Human condition: The body you desire...

...may already be yours, says Pat Norris. You just have to learn how to use it. James Sherwood gets in shape

Pat Norris, balletic septuagenarian, is demonstrating the principle of her Norris Technique of body alignment. Women, she believes - "and women are always antsy about their thighs" - will never trim their thighs through exercise. She stands up and shows me a stance that pushes out the front of the thigh muscle. With a minor adjustment of stance, the muscle vanishes and the thigh almost miraculously loses inches.

"Magic, my dear, has nothing to do with it," says Norris. She's not an illusionist, but Norris does believe that correct posture - a word she dislikes because it sounds too Lucy Clayton - can completely change the body shape. Shoulders that are hunched daily over a period of time will result in double chins and short necks. Arched backs and prolonged bending from the back will result in a pot belly. "You don't want to get rid of your stomach," says Norris, "you just want a place to put it."

Norris's mission is "to help you to get and to keep your body in good order without letting it dominate your life". Her technique, she says, is not a short cut. "It is a straight line. Something so simple and so lucid that anyone can do it and master their own body."

Over the past couple of years, Norris has built up a portfolio of prestigious corporate clients with businesses that demand personnel have good body alignment. The staff of London store Dickins & Jones, who are required to stand for the whole working day, use the Norris Technique. The women in the Harrods designer room and South Molton Street boutique Browns retain their racehorse posture with the help of a Pat Norris private seminar. Wella, Vidal Sassoon, L'Oreal and Toni & Guy all use the Norris Technique as an integral part of their in-house training programme.

Norris argues that most of us suffer from unaligned bodies, like trees growing crooked rather than erect. The mistake many people make about alignment, she says, is that by arching the back and splaying the feet, you are standing correctly. "Wrong," says Norris. "Your abdominals are the power-base of your body."

The gamine Ms Norris, less than 5ft tall in her black, platform heels, is a svelte American expatriate. Pushed into ballet at an early age, she worked as a dancer and choreographer with the great names, including Martha Graham and George Balanchine. Yet her technique was developed despite, rather than because of, her ballet training.

"Ballet is an arduous, difficult art-form designed to entertain kings," she says. "It has all the trappings of beauty, so people think it is good for you. Ballet wasn't designed to be good for you. You couldn't do anything worse for body alignment. I made a decision to go beyond ballet and explore using the body in a positive way."

Norris moved to Britain in the Seventies, with her British husband. During this time, she honed her technique, taking private clients such as Baroness Thyssen, but she wanted to bring the message to "real" people. Her book, Getting It Straight, published in 1986, introduced her to a wider audience, but at the height of her public recognition, one of Norris's two sons was tragically killed. She immediately stopped teaching, and it was three years before she went back to body alignment.

When she did, she began private classes for corporate clients. Using her performing talent and natural charisma, Norris teaches the basics of body alignment over three classes. It can then be maintained with minimal daily effort. "People don't need one more complicated thing in their lives. What I do is not going to save the world, but it is going to save a lot of people a lot of problems."

Converts to the Norris Technique are growing with such speed that she is now ready to train an elite team of understudies. "I want to spread the word so everyone can benefit from body alignment. What I don't want is other people to take the Norris Technique and adapt it. Not in my lifetime."

For information, call 0181 673 5185.