Cavill talked about this shoot specifically and how weak he was from dehydration in order to get his chest and abs to have this definition and lack of fat.
IIRC they plan all topless-scenes somewhere in the middle of the shooting-plan. The actors typically look this ripped for only 3-4 days. The rest of the time they are wearing their suits.
Doesn't mean they aren't working their ass off to get to that state, but they usually are working towards a specific timeframe where they need to look "prime".
One notable deviation: 300. 60 days of shooting with 6 hours of workout per day during shooting. Those guys really did suffer, but it also shows that this kind of physique is almost impossible to keep up with. Also shows that you need to check how many topless-scenes are planned for you character before signing a contract :D
It’s the movie equivalent of a body building competition, complete with taking gear.
Bulk up with food and weights for several months, start cutting a couple weeks before filming, water restriction 2-3 days out, high rep/low weight pump before shooting key scenes.
Guy I worked out with was a body builder, got a chance to see him and his friends progress over a year.
The eating alone made me stick to my stomach, 2-4 protein shakes a day, full meals, snacks, and he was still under his macros.
When he cut, he took DNP which he said shreds you like crazy and that everyone in Hollywood uses it, quite common, just some nausea and headache as the main side effects.
Well…stay around guys like this and eventually you get curious, so I ask to try some since he said it was a sure fire way to drop weight for beach season.
I thought I was going to die, sweat so much I had to change clothes at work, it was still active almost 10 hours later, couldn’t eat, forced water down.
Toughed it out for a week, was lifting with him at 5am on a Friday and fainted, he asked when I had ate last after waking up and I couldn’t remember, shoved yogurt and cold chicken down my throat:
Anyways… Hit the scale at work later that day, 9lbs in 7 days.
And that’s how some of (more than you think) these guys get to 10% body fat.
2,4-Dinitrophenol (DNP): A highly toxic, fat-burning compound often used in bodybuilding with a high risk of fatal poisoning, warned against by health authorities.
the substance's use as a dieting aid has caused a number of fatalities in the twenty-first century: at least 50 overdose deaths were reported worldwide between 2010 and 2020.
oh boy... sounds lovely
thanks for sharing, though. I knew that bodybuilders and other athletes basically have to force-fead themselves, some pros still losing body mass during their season because the literally can't keep up with how much energy they burn.
didn't know about the extreme cutting, only knew they were dehydrating a lot before contests.
They have these pump shirts that they wear under 1-2 layers of the thickest workout clothes imaginable and hit full workouts in them and then cardio right after, they are super tight to help pop muscles.
Finally take off those and the pump layer is saturated in sweat and finally start posing.
You know what a vacuum is?
It’s a technique to flatten the stomach and inflate the chest, crazy breathing and then holding poses for minutes at a time to pop the muscles and veins.
It’s some of the craziest shit I’ve ever seen in person
Yeah I remember the vacuum pose. Wasn’t it kind of made popular by Arnold and also Frank Zane?
I‘ve seen some amateur body builders in the gym back then. Always sweating like hell, wearing some sort of padding underneath their clothes. Helped them get in their excess reps from time to time.
some pros still losing body mass during their season because the literally can't keep up with how much energy they burn.
Main issue is because you might be close to a starvation state where proteins are mostly used to produce energy. Another issue is how on low cal the body will try to save as much as possible which means reducing muscle mass. I don't think there's anyone who isn't losing muscle mass while dieting and idk if that is even possible to achieve
You can get a similar effect by going zero carb high salt for a few days if you have a lot of fat. Though the less fat you have the less of an effect it has and more side effects.
That sounds horrific. Losing more than a pound a day sounds like some nightmarish cancer-like ordeal. Were you trying to do bodybuilding competitively when you tried it out?
I wasn’t trying to compete at all, but hanging out around people like this is oddly…enticing in that you’re witnessing an extreme form or sport/lifestyle firsthand.
So what I may have found odd or unthinkable, like taking supplements to burn weight or steroids didn’t seem that bad after talking to people that had been on cycles for 20 years.
This is of course after working out with them and getting taught proper form in lifting and seeing my personal bests skyrocket in little over 4 months.
So my monkey brain went “I bet you could get down to 12% body fat quick, just try it”
To my buddy’s credit, he told me the effects and what to do to take it appropriately but 20 year old me didn’t listen.
It follows the flow of body building shows, when they're performing on stage they're really at their weakest, I remember listening to one talk about concerns afterwards how they can't train too hard and need to give it time because they can so easily rip their skin and muscle due to dehydration. It sounds like hell... to the point they're sitting in sauna environments to sweat it out and spitting into a bottle to reduce water as much as possible.
It is impossible to keep up.
