Category: Actor Workouts

Jake Gyllenhall built significant muscle for his role in Prince of Persia which is a popular video game played on all kinds of platforms. In the movie he plays the fit and muscular Prince Dastan. Jake wasn’t huge or ripped before the casting for this movie so it took a couple of weeks to get him to the point where he is now.

We can all agree that he quickly transformed into an impressive physique and did it in a short span of time. He did it through intelligent and focused training as well as eating healthy balanced meals.

What made Jake Gyllenhaal’s workout routine so special for Prince of Persia? He used to be a thin dude, without any serious mass muscle going on. Today he’s ripped and lean with enough muscle to come on as an impressive man.

Jake Gyllhenhaal’s Workout For Prince of Persia was a lot of Parkour!? He was training as much as 2-3 times per day in order to build up a solid foundation of muscle to work with. He wanted to lose fat and build muscle during the months leading up to his role in the movie. If he would have continued this kind of training for a longer period of time he would have surely gone into overtraining mode.

The amazing thing is that Jake had to train Parkour, which is a french martial art of sorts, which is also known as “free running” in common terms. This is the kind of exercise that takes a lot of balance and strength. Parkour involves jumping, running and flipping on normal every day stuff like rooftops, park benches, beams, bridges and all kinds of fun stuff.

Initially Jake Gyllenhaal worked with the Parkour founder David. He was doing lots of work inside a gymnastics room before going out and hitting the concrete, so to speak. Since some of the stunts in the movie involved parkour look-alike moves it was good that he had a solid ground to work with. Jake Gyllenhaal actually performed many of the more dangerous stunts himself, which is a great thing for him, it shows confidence and that he was well conditioned for the Prince of Persia film.

Besides the fun Parkour stuff he also did high intensity workouts 2 times per day, including cardio and weight training.

In the mornings Jake would do hill sprints HIIT style and do some ab workouts at the top of the hill for about 30 minutes… Then at night he’d do his strength workout with regular exercises like pull-ups, push-ups, planks, shoulder and chest workouts, jumping etc.

Adrien Brody is ripped in his role for Predators. His “Predator Workout” wasn’t an easy task to manage. You’ll need to learn a little bit about his workout and see why it will make you ripped too. In recent news it said he gained 25 lbs of lean muscle and lost a fair bit of body fat during his build up for the movie.

A couple of tips for you new to exercising and want that “Hollywood look”, you need to focus more on functional muscle and fat loss as opposed to “building huge muscles” like a body builder. A great method to do this is to build muscle first and gain weight for 2-3 months lifting in the 8-12 rep range to get more sarcoplastic growth.

This is the “bodybuilding rounded look” and massive increases in size for your muscle. Then tone down the workout and start working with 5-7 reps in order to increase in strength and improve your muscle size and density… This should be done for 2-3 months as well…

The next step is to finally “CUT” while adding strength to the built muscles. This requires more focus on the lower range reps, like 2-4 reps and going really heavy. Do this until you reach a frame smaller than you like and go back to adding muscle.

You’ll see that your body totally changes and gets “ripped lean and rockin’” from this kind of workout. I suggest you try a program called Visual Impact Muscle Building, it’s a program I am on right now and it’s working like crazy for me! It’s fun too. This is the kind of workout program and exercise plan you need to follow to look like Adrian Brody in Predators.

He added muscle by eating a lot of food and gaining weight, while training hard at high intensity and low frequency. An example of this is a 5×5 program where you do 5 sets of 5 reps.

Choose 2 Big exercises for your big body parts and 1 exercise for each small body part. So like,

Bench Press, Incline Dumbbell Press, Dips, Military Press, Dumbbell Side Lateral Raises, Rope Extensions, Skull Crushers…

1) Do the first set of 5 repetitions

2) Rest for 90 seconds to 2 minutes

3) Do the second set of 5.

4) Repeat steps 1, 2, and 3 until you’ve finished all 5 sets; then proceed to the next exercise

5) Use a weight that makes it difficult to complete all 5 sets–once you can, increase the weight be 5 percent

6) For the fourth exercise in each workout, do 2-3 sets of 8 repetitions. These exercises focus more on smaller muscle groups that often have a postural or endurance component.

I might also go 12 reps on “side laterals” and calve movements etc.

Get whole body workout and split up your chest, legs and back days!

Also when building muscle, eat a lot of food and go big on the calories, but keep them clean and eat a lot of protein. This is the Adrien Brody Workout! He did lots of weights and running as well.