At 50, the self-described “wild and wacky movement guru” is feeling better than ever — and fired up about protecting her legacy: “I’m tired of the box that society puts me in.”
There’s something primal about Tracy Anderson. You can feel it in the way she moves across the studio, like she’s channeling ancient energy directly from the Earth’s core through choreography. Indeed, her signature creation — the Tracy Anderson Method — often feels less like a workout class and more like an otherworldly ritual (albeit one set to thumping pop music). No cues are given. No words are spoken. Participants train their gaze on Anderson, as she fluidly pulses her famously sculpted arms up and down, forward and back, their own limbs responding in kind. As the class transitions to the ground, Anderson kicks, twists, and unfurls her body, constantly shifting to keep mind and muscles engaged. It’s an intricate dance — an offering to the gods of sweat and stamina.
But there’s also a primal quality to the way Anderson moves about the world. She is a woman of instinct. Earlier this year, when the Pacific Palisades went up in flames, she and her family fled their Brentwood home, seeking refuge on the East Coast away from the smoke and ash. “If I was born 100 years ago, we would have packed up the wagon and been on our way because that land wouldn’t have served us anymore,” she says. “It would have been devastated, and I just had that sense.” She can get a bit whimsical like that. As she tells me about her home in Sag Harbor, New York, where she’s Zooming from, Anderson explains she’s always felt a pull to the coastal enclave: “There has to be something energetically here that I’m just intuitively drawn to.”
In a historic house that once belonged to a whaler (“I’m this huge animal lover, so it’s disturbing,” says Anderson, a vegan and a “triple Pisces”), the fitness icon has been reflecting on two big milestones. Last month, she celebrated her 50th birthday with a raucous bash at Clemente Bar in New York’s Flatiron neighborhood. “I feel more wise. I feel more clear. I feel more energetic,” she says of entering a new decade. “I feel more heart-full. I feel more body-full.” Last year, she also celebrated 25 years of the Tracy Anderson Method, the fitness modality she started developing in 1999. (Her eponymous company launched in 2006.) It’s this occasion that has prompted even greater reflection on her legacy.
“I’m tired of the box that society puts me in,” Anderson says. “I wanted to make choreography accessible to everyone, and I got put into the ‘fitness’ space by default.” Her Method, what she calls her life’s work, isn’t just exercise — she considers it an art form.
Anderson is serious about her work, but she is less serious about herself. Clad in a soft pink-and-blue-striped flannel shirt, her eyeglasses perched atop her head, she looks more like the small-town Midwest girl she once was, rather than the fierce fitness icon and multi-million-dollar entrepreneur she is today. In conversation, each of her replies feels like a mini journey, full of colorful detours and tangents that never quite lead where you expect. She knows that words like “kooky” are sometimes used to describe her. And, to her credit, she embraces it. “In everything I create, the question is, ‘How do I make the weird seem normal?’” she says.
“Beyond the physical results, there’s a strength and mindset that come from doing her Method that I haven’t found anywhere else,” Gwyneth Paltrow says.
Anderson credits her creative path to the women who raised her. Born in Noblesville, Indiana, Anderson is the eldest daughter of a professional dancer mom and an artist-entrepreneuer dad. She decided to follow in the footsteps of her mother, who also owned a studio, at an early age. “I was marinated in the arts my entire childhood,” she says. Her grandmother, Mary Lou, was an avid volunteer for organizations like the American Cancer Society and the Red Cross, and she instilled a spirit of service in her grandchildren. “She cared a lot that we participated in a better way forward,” Anderson says. “She wanted us to be an advocate and an ally.” Though her grandmother died in 2020, Anderson is convinced her spirit lives on in her miniature Pomsky, June, one of Anderson’s seven dogs (she also has three standard poodles and three cavapoos). “When I saw this little blue-eyed dog, whose name was June, who was born in June like my grandmother, for some reason I was like, ‘That’s my grandmother reincarnated!’”
Anderson left Indiana at 18 to attend the American Musical and Dramatic Academy on scholarship in New York City. But she soon found herself putting on weight — a no-no for any would-be prima ballerina. Anderson says she tried everything to shake the extra 40 pounds from her 5-foot-tall frame. She sweated through step aerobics, but that only bulked up her thighs. She performed the Hundred hundreds of times in Pilates class, but that only shortened her trunk. Nothing gave her the long, lean dancer’s body she wanted — and, frankly, needed in order to meet audition standards — so she gave up on her professional dancing dreams. That’s when a new dream began to take shape. “When I gained weight, the advocate in me started to bubble up,” she says. “How dare you tell me that I don’t look the right way to perform my art form? This is wrong, and I’m going to do something about it.”
