Method Acting

"I HAVE DEDICATED my entire career to this space,” says fitness and wellness guru Tracy Anderson of her mission to help her clients achieve true balance. “I felt that fitness had a real psycho-physiological content gap before I created my method. While there has been mindful practice since the beginning of humankind and the awareness of how to develop muscular strength, there wasn’t a place for prescription content based on strengthening and balancing the availability of the entire muscular unit—how to get the access through the mind and from what parts of the self.” Anderson strives to “take the guesswork out of why trends fail you, diets depress you and deep physical connection scares you.”

With a client list that reads like a who’s who of the most enviable physiques in the entertainment industry (such as Jennifer Lopez, Katy Perry and, of course, longtime collaborator and Goop guru Gwyneth Paltrow)—Anderson goes beyond sculpting a camera-ready body. “Healing... people so they truly have a life process that lights them up and supports them is what I am most passionate about,” she offers. “I didn’t want to start a business or have a fitness career, or be a trend,” Anderson explains. “I really wanted to heal people, including me, who felt physically disconnected and to contribute to the fitness world in a dedicated and impactful way that would help everyone.”

For Anderson, the voyage to wellness has been a wandering yet enlightening path. “After I completed my first study, which lasted five years, I was so happy that I became good enough at designing other people’s bodies, and even my own, that I felt like I could eat anything,” she shares. “I had to really evolve into being the example of nutritional balance that I expected my clients to be. I fell into some extreme practices in the name of ‘disease prevention’ and ‘health,’ but learned how one size doesn’t fit all in nutrition either,” she says.