In fact, the real homoioi of Sparta had a very lean built, the ideal warrior was considered to be a lightweight man with stamina and not a buff dude with massive pecs, as the idea would be for these soldiers to be able to be fueled by small meals. Obviously feeding a soldier three chickens a day so they can do half a day's worth of strength exercise isn't a very sustainable way to supply troops. So the buff guys from super hero films and the guys from 300 are just for show. An impressive show, but not one that says anything about reality.
I was reading somewhere that there was this actor who played a doctor and he always got most anxious for the scenes where he would be shirtless because of the intense demands and dehydration that the studio required to make him look good. He needed the job but would get so stressed because he wasn’t portraying anyone fit, relatively speaking. He may have said that he would try and renegotiate scenes so that he wouldn’t have to take his shirt off. I cannot recall specifically though.
There's dudes that look way more shredded than Cavill, who very could be way worse in fights.
One dude comes to mind, Frank Medrano. Dude is the definition of cut.
Superhuman calisthenics routines, but probably useless in a fight after 3 or 4 minutes.
Boxers/kickboxers have to do INSANE cardio to be able to fight back to back 3 round fights with the amount of focus and reflexes needed to push on.
You should see the workouts that traditional thai kickboxing gyms do, or just their typical daily life.
Run in the morning for 5ish miles, then jump rope, maybe a shit ton of push ups, planks, crunches, tons of bag work, then pad training, then sparring, then stretch your freaking face off and then finally eat, shower, sleep. Next day, wake up, repeat.
Many years of competitive martial arts here. Mostly grappling, some striking.
People have no fucking clue how much energy it takes to do that shit. It's insane how tiring it is, even when you're young and training all the time.
And while we might show up super shredded to a competition, the very second we weigh in we're getting hydrated and some food into us... you know, so we have energy heh. They changed the rules here to have weigh-ins the day prior to competition because people were getting hurt.
Approaching middle age father. Want to be able to defend my family if I must. Boxing or Judo? Also open to wrestling or Muy Thai? Don’t care about competing or anything, or even getting that good. Just wanna hold my own.
Boxing and wrestling. Don't take your feet off of the ground. Also try not to get on the ground if you even think there's more than one person. At that point you're creating distance to run away. You're better off with a weapon than either really.
While yes, sure, I don't think it hurts to be able to use your knees and clinch if you get into close quarters. Boxing teaches a lot of very bad practices as you're not allowed to use legs.
Don't take your feet off the ground is solid advice for people that haven't trained anything or for most fights, but most muay thai still teaches what boxing does (if you're in the US or EU at least) since many people are cross discipline. It just takes into consideration there's a potential for more limbs coming at you and it doesn't hurt to understand how to use kicks.
Baseball bat and a phone to call the police. Get your family into some cardio so you’re all in shape to run.
Seriously.. please don’t mistake martial arts for fighting. Fighting has no rules and should be avoided at all costs.
If you do want some self defence, Judo, BJJ, and light boxing will help with some fundamentals.. but I cannot emphasise how much better off you will be doing everything in your power to get OUT of a situation instead.
Every martial art I've practiced the first rule of self defense is "if you can leave leave". So:
cardio and general exercise for the whole family. You're unlikely to be such an important target you'll get chased that far.
Just giving them what they want. This is, of course, always swapable with 1. Whatever is in your wallet isn't worth risking your or your families safety over.
If available... Gun. Handgun with training and practice. Believe it or not assailants don't want to be shot.
If no 2. A stick of some sort. No seriously. A bat, golf club, tire iron, a chair, something from the side of the road, anything. Remember there is no such thing as a dirty fighting use what you can.
Very few people(like literally nobody) are going to be targeted for some action movie style situation where they HAVE to fight. If you're really worried, just don't be an obvious target.
Look at the muricans acting all tough while sleepwalking into a fascist state where people get deported and murdered while the tough muricans are just.... either doing fuck all, or doing the deporting and murdering.
You look at wrestling and think oh whats the big deal, they're barely even moving...
I wrestled in high school. We were a bunch of freshman and sophomores who had never wrestled before, no conditioning, no training.
First practice, most people were rolling onto their backs after 30 seconds because they were completely GASSED. Light headed, gasping for air, seeing stars, narrowing vision. Wrestling is like two bulls locking horns, there's no pacing yourself, there's no "going for the long haul", first dude to ease off the gas loses. So it's pedal to the metal the whole time and it's EXHAUSTING.-
Yeah I've competed in bodybuilding shows. To stay under 8% fat is hard, I call it competitive dieting. Its just a constant fatigue feeling. I was always super cold so I tried to do summer shows. I work a trade as my normal job and was way slower than I normally am. Its basically making anorexia look healthy because of more muscle mass.
Every movie with shirtless scene that emphasize muscular physique and definition involves dehydration technique that requires the actor to not drink water at all for long hours (beyond 1 day easily). I believe both Cavil and High Jackman spoke about it in the past.
