“Repeat after me, it works ...” - as if any photo of thin Gwyneth Paltrow tells us.

It was with Gwyneth's speech on television that the story of mass hysteria began about Tracy Anderson and her method.

Tracey is a former dancer and promoter of ultra-low-calorie diets and two hours of exercise daily. Like? Most people are destined to go from great love for Tracy and her method to equally great hatred.

If, say, Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels are immediately somehow alarming, Tracy, on the contrary, radiates grace and femininity with her whole appearance.

Muscular guys, yelling at wards, demands to keep a food diary against a slender blonde and “just repeat after me.” Dance moves and something like Pilates against kettlebells, burpees and frankly heavy dumbbells.

We seem to know who seems more attractive. Meanwhile, many who have tried the method otherwise than as "killer" do not call it.

What is the Tracy Anderson weight loss program

Tracy's video and book are available for purchase on her website. At the time of writing, the program consists of:

• The 30-day "Tracy Anderson Method" combines a vegetable smoothie diet and a small amount of boiled chicken with almost 2 hours of cardio and micro-dumbbell exercises.
• The 90-day Metamorphosis course is a little more varied cardio and micro-dumbbell exercises, plus a slightly more varied, but again low-calorie diet.

The product is a bestseller in the US and the UK, as well as almost ... the most popular content on video sites.

In general, the whole process is supposed to be carried out at home, no additional equipment other than a mat and micro dumbbells is required. Well, maybe a blender to make smoothies that you have to eat, for the most part.

Diet Tracey Anderson

What genius actually made this diet, we do not know for sure. But it is very reminiscent of the menu of an anorexic ballerina in the best form, not candy and with Coca-Cola.

For example, here is one day for you:

• Morning: a glass of water.
• Breakfast: sweet potato and milk corn puree. We are not particularly happy - you can take no more than 80 g of both, it is proposed to bake the sweet potato in the microwave, you have not yet earned spices, as well as salt too.
• Next comes the workout. Yeah, 2 hours under the video.
• Second breakfast: blueberry and apple smoothie. One portion. Green tea.
• Snack: a glass of green smoothie - usually celery or "leaf" cabbage, i.e. savoy cabbage. Prepared with water or ice, not fruit as you might think.
• Lunch: "gazpacho" - in fact, tomatoes chopped in a blender with herbs, vegetable puree (carrots, parsnips).
• Snack: green tea.
• Dinner: Broccoli, chicken breast, celery and spinach soup.

• Breakfast: turkey breast or 2 eggs, a piece of fruit (this is 50 grams, not a whole apple).
• Lunch: chicken breast and greens.
• Dinner: protein bar.

If necessary, lunch and dinner can be swapped. Then you will need to spend 10 days on smoothies again. True, apple and beets can now be added to cabbage green juice. Judging by the reviews, the result is quite peculiar in taste, so try to drink in one gulp.

Pros of this menu:

• You will definitely lose weight. Anyone will lose weight on a diet of 700-1000 kcal.
• You will learn to eat vegetables and maybe love them. Hunger is not an aunt!
• You will love green tea. Highly. After all, it is he who will keep your nervous system in relatively decent shape, while a low-calorie diet will undermine its function.

The irony is actually appropriate. Diets below 1200 kcal are prescribed for patients with morbid obesity and are carried out in a hospital. It is immediately proposed to live an ordinary life and expect an unreal surge of energy.

For an ordinary woman, the daily deficit can be about 1700 kcal. This may well turn into a hormonal disaster, menstrual irregularities and constant weakness.

The diet seems to be specifically designed to deprive you of at least some muscle. This, by the way, corresponds to the philosophy of the method. It turns out that almost any woman will receive less than 0.5 g of protein per 1 kg of weight with such a “diet”. And this is the risk of early osteoporosis.

At first glance, there are enough vitamins in the diet (greens), but they have no chance to be assimilated in the fat-free environment that a firm adherence to the method creates. In general, if you follow the diet as described in the book long enough, you can destroy the nervous system, lose most of your muscles and get exhausted.

The only thing that can be said in Tracy's defense is that she doesn't have a special education in nutrition and, suddenly, a certification in fitness training that would be respected enough. In the United States, aerobics instructors can be certified by the ACSM, and admission to the exam is a completed bachelor's degree in exercise science, which Anderson does not have.

Tracey Anderson workout

By themselves, Tracy Anderson's workouts are safe and may even be beneficial to health. These exercises can:

• Increase overall endurance.
• Improve the functioning of the cardiovascular system.
• Improve sleep.
• Help develop the habit of physical activity.
• Strengthen the muscles a little - mainly the muscles of the center of the body. With all due respect, multi-rep swings with dumbbells do not work for all arms and backs.

However, this method is not suitable for everyone. The philosophy of Tracy Anderson mentioned above is based on the fact that muscles are ugly. Maximum - thinness and light relief. That is why the ectomorph Gwyneth Paltrow became the face of the method, and not, say, the endomorph Kim Kardashian.

