Brie Larson is the proud and worthy owner of Oscar gold, but lately she's been pumping
iron to earn her place in the MCU.
The Captain Marvel star hit the gym hard to get ripped for her role as the cosmic Avenger
after already radically transforming her physique for 2015's Room.
Here's a look at how Larson got cut for Captain Marvel.
"It's not just a concept or a hypothetical that a woman can be strong; it's not that
it takes a CGI team in order to make a woman strong like, I am actually strong."
While many slender people are afraid to lift weights out of a fear of getting bulky, those
fears misunderstand what building muscle actually does for the body.
Thanks to the guidance of physical trainers, Brie Larson's learned that hitting the weights
for functional strength can work wonders, and won't make you bulk up in a bad way.
In prepping for her Captain Marvel role, Larson's worked on building muscle in every part of
her body, particularly the areas in which women are typically weakest the shoulders,
arms, and upper back.
For the first time in her athletic life, Larson's doing pull-ups at the gym, as well as other
heavy-weight exercises that one of her coaches, Jason Walsh, says, quote, "weren't necessarily
even in her thought process."
Working out these upper-body muscles can turn a shapeless back into a contour map of muscle.
As Larson built strength doing moves like these, she also burned off fat, resulting
in a strong and sexy look that especially shines in the right dress.
Praise be to the almighty deadlift.
The staple weightlifting move may look like backbreaking work, but as long as it's done
correctly, it's exactly the opposite.
Deadlifts, and other core strength moves like squats and overhead presses, help build the
foundation of a fit body regardless of physical size, making one strong without necessarily
making them huge.
Don't believe us?
Refer to the tape.
Larson's been using deadlifts to get a strong and trim body since her role in Room — you
know, the movie where she played an undernourished prisoner.
While preparing for that role, Larson put on 15 pounds of muscle, combining early-morning
deadlift sets with a no-B.S. diet to carve a sinewy physique.
Now that she's escaped from Room, she's been able to build on that baseline, staying svelte
but getting strong.
Larson talked about the lessons she learned preparing for her Oscar-winning role with
Elle, saying,
"Every other day I worked with this incredible trainer, and he would have me lift extreme
weights over my head.
Just having that, being able to deadlift before I went to work every morning, gave me this
mental change that I had never had before."
That mental change led to a physical metamorphosis, as she told Variety in 2018:
"My highest right now is 215 pounds in deadlifts.
400-pound hip thrusts.
Being able to lift weight like that really changed my perspective and understanding of
myself."
Thanks to Brie Larson's previous experiences at the gym, her transition into superheroism
has been a process of keeping up good habits.
It's true that the hardest part of working out is getting started, but once you break
through the initial pains and awkwardness, the process starts to feel and look rewarding.
It's no surprise if Larson's training programs have only gotten more intense; regular exercise
has been shown to effectively rewire the brain, making subsequent workouts easier and less
stressful.
After Room, Larson starred in the comical shoot-em-up Free Fire, which she called her
"first physical role," despite the hard training she did for her previous picture.
She told CBR,
"The action element of what I'd done before was really mental and very emotional.
[Free Fire] was the opposite."
"I slowly got the most disgusting and intense bruises all up one side of my leg."
Afterwards, Larson continued to challenge herself with the intense Kong: Skull Island,
telling the BBC,
"I spent two months just like two hours a day of tearing my body down every day, just
to be able to physically get through a film like this, because you're moving and climbing
on so much stuff."
For Captain Marvel, Larson's putting everything she's learned into Carol Danvers, building
the character on the inside and out.
She told CBR,
"Anything that's the physical side, from past experience, you hire specialists to help you
understand that and quantify it and pace you out and figure it all out.
I'm just in charge of what's going on in her head."
Nobody gets to peak fitness entirely by themselves.
Brie Larson has had a helping hand in honing her physique from a number of renowned trainers,
including Jason Walsh of Rise Nation and Rise Movement, a celeb-favorite gym in West Hollywood.
"I wanted to give her all the tools possible to get through this thing, and, and really
nail it and feel confident, give her that psychological advantage."
Before she collaborated with Walsh, Larson worked with another trainer on Room who helped
her develop not just a fighter's body, but a fighting mindset, introducing her to the
chemical rush that turns normal humans into gym rats, and keeps them coming back for more.
She told Bustle,
"The muscle gave me this surge of testosterone where I just felt so much more power.
I'm a pretty relaxed person, so it gave me this sense of urgency and strength to really
fight that I had never felt before."
From the very first trailer for Captain Marvel, it's been clear that she's a character with
military-level fitness, with Carol shown climbing to great heights on a rope course and getting
back up when she falls.
She's a character who must live up to the standards of both the U.S. Air Force and the
Kree Starforce, so naturally the woman portraying her has to look like she could haul herself
over any obstacle.
Fortunately, there's a workout for that.
