L'Elysée muscle son périnée ( dixit Le Monde.fr)

Une fois n'est pas coutume je transmets une info plutôt ridicule,paru dans ELLE, mais qui va faire le tour du monde, ça commence par le TIMES, le Guardian...en France, le Post..
La coach de Nicolas Sarkozy dévoile ses secrets (Canalstars.com)
Julie Imperiali a gagné la reconnaissance en devenant la coach perso de Nicolas Sarkozy, après avoir exercé ses talents auprès de Carla Bruni... Elève studieux et déterminé, à ses côtés, le Président s'est transformé physiquement, en réussissant notamment à perdre quelques kilos en trop.
La jeune femme a dévoilé les petits secrets de sa méthode (appelée Tectonic) à Elle, expliquant que le truc, c'était de faire travailler les muscles du périnée : "C'est la base sur laquelle s'appuie toute la construction, sans quoi la maison s'effondre."
De quoi attiser la curiosité des Anglais et notamment du Times, qui a appris que cette technique ne jouait pas uniquement sur la santé du corps et de l'esprit, mais qu'elle avait également un impact sur la vie sexuelle de ses pratiquants. Non pas qu'Il en ait besoin, bien sûr. Un joli coup de pub ! (JG)

From The Times
January 20, 2009
The woman who got President Sarkozy's pulse racing (no, not Carla Bruni)
The French President's personal trainer has helped him to lose 9lb, and look sleeker
Julie Imperiali, the fitness coach of the French President and his wife
Charles Bremner
The gates of the Élysée Palace usually open only for limousines. The presidential staff park their vehicles outside the small courtyard on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. But several times a week, they make an exception and the tall wooden doors swing open and a chic young woman drives on to the gravel aboard a motor scooter. Julie Imperiali, 26, comes to give Nicolas Sarkozy his workout, applying her patent method to make him stretch, sweat and run. Putting the President in touch with his pelvic floor, the former dancer and gymnast sculpts his shape and boosts the famous energy that earned him the name “Speedy”. She has been doing the same for Carla Bruni, the recently installed Première Dame, for the past four years.
Imperiali says that in ten months she has helped Sarkozy, a teetotal chocolate addict, to drop nearly 4kg (8.8lb) and two trouser sizes. “His body has radically changed,” she says. “He is a dream pupil. He is always ready and motivated.” Her method - focusing on the perineal muscles at the bottom of the pelvis - not only improves posture and delivers a healthier body and mind, but it also improves the sex lives of all her clients, Imperiali claims.
“Sexual relations are better if the male perineum is in good shape. The problems of premature ejaculation are often due to the perineum,” she says. Pilates and yoga also stress these muscles as part of the body's core, but working the perineum has long been a French favourite, especially for women after childbirth. “The Anglo-Saxons are a bit prudish about this and say that they don't know what we are talking about,” Imperiali argues.
The presidential trainer, who is as svelte and self-possessed as you would expect, described what she calls her Tectonic method while sitting in the flat near the Eiffel Tower that she is turning into an exercise space. Building on her success among a circle of wealthy clients, she has just started an internet (www.tectonicworkout.com) business with Marc Imperiali, her businessman husband.
The former French aerobics champion and dancer met him when she was working at the Ritz hotel health club, a favourite spot for fashionable Parisians. That is also where she ran into Bruni in 2004. The supermodel-singer and former foe of monogamy was intrigued by the big “balance ball” that Imperiali uses for her sessions.
“Something clicked. We got on and she hired me,” Imperiali says. “Carla is une bonne vivante. She loves beer. She smokes. She likes good food. But she obviously has an irreproachable constitution. I didn't have to change much in her diet. She felt better and better. She had a back problem and we fixed it. Sometimes we were doing five days a week with 90-minute sessions.” Bruni brought Imperiali to the President after the couple's lightning courtship and marriage last winter. Super Sarko had made running the image of his presidency when he jogged out of the palace in shorts accompanied by François Fillon, his Prime Minister, on the day that he took office in May 2007.
A running president was a French revolution and Sarkozy was widely mocked. No French leader had ever proceeded at anything beyond walking pace. No one could imagine the stately Charles de Gaulle or François Mitterrand breaking into a sweat. The images of the pint-sized Sarkozy pounding the pavements did not work because he looked silly. His [posture was awkward and he was thick around the middle. Last winter, as part of a makeover of the presidential image, Sarko kept the T-shirts and shorts out of sight and began jogging in the seclusion of the sumptuous high-walled garden between the palace and the Champs Élysées. Since last April, Imperiali has been running alongside him. She has also changed his eating habits and broken his evening chocolate consumption, she says. “He was un sportif, but he didn't have the right methods. He used just to run and run and run without being aware of his body.