Tracy states that during training, you need to work only on the stabilizer muscles, so that they then “pull up” the large muscles. But the latter should not be touched in any case, otherwise a terrible pumping will disfigure your figure. And you can’t run - repetitive monotonous movements serve the purpose of pumping. Yes, that's probably why marathon runners are so "big".

In reality, stabilizers cannot pull anything up. Working on them can improve joint mobility and protect against domestic and "hall" injuries. Plus - improve posture (again, due to mobility) and slightly reduce the waist circumference.

Workouts are structured in such a way that they develop predominantly "slow" fibers. Yes, it can give a reduction in volume, but the progress of slow fibers is not endless. There will come a moment when the volumes “freeze”, and the body may even partially lose its elasticity.

Dancers, frankly, look the way they do, not so much because of dancing, but because of the extremely low percentage of body fat. Which is what Tracy advises us to achieve with diet, missing the simple fact that by achieving a body fat percentage of less than 18, so many women will have to contend with extremely low levels of estradiol and may have to resort to hormone replacement therapy.

Are 2-hour cardio sessions combined with a 700-1000 kcal diet safe for health? Most fitness professionals will answer no.

And it's not that everyone is half-educated, and Tracy is in a white coat, but that such experiments cause very rapid adaptation and an almost inevitable collapse of the immune system. The body will definitely try to “save” by simply turning off unnecessary functions. So a constant runny nose is not so much a feature of high-intensity training enthusiasts as a manifestation of your body's rejection of a strict diet.

The complete absence of individual adaptation in the methodology is puzzling. The diet of a person weighing 80 and, say, 62 kg cannot be the same. And the universal recommendations to eat green juice and smoothies, by the way, say quite a lot about the method. Yes, it will help to lose weight, but rather at any cost, and not with health benefits.

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Recently, I was looking for some home exercises and, among others, I saw. Before spending time on training, I wanted to know what it is good for. It turned out that for the past three years, Tracy Anderson has been Madonna's personal trainer. And Madonna's physical form can only be envied! Although Tracy Anderson was discovered by none other than Gwyneth Paltrow, at that time already desperate to return to her previous form after the birth of a child. Now, among the clients of Tracy Scarlett Johansson, who needed to lose weight for the filming of the film "Iron Man 2", as well as Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston and singer Shakira. In addition, Tracy claims that the method she developed allows you to lose 20 kg in 3 months. Impressive, isn't it?

The Tracey Anderson method is based on that attention is paid to the accessory muscles. If you train them correctly, then the structure of the body will not become pumped up, but more miniature, that is, you will get a chiseled "figure of a dancer." The exercises themselves are a mixture of Pilates and ballet. For training with her clients, Tracy uses a simulator that she created herself - the Hybrid Body Reformer machine. It is similar to the Pilates simulator, but unlike it, it affects the muscles from several sides at once. This allows the trainer to create up to 40 new exercises per month. After all, one of the main rules in Tracy's training is the variety of exercises, which needs to be changed from time to time.

Of course, a simulator is good, but not everyone has the opportunity and desire to purchase it. To date, there are several full-fledged workouts according to the Tracey Anderson method in the public domain, which are available to any woman.

Classes with Tracey Anderson

Dance Aerobic and Dance Cardio are dance workouts that Tracey considers the most effective in the fight against excess weight. In addition to the workout itself, there is a 30-minute instruction on the discs with detailed movements, which is certainly a pleasant fact. The training itself is very active, you have to jump a lot. The only negative is that it requires a lot of free space for classes.

Mat Workout - strength training. In it you can find both familiar exercises and completely unusual, but still simple to perform. This approach does not let you get bored or miss the exercise. Very interesting and effective exercises for the legs with a chair, which make up the first part of the lesson. Also, special attention should be paid to exercises for the hands. For all their seeming lightness, the hands are in constant tension, and it is very difficult to complete all the exercises without respite. In addition, even in strength training, Tracy Anderson uses dance moves, which allows you not to get bored.

Recently, the Post-Pregnancy Workout workout has appeared, which includes exercises for the muscles of the abs, legs and arms. The difference from regular strength training is that these exercises have a slower pace and are held to classical music. That is, a baby sleeping in the next room will not be awakened by energetic music and movements.

In addition, new exercise videos are constantly appearing on and on the official Tracy Anderson website (http://action.tracyandersonmethod.com/site). Among them, the 30-minute workout for the abs, arms and buttocks is especially interesting, divided into three parts. It is suitable for those who do not have time for a full-fledged lesson. As well as a recently released 20-minute session designed specifically for Gwyneth Paltrow. True, it seems to me that without prior yoga or Pilates classes, it will be difficult to perform some exercises.

1. To achieve maximum results, you need to work out six days a week, devoting 30 minutes of strength exercises and 30 minutes of cardio (by the way, Madonna spent training 2 hours daily).
2. Cardio training can be varied with running, jumping rope, exercise bike classes or dance DVDs. Alternating classes will lead to greater results.
3. In order not to pump up extra muscles, never use dumbbells weighing more than 1.5 kg.
4. During any workout, you need to perform exercises on the abdominal muscles.
5. Train in a warm room. This will allow the muscles to be more elastic, which means they work better.
6. An important condition is a good accompaniment, under which there will be a desire to move, and not sit still.

