Whether she’s staying active day-to-day or preparing for a role, Charlize Theron has prioritised movement throughout her life.
Currently, the Oscar-winning actress’s routine consists of Pilates, two 90-minute power yoga classes a week and spinning up to four times weekly, according to Women’s Health Australia. ‘[Pilates has] totally changed my body,’ she said.
‘It’s total immersion in who you are, what you do and body awareness. It relieves tension but builds muscle and strength, and it gave me the platform on which everything else could be built,’ she continued to RSNG. ‘Yoga has been good for me in similar ways – it’s real inner strength.’
More recently, she’s enjoyed spending time on the tennis court. ‘My mum recently got me to play tennis, which I wasn’t good at but really enjoyed,’ she told WH Australia. ‘If you do exercise you enjoy, you’re keeping yourself fit without even realising it.’
The South African-American actress and producer developed an early connection to movement. ‘I was a ballerina for 12 years,’ she told RSNG, ‘so I’m very attracted to physical roles.’
Charlize Theron//Instagram
Alongside role-specific preparation, Charlize trains with PT Fedele De Santis. ‘I have been working with [him] for many years now,’ she said. Often, the goal is ‘to be strong but graceful, because a lot of the moves I want to pull off are based on flexibility mixed with power’. Some of their strength-training exercises have included glute bridges, lateral raises and exercise-ball chest presses.
Despite her impressive athleticism, Charlize has admitted that recovery is no longer as quick as it once was. ‘The thing that really bums me out is that I make action movies now and if I hurt myself, I take way longer to heal than I did in my 20s,’ she told Allure. ‘I wish I had my 25-year-old body that I can just throw against the wall and not even hurt tomorrow. Now, if I don’t work out for three days and I go back to the gym, I can’t walk. I can’t sit down on the toilet.’
Charlize Theron’s Atomic Blonde workout and training routine
Preparing for the physically demanding role of undercover MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton in Atomic Blonde required dedicated and varied preparation. To get ready for the film’s fight sequences, Charlize worked with a variety of coaches, with a particular focus on martial arts.
‘I had eight trainers checking in with me at various times,’ she told RSNG. ‘They helped me get to the level I needed to for those fight sequences. Each brought something different to the way I was going about building strength and working martial arts into routines. [Over] three months [I trained] for four to five hours a day.’
She noted the physical and mental demands of martial arts. ‘You need a base of strength… and [it sets] the mind so it can fully activate the body. Martial arts definitely opened up pathways to tap into energy and power that I never knew I had.’
Pilates shared similar qualities. ‘The only other thing I can relate that to would be something like Pilates,’ she said. ‘Pilates had an astounding effect on me from a physical and psychological point of view, and I wouldn’t have been able to do these movies had I not really immersed myself in it.’
Workouts for Atomic Blonde with one of these eight trainers involved three 25-minute high-intensity sessions per week, with the goal of building cardiovascular endurance rather than muscle. However, ‘you don’t need to exercise every day,’ PT Monique Ganderton told us previously. ‘Sometimes, I included one low-intensity cardio workout, too, but as we weren’t trying to build muscle, we didn’t need more than that.’ Example exercises included jumping lunges, resistance-band abductor raises and pulses, and side squats with kicks.
Charlize credits Mad Max with igniting her interest in stunt work and physically demanding performances. She linked her enjoyment to her dance background, explaining: ‘I liked the extreme action so much. I think my dancer’s background has also been very useful, as you’re always in the habit of wanting to push yourself to the limit in the course of expressing yourself through your body.’
The Apex training that pushed Charlize Theron out of her comfort zone
For survival thriller Apex – in which Charlize plays a rock climber and kayaker – she had to master a completely unfamiliar discipline.
‘I didn’t know if I was going to like it. I’d never climbed before, except as a kid in Africa climbing trees, which I loved,’ she told Netflix. ‘I weirdly climbed barefoot.’
She enlisted the help of celebrated American rock climber Beth Rodden. Again, her childhood athleticism served her well. ‘She has such good body awareness,’ Rodden said. ‘I think that comes from her dance background and just how hard she works at her craft.’
Climbing, as Charlize discovered, required moving in a ‘very different’ way to how she’d trained for fight scenes. ‘This is about endurance and strength. The technique of climbing is really beautiful because it doesn’t conform to one thing; it’s a real art,’ she said. ‘You have to make it your own and put in the hours to understand it.’
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