Movie Muscle Fast-Tracked

Stints in American Football and rugby union helped Cudmore morph into Colossus. Image via 20th Century Fox.

AGE: 33

BORN: Vancouver, Canada
LIVES: Los Angeles
JOB: Actor
HEIGHT: 198cm
WEIGHT: 111kg

Tricks of the trade
The short notice didn’t faze Cudmore because he’s not a guy who lets himself go between jobs. Plying his trade in the action-film industry, he can’t afford to. “It’s hard to bulk up in three weeks, but it’s easy to cut up and make yourself look heavier,” he says. It’s the old paradox: to look like you’ve gained 10kg of muscle, lose 5kg of fat.

Big and ripped
The Colossus name is self-explanatory: Cudmore’s brief was to look “massive . . . really big, broad-shouldered, athletic and defined,” he explains. It’s a tough combo to pull off. “It’s a body almost impossible to carry around all the time when you’re a normal human being.” Not that Colossus fits that description.

Two-pronged attack
Fortunately, besides exceptional genetics, Cudmore had two things in his favour. First, stints in American Football and rugby union taught him how to train heavy. Second, he had the time to work out twice a day.

“If you’re after ‘movie muscle’,” he says, “make sure your shoulders are wide and your arms are shredded.” By doing cardio and resistance sessions on the same day, Cudmore had a red-hot crack at achieving simultaneous muscle gain and fat loss – the perfect recipe for achieving arms resembling sculpted granite.

The puff of legend
“For me, cardio is always in the morning, because I’m not good with any kind of heavy weights first thing,” says Cudmore, echoing the thoughts of most mortals. Pre-breakfast, with only an espresso in his stomach, he would run for 45 minutes (ideally through a natural setting) or perform a shorter skipping session. Rowing is another favourite: “I find it works your whole body and gets your heart racing.”

Heavy lifter
Come late afternoon, the iron called. He would start with a score of big lifts via classic moves: squat, deadlift, bench press and weighted pull-ups. Back in his gridiron days he was doing 225-kilogram squats and 140kg power cleans. While he wasn’t matching those numbers to reprise Colossus, the poundages were still mighty as he powered through a 5x5 protocol.

Photography by Mark Whitehead.

Cut and thrive
Phase II of his resistance sessions saw a shift to intense, circuit-style training, aimed at ripping up. Reps and speed of movement would increase, and “basically you keep going until you can’t walk,” says Cudmore. The result? The actor put on 3-4kg of “lean, lean muscle, which doesn’t sound a lot, but combined with fat loss it can make you look a whole lot bigger and is more important than hitting a certain weight.”

Table tactics
“I think what a lot of guys forget is how important your diet is,” says Cudmore, who would use grains like brown rice as workout fuel but based most of his meals around meat and vegetables. Booze and anything sugary were off limits. While the jury’s out on the question of optimum meal frequency for fat loss, Cudmore applied the idea that chowing down on small meals every couple of hours is the best way to stoke your metabolism.

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