“We worked with a cardiometer and reworked his way of running. Now he runs faster and more solidly. He is doing about 10kph in the garden. I see him between two and four times a week. We run for 15 to 45 minutes then do muscle reinforcement and stretching. He doesn't talk much about work. He needs to blow off the stress. We talk about everything and nothing, sometimes about intimate matters.”
The President, who is known for his hot temper and impatience, is all charm with Imperiali. “I had imagined him très speed and he certainly is but at the same time he is very human and kind. He can be impulsive too.
“Sarkozy is the first French president to have a personal trainer so I am very honoured. The first time I arrived at the Élysée, I was super nervous. I asked my husband to take me in the car like a little girl going to school. Going into the palace in a tracksuit and trainers worried me. Passing through the Republican Guard in the corridors was surreal. Now I drive into the courtyard on the scooter!”
With Bruni, Imperiali coaches indoors, working out to soft music. “Carla says ‘Julie, I can do my gym alone but I will never do it so well as with you',” she says. Imperiali confirms the general view that the Bruni-Sarkozy marriage has calmed the “Hyper-President”, who was in a bad state after Cécilia, his last glamorous wife, walked out on him in October 2007. “Carla has a very healthy way of life. She is not a jet-setter. They complement one another. Sometimes he says to her ‘Thank you for Julie'. You can feel the complicity, the way that they take care of one another.”
Imperiali, who grew up in a small town on the edge of the Alps, puts everything down to her dedication to fitness. “I have lived and breathed sport since I was a little girl,” she says. Her method of “Tectonic Wellbeing” is a mixture of diet, stretching and other sports techniques. “My work is 60 per cent psychological and 40 per cent sport. It enables you to reconnect the head with the body.
“The perineum is the key to the method. It was taboo for a long time. It was something for pregnant women. But the perineum is the floor of our body and if it's not kept in shape it is as if you had a house with no floor. You can become incontinent, your organs descend and you have bad posture. By becoming conscious of your perineum you become aware of the interior of your body.”
So how do you get in touch with your perineal muscles, I ask with Anglo-Saxon modesty? “You have to imagine that you have a burning need to urinate and hold it in. That works for men as well as women,” she says.
Imperiali, who took a sports degree at Lyon University, says that you should be constantly aware of these lower muscles. “You should hold in the navel so that the four walls of the house - the abdominals, the laterals and lumbar muscles - are really rigid. You should base your breathing on this and little by little it becomes automatic. Your waistline shrinks and it's as if your wearing a corset.”
The right food is also crucial, says Imperiali, who, like Sarkozy, is a non-drinker. “But I am married to a Belgian, who is a big eater and drinker. I am in favour of excess. I learnt from him and my clients that you have to make do. Idon't forbid anything. Everything is a question of balance. I advise my clients to dissociate things and put others together. They should eat pasta with vegetables or meat with vegetables. Junk food horrifies me. It is better to eat a protein bar than a ham sandwich.” And you should drink a lot of water and, when you over-do it, take a day off food to detox.
Imperiali charges her clients £100 to £150 an hour. She won't name any others apart from Karen Mulder, a Dutch former supermodel, but talks of other “members of the government”, business people, lawyers, and Qatar and Saudi princesses. Most clients are women and she sometimes travels with them on holiday. “I give eight or nine sessions a day. I allow half an hour to get from one to the other by scooter or motorbike. That's enough in Paris,” she says.
She is now expanding the internet business, started last March, which is aimed at people who cannot afford personal trainers. You sign up for €1 a day (90p) and Imperiali prescribes a 20-minute routine and eating programme and supervises your progress. “It's not a slimming concept. It's about wellbeing and it's real coaching,” she says. “You choose between programmes for sculpting your body or losing weight. We have 200 internet clients now and it turns out that most of them want to sculpt.”
Her method is not sweat free. “There's no gain with no pain. But you don't have to torture yourself to get into shape. The beauty of my method is that it can be adapted to everyone.”
La coach de Nicolas Sarkozy dévoile ses secrets (Canalstars.com)
Julie Imperiali a gagné la reconnaissance en devenant la coach perso de Nicolas Sarkozy, après avoir exercé ses talents auprès de Carla Bruni... Elève studieux et déterminé, à ses côtés, le Président s'est transformé physiquement, en réussissant notamment à perdre quelques kilos en trop.
La jeune femme a dévoilé les petits secrets de sa méthode (appelée Tectonic) à Elle, expliquant que le truc, c'était de faire travailler les muscles du périnée : "C'est la base sur laquelle s'appuie toute la construction, sans quoi la maison s'effondre."
De quoi attiser la curiosité des Anglais et notamment du Times, qui a appris que cette technique ne jouait pas uniquement sur la santé du corps et de l'esprit, mais qu'elle avait également un impact sur la vie sexuelle de ses pratiquants. Non pas qu'Il en ait besoin, bien sûr. Un joli coup de pub ! (JG)