EXCLUSIVE: Henry Cavill On Getting Into Superman Shape

Man Of Steel star Henry Cavill has told SFX how he built his body up to Superman proportions with a punishing, year-long training marathon.

"When I first got hired I met a chap called Mark Twight, who was the guy who trained me, the founder of Gym Jones and a legendary mountain climber in his own right. This guy’s an absolute legend. He gave me some foundation training. It was literally pieces of paper and he just said ‘Do this…’ I think I had about two months of training by myself in the UK, just so I could be prepared for the training he was going to throw at me when I arrived in Los Angeles. So I did two months there followed by four months in LA and the four months in LA got really intensive."

The Tudors star trained hard to sculpt that Kryptonian physique.

"Every day. Sunday was a proper day off. Saturday was like go for a run or a walk – a brisk walk. Then training every day for six months of shooting. It was a year of training, effectively.

"It actually becomes more fun. In the beginning it’s miserable, because you’re breaking boundaries and you’re really pushing yourself to reach a certain endurance and power level, so you can start lifting the heavy stuff to put on the big mass. And that’s miserable to get to that stage, because you’re constantly pushing your body’s cardio limits, way beyond what you thought they could do. And then you start doing the really fun stuff like going for big heavy single lifts. Afterwards you’re exhausted but you feel amazing because of it. Whereas after rowing for however long on the rowing machine and blasting yourself you feel miserable no matter what – you don’t feel like you’ve gained anything. Towards the end of training it was fun. We would go into the gym, myself, Mark and Mike Levins the assistant trainer, and we just enjoyed it. Some days we crushed each other and really worked very hard and other days we just went ok, let’s do some simple bodybuilding stuff and just feel good about ourselves and go home."

An inspiration to us all.

Cornetto, anyone?

Nick Setchfield

Man Of Steel is released by Warner Bros on 14 June by Warner Bros

Nick Setchfield is the Editor-at-Large for SFX Magazine, writing features, reviews, interviews, and more for the monthly issues. However, he is also a freelance journalist and author with Titan Books. His original novels are called The War in the Dark, and The Spider Dance. He's also written a book on James Bond called Mission Statements.