At the time, Anderson was married to her first husband, the late basketball player Eric Anderson, with whom she has a son, Sam, 26. (She also has a daughter, 12-year-old Penelope, from another marriage, and she wed businessman Chris Asplundh in 2021.) Eric was playing with a rehabilitation league in Puerto Rico due to a back injury, and while there, Anderson met a doctor who focused on working small accessory muscles to alleviate strain on bigger muscle groups. Intrigued by the approach, Anderson began developing her own system to continually challenge these muscles — what is often referred to as “muscle confusion” — incorporating choreography with light weights into what would eventually become the Tracy Anderson Method.
“People want to steal my work and just call it Pilates, because they know that they can use his name, and I’m like, ‘Wait, he didn’t create those moves at all.’”
In 2001, she recruited 150 women for a trial run of the Method, with one admittedly superficial metric for success: “I wanted to see if I could create movement that would make people really tiny,” says Anderson, who reports that all the women lost weight. In the glaring light of 2025, Anderson readily owns that this initial goal hasn’t aged well. “Back then, everybody wanted to be Kate Moss, myself included,” she says. “I let go of that goal through my very first study… I won’t participate in that kind of messaging anymore.” Today, Anderson says her mission is “to create balance where there’s imbalance” — and that any weight loss from practicing her Method is just a byproduct.
Despite any misgivings she has about the marketing now, “Tracy Anderson will make you skinny!” was indeed a powerful advertisement for her first set of dance cardio DVDs released in 2003. If women craving washboard abs hadn’t heard of Anderson by then, they certainly would by the late aughts, when she took on her first A-list client, Gwyneth Paltrow, who gushed about Anderson on Oprah in 2008 and became an investor in her company that year. (Most recently, Anderson teamed up with Paltrow’s goop Kitchen to create a Green Goddess Crunch Salad, for which you’ll need no fewer than 30 ingredients if you want to re-create the recipe at home.)
“Tracy’s Method has been a constant in my life for nearly 20 years because it continuously challenges me and evolves, no matter how long I’ve been doing it,” Paltrow tells TZR over email. “Beyond the physical results, there’s a strength and mindset that come from doing her Method that I haven’t found anywhere else. She pours so much of herself into her work, and her dedication keeps me coming back — not just as a client, but as someone who wholeheartedly believes in what she’s created.”
“Back then, everybody wanted to be Kate Moss, myself included. I let go of that goal [of thinness] through my very first study. I won’t participate in that kind of messaging anymore.”
Their personal and professional relationship has been just as pivotal for Anderson. “At 50, it meant a lot to me to have a woman like Gwyneth sitting next to me at my party,” Anderson says. “We come from wildly different backgrounds. She’s 5’10" and a glamorous Academy Award-winning actress, and I’m not even 5 feet tall and this wild and wacky movement guru.”
The woman who brought jade yoni eggs to the world has clearly been an influence in other ways, judging by the almost dizzying menu of products on Anderson’s website. In late 2023, she debuted HeartStone, a $299 set of two “weighted energy trainers” beset with rose quartz, which “elevates your workout beyond what you can see,” according to the site. With weight training becoming more of a focus in the fitness space — especially among perimenopausal and menopausal women — Anderson earlier this year released a limited-edition set of six weights, made of wood and ceramic and printed with a tree design drawn by her father, that range from 1.7 to 20.5 pounds. Dubbed Growth Rings, the initial release, priced at $3,499, sold out.
Though Anderson no longer takes on direct personal training clients, that hasn’t stopped her from garnering a cadre of celebrity devotees who take classes at one of her eight studios in Los Angeles, New York, London, or Madrid — where dues run $900 a month — or from the comfort of their living rooms (OK, let’s be real, their tricked-out home gyms). Tracee Ellis Ross and Victoria Beckham are among a few of the bold-named fans. Jennifer Lopez tells TZR that Anderson has been “instrumental in keeping me in the best physical condition of my life, allowing me to continuously challenge myself and maintain a toned physique.” And a whole new generation seems to be discovering the Method, if all those Gen-Zers posting “I tried it” videos to TikTok — #tamily — are any indication. “She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s about to do the hardest workout class of her entire life and it’s gonna make her question her whole existence,” devotee Kiara Kacvinsky posted earlier this month.
