these cytokines, which she called myokines, had regulatory functions outside the muscle itself.”
Exactly how skeletal muscle interacts with other crucial systems in our body is unclear, Dr LaMonte says. But it is constantly in deep discussions with them, and it is looking to help out where it can. For this reason, if you can keep your muscles strong and healthy, they can be a powerful force for good.
Read more: Expert warns why this daily habit is shortening your life – even if you exercise
3 simple ways to gauge your strength
Dr LaMonte’s research used a series of simple tests to assess the strength levels of 5,472 women aged 63 and above:
- Grip strength: a dynamometer was used to assess grip strength, with people asked to hold their upper arm at their side, elbow bent at a right angle, then squeeze the machine as hard as possible. This is an indication of upper-body strength.
- Sit-to-stand: people were timed to see how quickly they could stand up from a chair, then sit back down again five times with their arms across their chest. This is an indication of lower body strength.
- Gait speed: a timer was used to see how long it took subjects to walk 2.5m.
Women with greater grip strength – a good signifier of overall strength levels – and faster sit-to-stand times had a “significantly lower death risk over an eight-year follow-up”, the study discovered.
“Gait speed is another one of the most potent predictors of mortality,” Dr LaMonte adds.
“I’d like to see the health care profession embrace functional health as much as they do the things they can prescribe drugs for – because you can’t prescribe a drug for this. It’s a behaviour, and I think that’s why it probably doesn’t get the same kind of attention. Nobody makes money from this, but people do die from it.”
Dr LaMonte also suggests another bonus test anyone can use as a sign they need to work on their strength levels:
- The pickle jar test – this is a proxy for any everyday task. If you notice it starts to feel more difficult, this is a good indication that your fitness has decreased, and it would be beneficial to gain strength and muscle through exercise.
“When you can’t open the pickle jar any more, don’t just assume they’re making the jars harder to open,” Dr LaMonte says. “That’s a good indicator that you might be at a phase of life where your strength levels have changed unknowingly.
“The same applies when you go to pick up a grandchild or climb the stairs, and you find you’re huffing and puffing – it could simply be that you’re getting more out of shape, or in the worst case scenario, it could be indicative of disease.
“Be mindful of your body. It’s going to tell you where you’re at, and we don’t want an injury to be that indicator.”
Read more: Four things you can do to reduce inflammation and cut heart disease risk, according to the experts
How to start strength training at any age
The human body is a representation of the life it has lived, informed by genetics and altered by myriad interventions along the way. A robust life, filled with challenging physical tasks, often builds a robust body. As a result, someone who has always been active will likely find it easier to remain more active as they age.
“I wouldn’t want to convey a message that age becomes a constraint for people doing what they enjoy,” says Dr LaMonte. “I know people in their late, late years who still enjoy going to gyms and lifting weights. It’s effective for their strength goals, and the social aspect keeps them healthy in other ways.”
However, if you are new to strength training and exercise generally, you need to start more conservatively. As with any new skill, there is an obligatory learning curve that allows your mind and body to adapt to the fresh stimulus without being overwhelmed.
“You can use simple bodyweight exercises like press-ups against a wall or sit-to-stands – US adults in their 70s and 80s spend around nine-and-a-half hours each day sitting down, so you could break this up by doing a few sit-to-stands every hour, or each time there is an advert if you are watching television,” Dr LaMonte says.
“Resistance bands are another good option, or even using soup cans or books as a form of resistance provides stimulus to skeletal muscles.”
The common denominator behind these exercises is the act of overcoming resistance. That resistance needs to be slightly challenging, relative to your individual strength levels, to trigger an increase in muscle and strength levels. By consistently doing a task that requires you to be stronger, you are telling your body you want it to adapt to handle it better. If the task feels easy, the body has no reason to make any changes.
“If someone finds that lifting a soup can or book [for example, pressing it overhead 10 times] challenges them, that’s probably the level they should be working at, and they should not be trying to do more,” says Dr LaMonte. As you grow stronger, you can then gradually progress to slightly heavier items to continue to increase your strength levels.
“Older adults in particular should consult with their health care provider about the safety of beginning muscle-strengthening exercises,” Dr LaMonte adds.
In short, building and maintaining strength is important at any age. And if you do fall below this study’s 63-99 demographic, any strength and muscle you can develop now will likely serve you well for the rest of your life.
“We want to live as long as we can healthily, and I think resistance exercises are a part of that,” Dr LaMonte concludes. “When we can no longer get out of the chair and move around, we are in trouble.”
Read more: After 50, you need to train smarter – the eight rules for strength training in midlife, according to experts
Read more: The science-backed two-minute daily workouts for improving heart health
Fitness
How much exercise is enough? A local doctor says you only need 15 minutes a day – WTOP News
Exercise is part of a healthy lifestyle and its benefits are well known and have been for a long time. What is only recently proven by doctors is just how much exercise makes a difference for one’s longevity.
By now, most people understand that exercise is part of a healthy lifestyle; its benefits are well known and have been for a long time. What is only recently proven by doctors is just how much exercise makes a difference for one’s longevity.
For most people who sit at desks or behind the wheel all day, the problem is often finding time to work out. The good news, according to Dr. Julie Chen, an internal medicine and lifestyle medicine doctor at Kaiser Permanente in Gaithersburg, is that a daily exercise routine can be broken down into brief segments.
“The general recommendation is for 150 minutes of moderate activity per week,” Dr. Chen said. “So that is roughly about 30 minutes a day, five days a week. But the important point is it does not have to all be done at once. You can break it up into shorter segments of exercise and still get the same great benefits.”
And those benefits can be tremendous. Chen said that studies have shown going from no exercise a day to only 15 minutes of total exercise a day can “can actually decrease their risk of death, death from all causes, by about 14%.”
“Any movement is actually better than being sedentary,” she said.
Movement can be divided up into short segments throughout the day instead of in one long, strenuous workout and it can still offer the same reductions in the risk of certain diseases.
Now, you might understand there are benefits of exercising for short periods of time, several times per day; but you might be wondering how you can get in the gym several times a day.
Chen advocates for what she calls “exercise snacks” — “small bursts of physical activity that you can get in, two to three minutes at a time throughout the day.”
For example, taking the stairs or doing squats while putting groceries away, walking around the office on a phone call or planking while your dinner is in the microwave. Chen said try to do whatever it takes to get a few minutes of movement in a few times a day.
Chen is also a big fan of fitness apps, including the ones that come built into our smartphones and watches: “Studies have shown that that is really motivating that you can actually track your progress in your app. You can see your trends.”
“Consistency is a really big goal of this effort, and so if you look at your trends over time, that’s going to be a really rewarding aspect of trying to improve your health,” she added.
Beginning an exercise regimen doesn’t need to be complicated or time-consuming. You don’t need to splurge on workout clothes or a gym membership; you just need a few minutes, several times a day, to start reaping the benefits.
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