If you don’t know who Tom Hardy is yet, you will shortly…as he is playing the sadistic villain Bane, along side Christian Bale in the $250 million Dark Knight Rises.
You can get the ultimate Tom Hardy Workout Program for building muscle here.
But before Hardy was even on the Hollywood radar, he had already transformed his physique by adding over 23 pounds of muscle for the MMA-themed movie Warrior.
To put in perspective how impressive this transformation is, here is a picture of Tom Hardy before he started eating small animals for snacks. Below, you will find the Tom Hardy workout for his movies Bronson, Warrior, and Dark Knight Rises.
Tom Hardy Workout – Bronson
Prior to Warrior, Hardy had put on a significant amount of weight play infamous prisoner Bronson.
“For Bronson, I put on about 7lbs a week — with no steroids – by eating chicken and rice, which was my staple diet throughout the day. Then I’d have a pizza, Häagen-Dazs and Coca-Cola. So not good stuff, but I had to put weight on.”
To do this, he consumed 5000-6000 calories a day, a diet solely focused on gaining mass. As a result, you will notice he had some fat on him. It was all part of the plan.
His workout routine, developed by U.S. Marine Patrick “P-Nut” Monroe, included the following exercises: push ups, shoulder flys, dips, and bridge. Hardy performed these exercises in a circuit multiple times daily.
According to P-nut, “Throughout the day you need to send constant signals to your body, so that it adapts in the direction you point it in. It’s better to do 10 press-ups every hour than 100 in a single burst.”
Obviously, this hard-gain approach wouldn’t work for Warrior, which required a fighter’s physique.
Tom Hardy Workout – Warrior
For Warrior, Hardy again gained mass, going from 162 lbs to 185 lbs at 5’9′ by following a very strict diet – basically chicken and broccoli, supplemented with chicken and broccoli. For dessert, he had beef and broccoli.
“It was a lot of protein,” Joel Edgerton (Hardy’s co-star) said. “They were bringing us like a plate of chicken or beef every three hours.”
Hardy explains that he had to add muscle without adding fat…”but it wasn’t fun.”
His workout routine included weight training, boxing, muay thai, and grappling, sometimes for 6-8 hours a day during filming. Here is a video of Hardy’s fight training for Warrior:
Dark Knight Rises
To play terrorist Bane in Dark Knight Rises, Hardy again had a plan.
He intended to portray the character as “more menacing” than the version of the character in Batman & Robin and gained an eye-popping 30 pounds of muscle for the role, increasing his weight to 198 pounds (90 kg).
Hardy tends to utilize chicken and rice as his mass-building staples, supplemented by vegetables if he’s trying to gain muscle, or high calorie foods like pizza is he’s trying to gain weight.
The Bane diet also focused on chicken and rice but was supplemented with protein shakes and vegetables… and small humans from the looks of things.
In an interview, Hardy said, “I feel heavy. This size is not real. I only feel strong in short stints of times. If I needed to get across the room and throw someone through a door, I could do that, but…as soon as I’m done shooting, I’m dropping the weight.”
The details on the workout routine are slim at this point, but likely include a combination of weight training, with some fight training and choreography.
Hardy described Bane’s fighting style as “Brutal. He’s a big dude who’s incredibly clinical. It’s not about fighting. It’s about carnage. The style is heavy-handed, heavy-footed, it’s nasty…He is a terrorist in mentality.”
Producer Emma Thomas says that Bane “is an interesting match for Batman after the Joker, who was just purely about chaos and playing with people. Bane has a plan.”
Can’t wait to see it.
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Update: Visual Impact Muscle Building is the best program I’ve seen to get a Tom Hardy Workout. If you want to add muscle safely and effectively, I recommend checking it out. It will teach you how to get the celebrity “shrink wrap” effect, shown below.
Check out the difference from the before shot and the body he has in warrior- thats amazing! Thanks for sharing.
I know, that’s about 20 pounds…diet must have been ridiculous. That’s hard to do without gaining fat. Nice website by the way!