Meet Madonna’s personal trainer, Nicole Winhoffer

Madonna’s personal trainer is half-Filipino and proud of it.

In town to show Pinoys how the Material Girl sweats her way to that tightly toned, size-2 body, Nicole Winhoffer, 29, is also visiting her parents: Filipino mom Mariels Almeda is the president of IBM Philippines; German dad Ernest Winhoffer is a dentist.

“I was born and raised in New York, but my family moved back to Manila three years ago,” Nicole says. “So now I have to take a 20-hour plane ride all the way to visit them!”

Winhoffer is taking her first vacation here in six years — no days off with Madonna! — and told fashion designer Rhett Eala, who’s a close family friend, that she wanted to do a class with Cosmopolitan (which featured her as one of Cosmo’s 2013 Fun Fearless Female awardees) and Women’s Health magazines.

The result is “Be Fit for Love: The Winhoffer Way to Strength and Beauty,” a workout that Nicole specially designed to showcase the unique approach to fitness that has earned her celebrity clients like Rachel Weisz, Stella McCartney, Josie Natori, Abbie Cornish, Mya, Trudie Styler, Andrea Riseborough and photographer Steven Klein.

Fulltime employer Madonna, we hear, flies her first-class to wherever she needs to go. After all, Winhoffer is the creative director of “Addicted to Sweat,” the workout program featured in Madonna’s Hard Candy Fitness studios worldwide. In 2012, they released a four-disc DVD workout series with the same name to make Winhoffer’s Madonna-inspired workout available to the masses. In it you learn how to sculpt the fit but feminine physique that both Nicole and Madonna prefer.

“I don’t like this built bod,” Winhoffer admits. “I like to have these long, lean bodies.”

We experienced exactly what she meant when we did “Be Fit for Love” at Onelife Studio in Makati, which, I have to admit, is the toughest workout I’ve ever attempted, but also loads of fun. Set to thumping dance music that got our energy going — Disclosure, Blondie and Bob Marley are but a few of Nicole’s favorites — we warmed up with a small exercise ball, passing it between the legs like basketball players do, and lifting it behind us to work out the triceps.

Then came some hardcore mat work. Many of Nicole’s abdominal and leg exercises are done from a plank position, thereby engaging the core while you try to lift your limbs from every angle, with 20 repetitions for each movement — not easy to do when you’re a writer whose heaviest lifting consists of toting around a laptop.

I was gratified to see that I wasn’t the only one sweating and breathing hard. Myrza Sison, editorial director of Cosmopolitan, joked that she had an ambulance stationed outside just in case; Lara Parpan, the Women’s Health editor in chief who does Iron Man triathlons, said her legs were shaking after the workout. When we took a group picture with Nicole afterward and she asked us to form a heart with our fingers, fashion designer Rajo Laurel wryly observed that his hands were shaking as well.

We then decamped to nearby health food joint Juju Eats for our recovery meal: a Love Salad Nicole concocted with grilled ingredients like zucchini, chicken and asparagus, veggie patties, roasted pumpkin, shiitake mushrooms and romaine lettuce with a sesame-miso dressing. It was yummy, filling, and hit the spot perfectly after a good workout.

The next day my buns were in agony. I’d never experienced sore glutes before, but it’s par for the course with Nicole, who’s been called the “Booty Builder” by her clients. Actually it wasn’t just my bum but also my quads, triceps, and many other muscles I can’t name, mainly because I never knew I had them. I am hooked, though. Myrza said that Nicole was inquiring about the possibility of bringing her workouts here… I certainly hope that she can bring her holistic brand of fitness to the Philippines in the future.

Here, Nicole dishes on the best way to blast belly fat, cheat foods and what Madonna’s really like.

How did you get into fitness?

I was a professional dancer growing up, so when I was younger, the book Matilda, by Roald Dahl, I used to think I was her. I had this imagination and thought that I could move things with my body, and I became infatuated with it.

I started training in dance. I had this amazing mentor and ballet teacher and learned how to condition my body through dance and music. Then I went on to do Broadway, so it brought that performance aspect into it of stage and acting, costumes and makeup and make-believe again.

All throughout my career — I’ve done three Broadway shows (Wicked, 42nd Street and Bombay Dreams) — I was always asked to train the people in my cast. They’d always ask me for new exercises and I was always intrigued by it. I studied eastern medicine as well, so I do Reiki and chakra work and yoga. Just like yoga, through stillness you achieve your full consciousness. Mine is through movement, so it’s almost like (Jerzy) Grotowski in acting — very much repetitive movement. I’ve combined so many different things from different cultures, from food, to fashion, to music into my work. It’s not just fitness for me, it’s really the whole thing.

Describe your workout regimen. 

