Tracy Anderson: the fitness guru to the stars

American fitness entrepreneur Tracy Anderson counts Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna among her clients, and she has built a personal fortune estimated at $110 million. Can she stop the copycats?

Fitness class led by Tracy Anderson
(Image credit: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Disney)

“Each day, thousands of women, myself included, engage in a ritual,” says Xochitl Gonzalez in The Atlantic. “We perform The Method. We ‘do Tracy Anderson’.” Anderson, who rose to fame training celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna, has become so ubiquitous in the high-end fitness world that if you visit the Hamptons or Tribeca, you might notice solitary men in T-shirts proclaiming “My wife is at Tracy”. While ordinary mortals do pre-recorded workouts online for $90 a month, membership at one of Anderson’s studios is a multi-thousand-dollar status symbol – “the fitness equivalent of a waterfront property”. Last year, she opened her first studio in London’s Belgravia.

“Fitness entrepreneurs come and go,” says The Cut. Most can only dream of having “the staying power of Anderson”, who burst onto the scene in the mid-2000s when she helped Paltrow lose weight for the first Iron Man film and went on to train luminaries including Jennifer Lopez and Victoria Beckham. Before parting with “the queen of pop” in 2009, she moved in with Madonna so the pair could concentrate full-time on the routine. Paltrow, who calls Anderson a “pint-sized miracle”, remains a friend and business backer.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.