At this point in her career, you could understand if Anderson wanted to lean on her library of routines and let her studios more or less run themselves. But coasting is not in her DNA — she still creates eight hours of new choreography each week to serve her beginner, intermediate, and advanced classes, as well as other programs. “I think it’s endured because of my skill,” she says of the Method’s longevity. “I don’t consider it to be balanced, but the amount of hours that I have obsessively poured into my skill set is alarming.”
Protecting that body of work — from people who might want to copy and cash in on it — has become the fight of Anderson’s career. Her company holds 28 international patents for various workout props she’s invented, but safeguarding her intellectual property, the essence of her Method, has proven more difficult. “I’m actually fighting for my choreography. I’m fighting for artists anywhere,” she says. In this way, she is not unlike young creators on TikTok, who have sought to assert ownership of their viral dances, or pop choreographers, who have increasingly pursued copyright protections for their routines in recent years.
“It doesn’t matter if you do choreography on a stage, in a TV show, in a classroom, or you allow other people to perform it for a fitness experience,” she continues, gesticulating to emphasize her point. “Choreography is choreography, and it’s an art form that comes through me, and it needs to be protected. If we don’t protect people’s creativity — especially with AI coming — we’re screwed.”
“The amount of hours that I have obsessively poured into my skill set is alarming.”
Anderson recently took her battle to the courts. In 2022, her company sued former employee and The Sculpt Society founder Megan Roup for, among other things, copyright infringement. Last year, a judge dismissed the copyright claims, and Anderson and Roup later settled out of court on breach-of-contract claims. Anderson, however, plans to keep fighting for copyright protection of her choreography and filed an opening brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this past February.
For Anderson, the constant stream of seeming copycats can feel demoralizing. “I’m tired of waking up in the morning [and seeing] a class with some kind of fusion name, and they’re literally just doing my content without giving me credit, because I’m a woman, who is still alive.” She sees parallels between her experience and that of Joseph Pilates, whose successors have also gone to court over the right to use his name, exercises, and images after his death. Anderson has immense respect for Pilates’ method and considers him a kindred spirit, yet she stresses that their approaches to the body are very different. She finds it curious, then, that so many try to conflate the two.
“People want to steal my work and just somehow call it Pilates, because they know that they can just use his name, and I’m like, ‘Wait, he didn’t create those moves at all,’” Anderson says.
Anderson has actually been trying to think about work less these days. Or at least that’s the goal as she contemplates the next 50 years of her life. “I want to be very present with my family,” she says. Her husband and kids seem to be a grounding force in her life — and she knows just how lucky she is that her adult son wants to spend time with them at all. “He is 26, so he doesn’t have to be with us. He chooses to be with us,” she says.
“In everything I create, the question is, ‘How do I make the weird seem normal?’”
But somehow, the Tracy Anderson universe keeps expanding. A few weeks ago, she debuted her newest fragrance, the eye-catchingly titled Spring Break Sweat, perhaps to be worn at her series of retreats and “ViTAlity Weeks” — essentially, wellness spring breaks for adults. She also has plans this year to open new studios in Miami, West Palm Beach, and Bozeman, Montana. Yes, Montana — Anderson has a home there and describes it as the place she’s most relaxed. “That’s probably the only place that I really play,” she says. “I like to be on four wheelers. I like to set up a little station and paint. I like to take June out and pretend like I found her on a hike in the woods.”
She’s a big reader in her spare time and especially enjoys the work of ancient Persian poet Rumi. Anderson gets reflective about her 25-year journey from small-town Midwest girl to fitness titan, thinking about one of his poems, in particular. “I wish I would have discovered ‘The Guest House’ at 25, instead of so many years later,” she says. “I let a lot of people in. I was very, like, arms wide open. I let a lot of people come in and sweep me of my furniture.” But as Rumi suggests in the poem: Maybe those people were making room for new joys.
At Anderson’s 50th birthday party, her 79-year-old mom was among those who danced until midnight. It’s easy to imagine Anderson, still spry 30 years on, doing the same — arms pulsing up and down, forward and back, following the pull from the universe. “I know what dance has done for me my whole life,” Anderson says. “Creating choreography, creating art, for me, is something that I’m just called to do.”
Photographs by Ben Fink Shapiro
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