ACTORS ARE OFTEN required to get in shape and put on muscle for roles, especially in the superheroverse. This is true even when you’re playing a superhero like Spider-Man, who is meant to be a bit slight. Over the past decade, Tom Holland has met that challenge head-on, hitting the gym hard and eating way more than he normally would to pack on size.
Speaking to Men’s Health last year, Holland explained that his focus had shifted from looking lean to bulking up in order to fill out his Spider-Man suit. “In these movies the suits are often padded,” Holland said. “Then they’ll add CGI to make the way the padding moves look more natural. I want to add enough muscle that the padding and CGI aren’t necessary.”
Holland told Men’s Health he’s been training assiduously, using a mix of bodyweight work, weighted vest training and traditional bodybuilding to add size without losing the athleticism that underpins the role. At the time, he estimated he still had around 4kg of muscle to gain.
From what we’ve seen in trailers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day and footage from The Odyssey, it looks like Holland has achieved that goal. Here’s everything we know about how he trained and ate to do it.
How Tom Holland trains
Holland tackles an hour-long ladder workout on Monday mornings, kicking off the week with a protocol designed to build muscle across the chest, back, arms and core, all with nothing but basic bodyweight movements.
“Start with one pull-up, two dips, three press-ups, four sit-ups, five squats – that’s round one, and you basically go all the way up to 10, so the last round is 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 [of each movement]. And then you’ll go all the way back down to one,” Holland told Men’s Health. “That is a monster workout.”
Holland has also been known to do a HIIT workout almost daily, with the aim of building a solid base level of fitness while swapping fast gains for sustainable muscle. The workout involves four sets with as little rest as possible between exercises. Here’s the circuit:
- Bear crawls, 60 secs
- Plank taps, 20 each side
- Dumbbell thrusters, 20
- Renegade rows, 20 each side
- Push-ups, 20
How Tom Holland eats
We’ve just showed you two pretty gruelling workouts so you might not want to hear this: Holland doesn’t believe his physique comes from his training. Instead, he thinks the decisions he makes in the kitchen are more important. “My diet is far more important than what I do in the gym,” he told Men’s Health US. “I would say for me to see results, it’s 80 percent diet and 20 percent fitness.”
Holland prefers bulking up for roles than slimming down. But because he typically eats so little, he finds the task of shovelling in extra calories to be onerous. “I really have to think about eating three times a day. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner to me is an extortionate amount of food.”
As a result, Holland doesn’t cut himself off from cheat meals, because he could use the extra calories anyway. “I have ‘cheat meals’ all the time, to the point where I can’t even call them cheat meals,” he says. “They’re just really ‘meals meals.'”
A typical day of eating for Holland is fairly simple. For breakfast, he opts for porridge with fruit and nuts and a shake to add more nutrients and protein. Lunch sometimes doesn’t even happen. “If I’m not bulking, I’ll skip lunch,” he says. Dinner is often a family affair. His brother is a chef, who treats Holland to his new recipes. For an indulgence, he loves In-N-Out burgers. He told MH that his go-to splurge is two Double-Doubles with raw onions – but he doesn’t like the fries. “I don’t understand why their fries taste like cardboard,” he says.
So it seems like this is another case of the secret behind why a guy looks great being that he trains hard and eats well. Big surprise. Perhaps the takeaway here is more useful for those of our readers who are on the shorter side. Holland is only around 5ft7, and for him, the key to bulking up was simply eating more than he was used to and training enough to build muscle. So there’s your advice: keep on eating.