We’re so stressed — so much high levels of stress and toxins, especially for women. We have 80 jobs: we have our work jobs to make money, we’re wives, we’re mothers, we’re best friends… and there’s so much stress and responsibility that we fail to give to ourselves. We also develop toxins in our body: weight gain and inability to sleep.

What is your diet like?

Everything stems from stress, so a lot of the diet I follow and advocate for my clients is a low pH balance, so it’s not so acidic — lots of avocados and whole grains. Of course you can have your cheat meals now and again — alcohol or take your pan de sal.

How often can you cheat?

For me, I really have to pay attention to my schedule. Like I traveled here, it took two days, I taught classes, I trained, so I really had to pay attention to what I eat and I’m very disciplined. But I did go to Privé one night, and it was fun! Whenever I visit a country — like I’ve been to Berlin, or Portugal or Brazil — I like to hang out with the people who are in the country because it gives me information about how to make my class, what music to play, what their energy is like, what do they like? So I went out to be among my Pinays. And they have amazing rhythm, they love to dance, and they always have a smile, and they always call me ma’am: “Yes, ma’am.  Ma’am sir.”

What’s your favorite cheat food?

My favorite cheat food would have to be really good French fries, a toasted bagel with Président French butter and Himalayan sea salt, or a donut.

How did you meet Madonna?

When I was a professional dancer — the dance community is very small — and she was about to go on tour with “Sticky & Sweet,” which was 2009. And her dancers needed training. She travels a trainer for herself and for her dancers. I met her, she had auditions and she chose me to train her dancers, so I was on the road for her for only three months and after that tour ended I continued to be her trainer. She asked me to train her fulltime. And we’ve been working together five years.

How fit is she? 

She’s very fit. We work out two hours a day, six days a week.

Can you tell me something about Madonna that most people don’t know?

She’s just so disciplined and just such an amazing person with a really big heart. She’s beautiful, and my biggest mentor.

Can you describe how a typical workout with her would go?

The workout I do with her is just like the workout I do with any of my clients, like in the class today. I usually put together about 400 movements in a one-hour class, and I focus on muscles that we don’t use in everyday life.

Everything we do has a forward momentum, like we speak forward, we walk forward … we really lose our brain-and-muscle connection by not walking sideways, or walking backwards, or reaching backwards. Through our habits of everyday life we really lose sight of the fact that there’s so much a human can do, that our body has over 700 muscles, and that we’re just infinite beings. So my workout focuses on all these different muscles, and high repetition. Muscle memory’s very important to me in order to condition a body. And really working hard, pushing people, torturing them (laughs), and allowing them to push past their potential.

What are Madonna’s favorite exercises?

We love to work the butt. The butt and the abs, I would have to say, are our favorite exercises.

How do you keep her womanly shape instead of bulking up?

A lot of it has to do with the types of angles I use in the workout. If you look at any normal gym that has the weight equipment, people only use it in one way. And they add a lot of weight. What that does is bulk the muscle. So my movement never repeats itself too many times in one direction. I do many different angles all around the body. So I take from the best sports — like swimmers, they have amazing arms. I take from ballerinas (their leg exercises). I take from long-distance runners. They’re very lean because they work out for three hours at a time. Horseback riders have amazing arms because they’re always engaging in a certain way. So I really study sports and, having my dance background, I piece together the perfect combination of a workout based on movement.

How come Madonna hasn’t come here yet to perform? 

I don’t know.

Do you think you could convince her?

I want to, it would be amazing.

For those of us who don’t have the time to work out two hours a day, how long should we work out to see results?

Typically you should strive for one hour, five days a week, for one month. Dancing’s great for cardio and toning. I would try to do also some Pilates, which is really great for women’s midsections.

What’s the best way to address most people’s problem area: the stomach?

Sugar. Sugar is the devil. You want to stick to grains that are darker in color, like brown rice. Your body burns glucose first, so if you don’t have glucose in your body, your body will burn fat. So the problem is in our diets: we already have fat on us, and then we eat sugar, and our body just burns the sugar, and the fat stays. If you cut sugar out of your diet, then you will go right to the fat. And you want to just be really kind to your body and pay attention to what you’re eating. There are so many bad additives and chemicals in our food now.

I like that you use everyday objects like a towel and chair in your workouts, which everyone has at home.  How did you develop these methods?

People get bored, and a lot of people who don’t have a dance background don’t know how to perform an exercise without something in their hand, and having a connection with a foreign object allows your brain to focus and connect to muscles. Like soccer players with soccer balls, or a baseball player with a bat, it gives a person something to touch, something to associate with distance and with weight. And I notice that people get faster results with a prop rather than just with their free body weight.

What is your definition of a healthy, beautiful body?

One where the skin is glowing, where the woman is just super-confident with herself so that she really embodies her power and she doesn’t base her confidence off of, superficially, what she looks like, but more about her inner power, her aura and energy vibration. I think that’s a really beautiful woman.