Polar Bears: From the Journal of Negative Results

For those who will wonder about the constant 'Polar Bears' references in the text to follow, in one of my places of employment prior to graduating university, there was a room marked exactly that. There are very few people who know what it contained. You will not be one of them.

Tracy Anderson is useless.

Yesterday, I had finished the last cycle of my Wendler 5-3-1 and was feeling fairly good at having laid to bed my last deadlifts. I went home, and in the process of searching for an e-book version of 'Black Powder Red Earth', I was somehow smart-advertised into seeing Tracy Anderson's newest abomination: her 'Metamorphosis' DVDs.

I ran out of pictures of Lovecraftian horrors, so here's
Tracy Anderson with current client Paltrow and
ex-client Madonna.

I've seen Tracy before, and every time I do, I feel the same primal, mammoth-slaughtering rage, and I'm not alone. What I'm going to attempt to do in this blog post is to dial that rage back down into a simmer, and see if there's a silver lining to her existence.

When I set out to write this blog, one of the guidelines I gave myself was to always have something useful in every post. This would prevent me from entering the realms of self-congratulatory preening or the useless negativity that seems to inhabit a good deal of the internet. This is not meant to be an editorial blog. It is meant to provide either solutions or a transparent look into the problem solving processes.

Earlier in my career, I stumbled into a research project that resulted in a conference paper presented by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. This was a happy accident: what was meant to be a simple task in scraping HTML turned into a natural language processing problem (to the non-nerdy: I had to teach a computer how to read). Before the paper was even possible, there was a great deal of trial and error involved. The problem I was addressing remains unsolved to this day, and in the process of trying to find a 'better than nothing' solution, I powered through method after method that produced zero results. Like Thomas Edison's fabled failures with the lightbulb, I scrapped many different methods, some of them novel, and others from publications that swore up and down that they worked. Sifting through these methods, I remarked that we could have written a paper about what didn't work. What I didn't know at the time was that everyone in any field of research vocalizes that exact same thought sometime in their career. It's like the 'Aristocrats' of the science world.

But with less Gilbert Gottfried.

Unfortunately, due to publication bias, even though such journals do in fact exist, they aren't nearly on the same level as bigger players in the game. Positive results sell. Negative results get thrown into a rusted filing cabinet in the room marked 'Polar Bears'. If I was following the journal model, I wouldn't touch Tracy Anderson with your 10 foot fitness pole. But this is a blog. I can publish whatever I want, with relative impunity.

I answer to no man.

Tracy Anderson has not produced many first round draft picks for the NFL. This may seem irrelevant; her flailing, low-impact cardio program (whatever that even means) isn't designed around producing an athlete, it mostly seems to revolve around generating Gwyneth Paltrows.

I can't even fit a decent caption
under this ridiculousness.

This becomes relevant because a good indicator of the quality of a training program is in the kind of people it produces. Of the fitness programs I have respect for, there are a lot of bones of contention. Take the more tattooed, stronger and scarier Simmons, Louie of Westside Barbell, for example. Louie  is a regular consultant for UFC fighters, rugby players and 4 NFL teams and uses a fairly well thought-out plan called the conjugate method, which is steeped in heavy powerlifting. In the same territory Simmons, however, we find Marv Marinovich. Marv, as far as his promo material would lead me to believe, eschews the barbell altogether to train people with a combination of plyometrics, bosu balls and Voodoo. In his roster: a UFC fighter, NFL players and other national level athletes.

Both Marv and Louie produce top level athletes. Neither agrees on anything. You could either spend your days trolling internet chat-rooms, getting into arguments on whether or not Polamalu is better off for having Marinovich in his camp or just sticking to his 600lb squat...

Fun fact of the day: for several nanoseconds of every Steelers defensive play,
Polamalu exists simultaneously on every point of the field.

...but you would be wasting valuable time you could be using to train. That doesn't mean you couldn't find a better better way to train. It just means that both Marv and Louie offer replicable ways to significantly increase performance. It might be that some newfangled methodology might create a frightening superhuman capable deadlifting a thousand pounds and beating Rondel Melendez in the 40-yard dash, but for the majority of athletes, the promise of being a Polamalu is beyond satisfactory. 

What's helpful and somewhat comforting to remember with the top being fought over by varied theories on fitness, is that thanks to Tracy Anderson, we have a VERY good idea of what doesn't work. She has produced Gwyneth Paltrow. I could go on and on about how utterly deranged the media's idea of female proportions is, but I'll just leave it at this: Paltrow is sick. Very literally. She has been diagnosed with osteopenia and remarkably low vitamin D levels, which was discovered after a leg fracture. Considering her appalling appearance, I wouldn't be surprised if this is to be followed by a plethora of other health problems. The same way Marv and Louie produce some of the fittest athletes in the world, Tracy has succeeded in taking a healthy individual (and the vanguard of her media campaign) and has ground her into the dirt. I'm very upset at this, and very upset that I had to actually read this in Daily Mail, doubly so because it required me to read the stupidity in the article and the Daily Mail. What made it worth reading through was the content of Tracy's regime:

• Daily weigh-ins
• 90-180 minute workouts, 6 days a week.
• 700 Calories a day and less than 50 grams of protein.
• No lifting anything over 3lbs.

This reads like pure nightmare fuel to me (confirmation bias alert), but it's important. I could go into the medical and psychological details of what this is believed to do to one's body and mind, but I think the broken bones and sickly appearance do the talking for me: we know that this doesn't work. This is important, because it fills our 'Polar Bear' cabinet with a valuable lesson without actually having to become a hip-fracture victim. Tracy has already done that for us at the cost of her client's health.

So there's your silver lining. I haven't fired off a 1000-word vitriolic screed. As angry as I am, I can just take Tracy Anderson's awful training methodology and file it in the cabinet with Zumba and the Shake Weight.