Tom Hiddleston is no stranger to putting in the work for a role, but preparing to play legendary mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary in the upcoming Tenzing took his conditioning and running fitness to another level.
To build the ‘total fitness’ required for the role, the 45-year-old says his training included long runs, leg strength, upper-body work, pull-ups, core training and plenty of cardiovascular conditioning. But one particularly brutal session earned an appropriately ominous name: the ‘death run’.
Tom Hiddleston’s ‘Death Run’ Workout
The premise is simple, but the workout is anything but.
Complete 5 rounds. Rest 2 minutes between rounds
10 × 100m Shuttle Sprints
That adds up to 50 hard 100m efforts – or 5km of sprinting in total. Hiddleston completes the workout for time, with the goal of finishing each set of 10 sprints in under four minutes.
And if that doesn’t sound unpleasant enough, Hiddleston has been known to complete the session on thick grass rather than a running track.
Men’s Health’s Christopher Riley joined him for the workout and described it as ‘without doubt one of the hardest workouts I’ve ever done’.
With only two minutes separating each round, recovery becomes almost as important as the work itself.
‘The recovery is almost more important than the work in this protocol,’ says MH fitness director Andrew Tracey.
Rather than pacing around between efforts, Tracey recommends focusing on bringing your breathing back under control and settling into a long exhale before the next round begins.
The workout formed part of Hiddleston’s preparation to portray Hillary, who, alongside Tenzing Norgay, completed the first successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953. His aim was to develop an engine capable of matching the legendary mountaineer’s.
‘I just wanted to be aerobically fit in a way that I just knew, like, my heart was fit, my lungs were fit,’ he says.
Judging by the demands of this workout, it’s hard to argue with the results.
Read our full interview with Tom Hiddleston at this link. You can subscribe to Men’s Health by clicking here.
Kate is a fitness writer for Men’s Health UK where she contributes regular workouts, training tips and nutrition guides. She has a post graduate diploma in Sports Performance Nutrition and before joining Men’s Health she was a nutritionist, fitness writer and personal trainer with over 5k hours coaching on the gym floor. Kate has a keen interest in volunteering for animal shelters and when she isn’t lifting weights in her garden, she can be found walking her rescue dog.
Christopher Riley is the editor of Men’s Health UK.