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A woman dressed in black perched on a mat in a wood-paneled room. She is a small figure in the center of this stratified cube; her impeccably wavy blonde hair barely moves as she performs an exercise sequence, and her expression remains impassive, save for a few pouts. Welcome to the Tracy Anderson Method mat workout.

One of the American exercise guru’s first fitness DVDs, it was released in 2008, when his rise to fame – or proximity to fame – was just beginning. And a few years later, I found myself loading up Mat Workout daily on my laptop, ready to embark on an hour of torturous contortions with the woman best known for getting Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna into shape.

There would be squats and variations of crunches – everything you might see taught in any Pilates class at your local gym. But there would also be many more esoteric exercises: a long section devoted to pulsing the waist from left to right, for example, and arm movements seemingly better suited to a haunted interpretive dance.

I wondered if I would ever be able to master Britney Spears-style abdominal isolation exercises. Had I inadvertently messed up the ballet-style leg lifts by using an Ikea swivel chair for support, rather than the proper dining chair Anderson recommended. And, above all, if I would one day end up with the “tiny dancer’s body” and the “long, lean muscles” she spoke of in a monotonous tone.

Because, for me, “the method” wasn’t about fitness. It was a time when leanness was paramount, and my DVD – in fact, Anderson’s entire philosophy – seemed to encapsulate that. “Joseph Pilates was all about making the core of the body really strong,” she said. The guardian in 2009. “I want every woman to look like a Victoria’s Secret model.”

For me, and probably for countless legions of Anderson’s other endeavors, it was a first foray into fitness as an exclusive cult: a diet that was perhaps intended to make you feel better than everyone else by doing so. doing, rather than doing. banal goal of feeling better about oneself.

In the 2000s, you might not have known Anderson by name, but you probably would have recognized her from paparazzi photos in gossip magazines, where she appeared flanked by Paltrow and Madonna, with her celebrity clients looking disheveled afterward. two hours of training. These intense sessions, we learned from breathless articles, involved a strange mix of dance routines, workouts on a specially renovated reformer-style Pilates machine and an unusual array of props, such as ladders and a cube hanging from the ceiling (said cube once fell and broke Anderson’s nose). They took place in a heated room, equipped with a suspended floor designed to improve calorie burning.

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 to study dance, she quickly gained weight and was told by her instructors that she would never find a job in a notoriously cutthroat, image-obsessed industry. So she put these ambitions aside. Later, when her husband, a professional basketball player, was recovering from a back injury, she began talking with her various sports medicine specialists and physical therapists about how to lose weight. Or not just how to lose weight, but how to regain the light and supple figure of a dancer. “I wanted to know if I could take a woman of any genetic background and turn her into a tiny dancer,” she said. Harper’s Bazaar in 2009; it has been its unapologetic mission statement ever since.

She then conducted a five-year study of 150 women of different body types, trying to understand what type of exercises made them stronger and leaner. She later opened 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 his second child and wanted to lose weight before filming Iron Man. Soon, she had ordered one of Anderson’s reformative Pilates machines installed in the hotel where she was staying; apparently he had to be dragged up 64 floors.

Paltrow later praised Anderson to Madonna, who hired her as a personal trainer, and her mystique only grew. She would have lived alternately with the actor and the musician, so that she could always be on call for a training session. “My philosophy was that we had to move our bodies in this way five to seven days a week to be effective, which meant I had to be where they were,” she later said. The times.

More and more celebrities have jumped on the bandwagon. Jennifer Lopez, Victoria Beckham, Shakira and Victoria’s Secret model Alessandra Ambrosio have all been named as Anderson followers. Tabloids claimed she adopted a “baby diet” with her famous clientele, but Anderson denied the claim. She didn’t ask her followers to stock up on little jars of baby food, she explained — but she sometimes recommended pureed foods 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 “her own physical language.” But in less grandiose terms, it’s essentially a mix of dance-based cardio and mat exercises, using small, repetitive movements and avoiding heavy weights. Anderson claims that women should not lift anything more than 3 pounds – or just under 1.5 kilograms – to prevent their muscles from becoming “bulky” (this particular adjective is anathema to Anderson, as it is the opposite of the “dancer” physique she is aiming for). ).

Her routines focus on the smaller “accessory muscles,” she says, rather than the larger ones that other diets might target, and she recommends that her clients change these routines every 10 days, so that their body doesn’t get used to the movements. Oh, and they’re advised to exercise six times a week and avoid more conventional forms of cardio exercise (for fear of “bulking” – but who would have time to adapt?) more cardio in their week after their six workouts?)

It’s an approach that has won over many followers, both celebrities and civilians, 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 his exercise videos; she called Anderson her “little miracle.”

But not everyone agrees with his view of fitness. Keeping women away from all but the lowest weights has proven controversial: Studies have shown that strength training can have many benefits, including better cardiovascular health and stronger muscles. bone. The eerie silence of his classes – “methods” trainers are asked to teach only with their bodies, rather than verbal cues – has also proven divisive: critics have said it makes the sessions difficult to follow and means that errors in form and posture might not be corrected.

The cover of my Anderson Mat Workout DVD featured Shakira’s endorsement, 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 that wasn’t the case – rather, it was the promise of thinness, made explicit in all that talk about becoming “tiny.” This was the early 2010s, before the advent of body positivity, when exercise was presented as nothing more than a torturous tool for losing weight, a path to a particular aesthetic. But even then, the promise seemed particularly egregious. It was as if, as we might say now, she was saying the quiet part out loud.

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When the fitness world began to timidly embrace body positivity in the 2010s, when we were told to aspire to “be strong, not skinny,” Anderson may have lost a bit of cultural awareness; the pap pics stopped when she split from Madonna. But it certainly hasn’t disappeared. Instead, his studio empire has slowly expanded, with American outposts in upscale New York, Los Angeles and the Hamptons (membership currently costs $900) as well as a venue in Madrid . In 2015, she launched a subscription streaming site (because who uses DVDs now?).

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

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

I didn’t last long with my homemade version of the “method”. I also purchased the Total Cardio Workout, but I was far too incompetent to master the choreography. Yet I always kept the DVDs with me through countless house moves over the next decade, as if they were a golden ticket to a better, slimmer me that I could unlock, if only I could. put in the hours (and managed to find a laptop). with a disk drive).

Finally, after clearing out my belongings before a big move a few years ago, I left the DVDs on the garden wall for a passerby to take; a few hours later, they had been picked up and gone to a new home. I wonder if I should have put them in the trash instead.