Movie Star Training for the Average Joe

We’ve all seen them; the Hollywood A-listers who transform their physique from Pee-Wee Herman to Schwarzenegger-esque in a matter of months. We yell foul, scream drugs, and dismiss them as privileged show ponies. But deep down inside we wish that we could achieve what to them seems so effortless.

The truth is that almost anyone can get in great shape within six months. If you’ve been training for some time, you can definitely ramp things up to hit your peak in 26 weeks. You just have to know what you’re doing.

Enter Nick McKinliss. Nick is a movie stuntman, personal trainer, and strongman who has trained and shared screen time with some of the biggest stars on the planet. Here’s an expert at getting people in peak condition fast.

When Nick’s only got a matter of months to get an actor into peak condition, every exercise needs to count. That’s why he builds their program around compound moves that will produce the greatest anabolic benefit.

Here are four keys from Nick’s training arsenal that will get you looking your best...

Walk into any gym, and you’ll see the bench press areas crowded. Then look across to where the pull-up bars are. My bet is it’ll be deserted. If you want to add impressive size fast, do the opposite to what the rest are doing. That means you should train for width rather than depth.

And that means focusing on lats rather than pecs. It also means hitting shoulders with flyes and lateral raises to bring out the width in your deltoids.

The best exercises to create a movie-star v-shape to the upper body are lat-pull ins and pull-ups for the lats.

When Nick trains an A-lister for a big-budget movie, he cannot afford to run the risk of injury. So, he makes sure that every rep is performed with the utmost attention to detail. That’s what you need to do, too.

Too many guys use sloppy form in an attempt to lift heavier weight. Nick advises dropping the weight and correcting the form. He also advocates using the following intensity enhancers to push your training to the limit . . .

• Supersets
• Drop sets
• Rest pause
• Slow negatives

According to Nick, most guys don’t appreciate what intense training looks like . . .

“Most people really don’t know how hard they can work so I try to bring out the beast in them!”

Be Progressive

Every workout you’re either going backward, standing still, or moving ahead. To move ahead you simply have to do more than you did last time. Set weekly goals for weights and reps and be absolutely determined to smash them. Then reset your goal to achieve even more next time.

On a movie set, there’s never enough time. To keep his actors in great shape, Nick has got to get them in, have them pulverize their bodies, and then get them out. And that is precisely how you need to train, too.

Forget those 90-minute workouts where you spend half your time staring at your Smartphone. Get yourself psyched to hit your muscles with everything, push until there’s nothing left in the tank – and then get out. You should be able to get the business done within 40 minutes.

Here’s a plan you should try:

The first thing an actor will do when he lands a physical role is to hire a trainer, The second thing he’ll do is to hire a nutritionist. Of the two, the nutritionist is going to have the biggest impact on how he looks. After all, it doesn’t matter how he trains; if he’s not getting the right nutrients at the right time, the body will have nothing to work with.

When it comes to packing on mass, like Tom Hardy did to go from skinny Private John Janovec in 1998’s _Band of Brothers _to play the title role in Bronson, actors have got to eat an uncomfortably high amount of calories. To gain that 42 pounds of muscle for Bronson, Hardy consumed about 4500 calories every day for 5 months.

Then a few years later when Hardy had to whittle down his beefy Brosnon look to one that more resembles an ultra shredded Bruce Lee in 2011’s Warrior, Hardy cut way back on his calories, incorporating intermittent fasting and training early morning in an empty stomach to maximize fat burn.

To constantly provide their muscles with a stream of nutrients, most actors eat multiple times per day during their move prep. That’s what Michael B. Jordan did in his prep to play Adonis Creed in the first Creed movie. Even though he was already in pretty good shape, he needed to pack on lean muscle. In an interview with E! Online in 2015 he said the following …

Literally in the middle of takes, I would just be eating food. Chicken and rice and broccoli—a lot of it.

The bottom line here is that movie stars know that the foundation of building muscle fast is to eat at least a thousand more calories than your maintenance level daily. Then, to get ripped, the key is to create a daily caloric deficit. Putting their energies into eating a clean, low-carb diet while training to maintain muscle size is more beneficial for getting ripped than doing endless cardio.

There are really no secrets to movie star transformations. Every actor who has ever got himself into incredible shape for a role has gotten there by virtue of damn hard work, perseverance, and dedication. And they have done it using the principles laid out in this article. But there’s one final ingredient that has helped them achieve their goal - a timeline.

When you have a timeline, everything becomes more urgent. Imagine knowing that in 3 weeks you are going to be filmed with no shirt on so that the whole world can critique your body. That would be a pretty powerful motivation to train as if your life depended on it!

You can benefit from this by putting yourself on a timeline. Set a date, 26 weeks from now and make it your filming day. Book in a photoshoot or arrange for a friend to take pictures of you. If you’re at the level of competing, you can also enter a physique competition. These things will provide a similar deadline to a looming movie shoot, providing daily motivation to slay your workouts and stay on track nutritionally.