In addition, you can not do without a diet. However, the recommendations here are pretty standard. Breakfast: soft-boiled egg with herbs or oatmeal with milk. For lunch - a piece of lean meat or fish with a vegetable salad. Snack - a glass of fresh berries. Dinner - rice or buckwheat with vegetables.

As a "first aid" before the summer, you can use the diet that Tracy advised. It includes 14 servings of baby puree every day, and for dinner the normal food of an adult (though without oil, salt and spices). But this is just a temporary diet for a quick effect.

Of course, in order to achieve the promised result of minus 20 kg in 3 months, you will have to work hard. And yes, it's hard for me to imagine. However, I can say with absolute certainty that the clear effect of training according to the Tracey Anderson method becomes noticeable after a week - it has been verified. It even begins to seem to me that a body like that of Madonna is possible.

In the new section "Hero of the Month" we talk about professionals who inspire us to change for the better. The rubric is opened by star trainer Tracy Anderson, who is responsible for the figures of Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira and motivates thousands of women and men around the world to play sports and lead a healthy lifestyle. What is the difference between Tracy's approach, her main principles and 7 examples of training - in this post.

Tracy dreamed of becoming a ballerina, but due to her strong physique and rapid weight gain in college, she was forced to give up trying to break into the world of professional dance. For several years, Tracy developed her own method of training and nutrition, which helped her get into excellent physical shape: “I wanted to understand if it was possible to help women with a genetic predisposition to be overweight and give them the body of a dancer in return. And definitely it can be done.” Tracy has recorded 160 signature exercise DVDs, opened five fitness schools in America, trained Madonna during her world tour, helped Gwyneth Paltrow get in perfect shape after the birth of her son, and became not only the actress's fitness trainer, but also a business partner.

The essence of the Tracy Anderson method

There are over 600 muscles in the human body. Most workouts involve about 200 muscles, and thanks to the Tracy Anderson program, 400 are included in the work. These smallest muscle groups make the body develop harmoniously and improve towards the ideal figure. Tracy opposes heavy weight training and building biceps, but insists on repeating each exercise many times and changing the training regimen every 10 days. She believes that a woman's body should be flexible and feminine, not beefy. And she built her method on this philosophy - daily workouts and diet will allow every woman to have the figure of a miniature dancer, and not a professional bodybuilder.

The main principles of the Tracey Anderson Method:

Working out with Tracy

Or a 5-minute excerpt with a series of dance exercises from the Dance Cardio program:

Exercises for various muscle groups that need to be performed daily, combining them with cardio loads:

Hand exercises:

Leg exercises:

For the muscles of the shoulder girdle:

For toned thighs:

Tracey about nutrition, harmony with the body, mode and chocolate

“I wake up every day at 6.00 or 6.15 in the morning to spend time with the child before school. I don't eat breakfast right away. Sometimes in the morning I give an interview or communicate with a client who is practicing according to my method somewhere on the other side of the globe. At 8:30 I have my coffee and then my protein shake. At 9:30 it's time for my workout. I can't live without sweets, so if I'm craving a gummy bear or a cookie before a workout, I won't deny myself. But now I still prefer something sweet, but healthy.”

"I don't strive for perfection. But every day I work on something that I think needs my attention. If I do something wrong, I start a mental dialogue with myself, trying to understand what I can improve. We need to listen to the signals that our body sends us, and sometimes take into account the opinion of our loved ones.

“My mother was a ballerina and for a long time I was going to follow in her footsteps.. But then I realized that ballet is my parents' dream, not mine. And I have to stop and think in what direction it is worth developing my talent. ”

“I really do my method 7 days a week.. And I am 100 percent sure that it is important to be focused on your training and follow the direction once chosen. Regular and monotonous work on oneself allows you to create balance in the body in the place where there was once an imbalance. If you try newfangled workouts every time, you will certainly burn extra calories, but you will not be able to achieve the perfect body. ”

“I believe in whole, organic food. I would like all people to understand what natural food is and what benefits it brings to the body, and refuse processed, refined products.

“Soberly evaluate yourself and your body and give up filters and photoshop on photos in social networks. Look in the mirror and admit - I need to work on myself here, here and here. This is necessary for my health and for me. And even if I'm not the same as my girlfriend - this is my reflection. It's me."

“When I was 20 years old, I often thought: “Why is my body not the same as that of a roommate? She can eat anything and stay slim. But then I realized what it means to be in harmony with yourself and with your body. You don't need another person's legs or a friend's thighs to be happy."

« Start healthy habits now because it will get harder as you get older. You need to connect your health with your body in advance.

“I would like people to understand exactly what they want to achieve., and rejoiced at their successes on the way to the intended goal. If they want pumped up muscles, let them pump and be proud of themselves, looking at themselves in the mirror. We are all individuals and deserve to look the way we want.

"When I'm lazy and I feel like I have no motivation to go to the gym at all, I eat a piece of chocolate. And you find what motivates you to exploits.

Material prepared: Nastya Khvatova