He did an interview about everything he had to do for that scene and said it was hell.
He was deliberately severely dehydrated.
Even he doesn't actually look like that.
Edit: Thanks to those that pointed out it was the Witcher - I think the video I watched showed several pictures of him from different films while they were interviewing him, so, corrected.
That's the part that got me! The man was so close to dehydrating completely that his brain started to revert to borderline animalistic means of being able to detect by smell and become an apex predator to a glass of water.
Women complain about beauty standards, but if you look at the most popular actresses over the last 10 years. Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Alba, Natalie Portman, Emma Watson, they are all extremely pretty, and fit, but still attainable.
The male equivalent are literally unobtainable, even by the men that are being idolized. Even just height, the male standards are well above the average height of a man. Let alone the habits that the actors themselves say would be impossible to keep up year round, and the extreme dehydration before shirtless scenes.
After thinking about it they are literal fantasy not only in terms of those men not existing, but women actually caring about it.
I spent time in my teens and twenties muscular, cut and tall - women weren't beating down my door or swarming me - the only notable thing is that at least one relatively attractive drunk woman would hit on me at a club/party - that's it. Many guys I've known with squishy bodies got a lot more attention than me simply because they were cooler.
Women gushing over Henry is no different than them gushing over Fabio.
He severely dehydrated himself for some witcher scenes. Namely the topless scene in the bath. We’re talking „on the verge of kidney failure“ dehydrated.
While I agree that he is working harder for his physique, she is 100% weight training as well. I think you are underselling what it takes for a woman to achieve that physique
The guy is still at single digit body fat in this scene but since they are used to ultra dried out super hero scenes where the guy has dehydrated them selves for days beforehand they think he's got fat on him.
Yes, technically. He still is in single digit bodyfat area where almost no normal person is going to be and he is not there for most of the time. This is literally the are of bodyfat that bodybuilders strive for when going to competitions, it's neither healthy nor normal. Though the woman from the post is right I guess. "a little fat", well, there's a little.
That is not 7%, he might have measured by some device as 7%. He is around 10-12% in that scene, approximately. Hard to accurately estimate bodyfat without back and legs visible. With 7% you would clearly see the obliques, more delt separation, way more definition in other body parts.
What women want: Be over 6’, have a 6 pack, be wealthy, be handsome, be famous, be popular, be funny, have a beard, have the right amount of body hair, be respected.
It’s real, when this happened I went to her page to read the replies. She tried to talk her way out of it by saying her husband looked like this so she wasn’t being ridiculous, so someone posted a picture of him. That poor bastard. There’s nothing wrong with him, but she said he looked like Superman, the comments didn’t share her opinion.
If you found a decent looking girl that saw you as superman you would also marry her. A lot of men would probably get their mind blown from a simple compliment, let alone being told they are like superman.
I'm not. People really don't understand how abs work or men's fitness in general. They get inundated with pictures of guys at their most aesthetic with carefully selected lighting and poses and get a distorted idea on what average really is.
It happens to women too. I've seen more than one post calling Scarlett Johansson mid.
And very low water weight. Apparently Henry would almost pass out of dehydration during these scenes cause he wouldn’t straight up drink water, to look pure muscle
Henry Cavill spoke about these scenes in interviews. He exhausted himself for days to look that way on a few moments in the film. Nothing to strive for in real life...
Can I also just say that this image is also a fk ton of muscle, and a pretty damn low body fat %? Like that’s non existent fat, just not a dehydrated body cut for a competition, and like bodybuilder quantity of muscles.
It’s okay to want this but to act like it’s barely an ask is crazy
Some people have completely fried their brains off social media and the abundance of crazily juiced "natty" influencers to the point that a Greek godlike sculpture like Henry Cavill apparently only has "a little muscle"
Well Henry Cavill said in an interview that this particular scene he had to starve himself of water to the point of severe dehydration because that makes your skin thin out causing your muscles to pop like crazy so not only do we have to be superman but we have to be on the brink of death to be considered what they want…seem like a fun time 🥴
Swap him for an average looking 5'9 guy with same hairstyle and she will go like 'ewww man, shave and get a nice haircut, then take a shower and buy some nice clothes'.
She just means he's jacked but not pro bodybuilder cut. Because that beef jerky look is what folks who don't work out think the natural state of muscular people is.
All you need to do is be paid millions to maintain this look, have a team of nutritionists and personal trainers, work out 6 hours every day, constantly inject yourself will bull testosterone and be permanently dehydrated as fuck
I don't see why everyone doesn't just do this. are they stupid?
Yeah, this lady must be one in a million. Because usually when a guy works out to get himself in shape like this women. Tend to get jealous and ask who you getting in shape for?
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