Tracy Anderson and Body Shaping

A couple of weeks ago, at the end of a knackering day, I was surfing online when Goop popped into my inbox and I opened it. I wish I hadn't. It's been driving me bonkers.

For the uninitiated, Goop is Gwyneth Paltrow's weekly how-to-live missive, which I usually quite enjoy. It's good for snooping on the rich, on the one per cent. It allows me to check in with the me in a parallel universe where I'm worried about how my latest contemporary art purchase doesn't quite match the colour of paint in the hallway and then I smile at the ridiculousness of it before I wipe Ready Brek or whatever weird and wonderful combination I've given the baby for breakfast that day off the walls.

Anyway, contained in this email was a video clip from Tracy Anderson - fitness guru to the stars - and a list of Q&As. In these she says that doing repetitive exercise like running causes you to bulk up (I doubt she's met Paula Radcliffe) and she gives a series of exercises to help you attain Anderson's ideal of a 'teeny tiny dancer's body', which she seems to think all women want.

Tracy Anderson. Pic credit: David Shankbone

 

Anderson, if I followed her, would be bad for my health - physically and psychologically.

Physically, what she advocates involves calorie restriction and is - quite frankly - dangerous. The diet component to her regime is terrifying. I apologise that this link clicks through to The Daily Mail, but this article's actually worth a read. The pilates-based exercises (I've done pilates for years) could do more harm than good without proper instruction. I don't for a second doubt she gets results. If you cut out meals and work out six days a week for at least an hour at a time, you are going to become skinny. But why do I care? Because it's not just adults she's targeting now. Anderson is introducing her brand of fitness to teenagers.

Before the Olympics, I saw a couple of women at the gym wearing tops saying 'strong is the new skinny'. During the Olympics, comedians who attacked female athletes' bodies - case in point being Frankie Boyle on Rebecca Adlington - were criticised. Afterwards, when The Daily Mail ran a feature commenting on how our Olympic female athletes looked unfeminine in black tie, they were condemned on the BBC's Woman's Hour and elsewhere. Victoria Pendleton spoke about how she preferred her body before Strictly and yet here we are again - women must aim for tiny. Even from their teens in Anderson's Teen Meta programme.

But why? I don't see the point in tiny. Anderson's obsession with three pound weights - 'no woman should lift more than three pounds' - will do little to help with my seven-month-old son. It won't even help me lift shopping from the car. But what tiny does do is change what exercise is for - fitting a socially-ordained physical ideal rather than it being about health or pushing yourself.

 

Rebecca Adlington with Sir Chris Hoy. Pic credit: Nick J Webb

 

To be honest, I could stomach Anderson's teenage programme, which is basically dance aerobics, if it didn't say anything about 'shaping' bodies. But given we have a major problem with sport in schools and childhood obesity, telling girls they must work out to look a certain way not only messes with their heads but will lead to huge disatisfaction when they don't turn into Gwyneth Paltrow. They might then quit working out entirely. You're vulnerable as a teenage girl. I remember with horror being made to do the shot put on the school sports day because someone had to do it and this prompting huge paranoia over my size and shape. If I'd had Jessica Ennis as a role model, I think I'd have had a much easier mental ride.

We don't want to lose those Olympic advances but Anderson's shaping ideology slots so brilliantly into the current body model, I can see why so many women do commit to her routines. As for me, I'm sticking to my running plan this year and seeking bitchy refuge in that I won't be lectured on it causing body imbalance from a woman who's blatantly gone under the knife for Hollywood-style breast augmentation.