This is the question I get more than almost any other, and the honest answer disappoints people. They want a split, a programme, a supplement stack, some secret. What they get is: I lift four days a week, I go to bed early, and I eat the same eight things.
The reason it disappoints is that people assume the training is about how I look. It mostly isn't. Looking a certain way gets you in the door once. What keeps you working is being able to show up at seven in the morning and still be functional at six in the evening, on the fourth take, in a room that's been at ninety degrees under lights since lunch. Training, for this job, is about reliability. Aesthetics are a side effect.
The point is stamina, not shape
A shoot day is a long, physically odd day. It is not one sustained effort — it's a series of short, intense bursts separated by long stretches of standing around going cold. You warm up, you go, you stop dead, you wait forty minutes, you go again. Your body hates this. It's closer to being a substitute on a football bench than to anything you'd design a workout around.
So the things that actually help are unglamorous. Conditioning that means my heart rate comes back down fast. Enough leg and core work that holding an awkward position for a long time isn't the thing that ends a take. Mobility — genuinely, boringly, mobility — because a lot of what gets asked of you is held, static, and at angles that have been chosen for a camera rather than for a spine. I've written elsewhere about how a professional set actually works, and once you understand the rhythm of the day, the training you need becomes fairly obvious.
What doesn't help: chasing a personal best. Nobody on set cares what I bench. A heavy week leaves me flat and sore, and flat and sore is a bad thing to be when you're being paid to be responsive. I train hard enough to stay strong, and I stop well before the point where it starts making tomorrow worse.
Sleep is the actual performance-enhancing drug
I mean this with total seriousness. If you gave me a choice between six extra hours in the gym a week and one extra hour of sleep a night, I would take the sleep instantly and it would not be close.
Everything this job asks of a man's body runs downstream of sleep. Recovery, mood, focus, patience with people, and the specific physiological thing that is my entire professional liability — all of it degrades first when I'm short on rest, and all of it degrades before I notice. The bad days in my career have almost never been gym days. They've been days after a flight, days after a late night, days when I told myself five hours was fine because it used to be.
Nobody is going to post a video of themselves going to bed at nine-thirty. It is still the single most professional thing I do all day.
The rest of the recovery stack is equally dull. Water. Sunlight in the morning. Not drinking much, which was a hard adjustment and is now just how I live. There's no hack in here. It's just the tax you pay to be dependable.
The diet is boring on purpose
I eat well because eating badly makes me feel bad, and feeling bad is expensive. That is the entire philosophy. Protein, vegetables, rice, fruit, coffee. I cook most of it myself. Persian food when I'm home and want to feel human about it.
I don't do anything extreme before a shoot beyond eating light in the morning, because being uncomfortably full on camera is its own kind of misery. I'm not doing dehydration protocols. I'm not carb-depleting to look shredded for a day and then being useless for a week. Some people do. It shows, and not in the way they think — you can see it in the eyes long before you'd see it in the abs.
I take no supplements worth mentioning and I'm not going to pretend otherwise so I can sell you some. If someone in this industry with a body like mine is telling you a powder did it, they're selling the powder.
The part nobody posts
The mental-health load is heavier than any lift and it gets almost no airtime, so here it is plainly.
This is an industry that runs on bodies and is consequently full of people who have gone slightly insane about their own. Body dysmorphia is not a fringe problem here; it is closer to the default condition. I have watched genuinely beautiful people describe themselves in terms I wouldn't use about an enemy. I've done a version of it myself — standing in front of a mirror at 6'1" and a perfectly reasonable weight, doing maths about whether I'd shrunk. Your body is your income, so every ordinary fluctuation in it reads as a financial threat. That is a genuinely poisonous way to live and it creeps up on you.
What helps me: training for what my body can do rather than what it looks like, having people in my life who never mention it, and — the unromantic one — actually going to therapy. The pressure specific to being a man in this business is something I've written about at length, because it is the thing most likely to break someone, and it is the thing nobody screens for.
On the shortcuts
I'm not going to lecture anyone. Adults make choices and I've made plenty that other people would raise an eyebrow at.
But I'd be lying by omission if I wrote a piece about training in this industry and pretended the shortcuts don't exist. They exist. They're common. They are, in some corners, close to assumed. And they cost people — not in some abstract morality-tale way, but concretely: hearts, heads, moods, sleep, and in more cases than anyone admits, the very thing they were taken to protect. I've seen careers get shorter, not longer, because somebody tried to buy insurance against a bad day.
If you're starting out and you feel you have to, ask yourself who benefits from you feeling that. Usually it's not you. The performers I know who are still working comfortably in their thirties are, almost without exception, the boring ones. Early nights. Same meals. Nothing exciting to report.
That's the routine. It's not content. It's just a job, and this is how I stay able to do it — which, in the end, is the only fitness goal I have.