In one workout video shared on the actress' Instagram page, you can see the Academy Award-winner
deftly defying gravity on an indoor rock climbing setup.
This suspended crawl across the ceiling is far from a novice move, requiring control
of many muscles in the upper and lower body, including the forearms, obliques, and thighs.
Pulling this off without falling is a full-body experience, engaging the back, the legs, and
even the tiny muscles of the fingers the sort of conditioning that rock climbers need, but
that your average Joe or Jane off the street just won't have.
That takes practice.
So this kind of exercise isn't just a fun way to mix things up it also provides functional
strength and boosts muscle memory, taking climbing from a relatively daunting activity
to something close to second nature.
The results speak for themselves on screen.
At least some of Larson's workouts are tuned in to the idea of style over substance.
She doesn't just need functional strength for the purposes of selling a big-budget movie,
the goal is really more of a fine physical form and you get that sort of look with toned
muscle and low body fat.
One of the best ways to shed fat and get good muscle definition is high-repetitions of a
lower weight not low weight, but low enough to allow for 10-15 repetitions before failure.
Reaching this goal is where resistance training comes in, with tools like elastic bands taking
the place of heavier dumbbells, barbells, or weight machines.
One workout Larson has shared herself doing is a resistance band pull-apart move, which
helps to build back muscle and make you look much more physically defined.
It's also a great move to improve posture, making it all the easier for the loyal soldier
to stand at attention, or stand her ground against an enemy shapeshifter.
Of course, an all-vanity approach without a strong foundation wouldn't really do Larson
a lot of good either.
There's a difference between looking sleek and shapely and looking like a real-life soldier,
and it's the sort of thing a viewer's brain can definitely notice.
Captain Marvel is joining the MCU with a power level well above many other of the Earth's
mightiest heroes, and if audiences are going to accept that, she needs to look like she
can hang from the moment she shows up.
We don't care if a lot of her power comes from laser beams and razzle dazzle she also
needs to look like she can handle a big opponent, which she most definitely has in big bad daddy
Thanos.
To build up this baseline strength, Larson and her team put some time in on high-weight,
strength-building workouts which can sometimes involve unorthodox activities like pushing
a 5,000-pound Jeep around for awhile.
In one video Larson shared of the routine, she's seen pushing the vehicle along for a
full minute, passenger and full tank of gas included, keeping the strain up until she
can't help but seek relief with a hearty laugh.
Variety is more than just the spice of life it's a building block of general fitness,
and a reason to constantly challenge yourself with the unexpected and less common.
As part of her workout regimen, Larson has been seen pursuing several different activities,
including strapping on boxing gloves for routines that shred fat and boost cardiovascular fitness.
Putting on some gloves and slapping the hide off of a heavy bag is a worthwhile workout
whether you plan on getting into fights or not.
It's a tiring activity that boosts physical endurance while letting the lower body stay
at relative rest, training different muscles than a more typical jog on the treadmill would.
Also in the mix are Larson's different dance routines, all physically demanding in their
own way and requiring lateral movements, balance work, and physical precision that boxing,
running, or weightlifting don't typically demand.
The different workouts all add up to well-rounded fitness, so by all means, mix things up your
mind and body will both thank you.
No one gets ripped by just doing bicep curls.
To build real fitness, an athlete needs to focus on their core muscles, building strength
and stability that comes in handy for all forms of exercise.
They're not just called core muscles because they're at the center of your body they're
completely essential to your fitness in general.
One Instagram video Larson has shared on her unique fitness journey demonstrates a bodyweight
exercise called the dragon flag, a move Men's Journal identified as being made popular by
martial artist Bruce Lee.
It's a move that both requires and builds muscle control, a worthy investment that can
make it easier for you to do just about everything else you have to at the gym.
From as far back as her aspiring pop star days, Brie Larson has never seemed to be particularly
out of shape.
But in Room, the 2015 movie about a kidnapped woman that brought her so much attention and
acclaim, her body was much more lithe and razor-sharp.
Ever since her follow-up turn as a more physically-built adventurer in Kong: Skull Island, she's been
looking more and more in-shape each time we see her, getting to the point where it kinda
does look like she could clean Thanos' clock.
An overnight success story, this is not nor is it supposed to be.
"How far can I take myself to kind of reprogram my brain and reprogram my body to learn something
new about myself?
So this has been an amazing challenge."
The most important lesson you can learn on your own fitness journey is that engaging
in physical exercise is not just something you do, but rather a lifestyle you adopt,
for lifelong benefits.
Having specific goals is good, but the goals aren't the point.
The point is the practice, showing up for yourself consistently for the sake of doing
it, with your goals being accomplished as a byproduct of good habits.
Brie Larson got herself in heroic shape by going until she was exhausted with consistency,
building up a body bit by bit and smiling all the while.
The trick is making it fun for yourself, in whichever way you have to whatever it takes
to keep showing up.
Once you've reached the point where you want to work out, the battle is pretty much already
won.
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