I’ll talk about Creed III’s training in a second, but I wanted to ask about the CrossFit training prep you did on Without Remorse and Creed II. What did that entail? Was it complexes, Olympic lifts, high reps? Or was it more hybrid training?
It was more hybrid training for Creed II; I did a lot of CrossFit training for Without Remorse. For Creed II, we wanted a lot of boxing, since that’s the discipline. A lot of cardiovascular work. Going into the movie there was a lot of weight training. After that, a month or so before filming, we did a lot of boxing and conditioning work to get camera ready.
What do you get out of doing functional work like kettlebells, medicine balls, or ropes? I know they help function, posture and mobility—but how do they show up aesthetically?
Conditioning—they’re all conditioning to me. Getting that heart rate up—that’s what’s most important and is why I program that work. It’s good to help with movement. But for the look, it’s conditioning.
How’d you change it up for III?
For Creed III, we started with weight training so we could put muscle on and wake his body up, but smaller increments, because the pre-production he was doing as a director was serious. I tried to throw in everything possible. There’d be weight training, and in the evening, cardio. Mid-day, we’d do boxing. We got his body doing everything before filming since he was going to do everything during the film.
What sort of weight training were you doing? Barbell work, high reps, volume training?
I do a lot of drop sets. I love drop sets. Sometimes we do volume. If I’m not doing just drop sets, I do very very high reps. And not lifting so, so heavy, but moderate weight, so you can still feel it.
Why drop sets? [With drop sets, a lifter performs a rep to failure, then drops the weight by 10%, then lifts to failure again—then again with lower weight. It’s great for muscle growth.]
I like the breaking down of the muscle. For the muscle to grow, it needs to break all the way down. I like to do a lot of sets; I do drop sets on almost everything except for triceps. I don’t worry about them on small muscles; it’s overkill on triceps.
Was there a specific shape or aesthetic you were going for here with the Creed character? He’s a boxer, but he looks like a lifter. Was there a different aesthetic for Jonathan Majors’ character?
The storyline is: Mike’s coming out of retirement. No retired boxer is going to look like they’re fighting regularly. But I wanted him to be bigger than in II; my goal is to make the actor look better than in the last one.
For Jonathan Majors’ character, he’s coming out of prison, where all you do is work out. I wanted to make sure he looked like a boxer. When he got to me he was in good shape; I just needed to make him be in great shape.
Sami Reiss
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