- Are you looking for spoilers?
- [Producer] I mean, if you wanna drop one I'll take one.
- Absolutely not.
Hi, I am Danai Gurira, and this is my trainer, AJ Fisher.
And today we are going to discuss
how I trained for "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever."
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I used to train alone.
And there just came a time where I realized
I could not challenge myself anymore.
And I needed a lot more information,
and a lot more of a challenge
to how I work out, and how I function.
- She's consistently on a program throughout the year.
That's so inspiring for me as a trainer
'cause I know that we're working long term,
and that is the most effective method
of accomplishing your goals.
We had six core pillars when preparing for this role.
Breathwork, core, posture, cardio, rotational,
anti-rotational, and rest and recovery.
First up, breathwork.
I've found breathwork to be so important and crucial
for Danai's routine for so many reasons.
First and foremost, if you can learn to breathe in tandem
with activating your core in the correct way,
it is one of the most unbelievably effective methods
for protecting your low back.
The low back is just so susceptible to injury
because the lumbar spine doesn't love
to move too much under force.
- In terms of how Okoye holds her body,
very different from Danai.
That is something that we discovered in the last movie
through actually my Alexander Technique,
grew this lovely little gentleman in Atlanta
who just showed me a picture.
And then we really broke down what that picture
of a woman who was really holding her body in a certain way.
The idea of girding the body,
and then allowing the breath to fill
the rib cage above the belly button.
It's not easy, actually, but when I would do it,
and when we worked on things to help me gain
that type of strength, that's where Okoye lives.
She's all steel.
And then she's like all open, ready.
And so that combination is all in breathwork.
- So for example, if we're performing lunges,
I may say, perform three reverse lunges
on one continuous exhale.
And that's important that it's on the one continuous exhale
because it's only at the conclusion of the breath,
her lungs are very drained of air,
that certain muscles activate to a high level.
And those are the injury prevention muscles.
And so I'm pretty specific with the breath prescriptions
because of that fact.
- Next up, core strength.
So, before I met AJ, sure, I had some rudimentary ways
that I would try to do crunches and the whatnots.
I don't even know what I was doing.
It's been a while since I've done things
other than what she tells me.
During "Black Panther," it was very important
because of how I move with the spear.
It's all rush, rush, rush when you get to to that.
It was like hair and makeup,
now go change, now they're ready for you.
I would have a little setup in my trailer,
and there were certain exercises,
she'd send me little vimeos,
and I knew what little videos to do
to get into Okoye's body.
So she would literally go over every move
that where she could see I was out of alignment.
And screenshot it, and take pictures,
and then do the drawing on it, and write stuff underneath.
And it was just like so clear exactly what I needed to do.
And then we'd go over it together.
So I always had a guide from her about how to actually
execute the work in my fight scenes literally move to move.
But it all involved attaching to the core.
- Based on her fight scene for that day,
maybe sometimes we'd practice
the fight scenes in our sessions.
And then me knowing, okay,
if you are slicing here, and then you're kicking here,
yeah, let's really make sure to tie in the external oblique
with the internal obliques.
A key exercise that serves as a warmup
and also an injury preventative exercise
that I've given Danai a million times to perform
before going into a shoot is a standing core exercise.
I love a standing exercise, that's a functional movement,
that also trains the core,
because she can immediately feel how to engage her core
when she then is standing,
performing a functional movement in her character.
Versus, doing all of her core work on the ground.
So a traditional classic wood chop
is either holding a medicine ball,
and going from down to up or up to down.
The way that I teach it for Danai
is to resist rotational force in the warmup.
So she's actually not rotating her body,
but she's slicing across her body
a certain amount of resistance.
Usually using a light pull up assist band as a warmup
so that she's not burning her muscles out
before she goes on set.
Next up, let's talk about posture.
- The idea of how do you strengthen around your posture,
and in a way that allows you to be free in your posture.
Definitely something we've worked on.
- I think even when we first met,
I think we had great chemistry even on our first session.
Because I put her against a wall.
I looked at, okay, how does it feel to push your head
against the wall, your shoulders against the wall.
And where's your pelvis adding space?
I'm really big on head posture with her,
and making sure that the head is stacked over the shoulders
and over the ribs, because one of the biggest
posture exercises that we rely on
is putting a TheraBand behind the head.
- Next up, cardio.
Before I met AJ, I was doing cardio.
But it was sort of like, there were times I would overdo it,
or there were times I would underdo.
I didn't know exactly what my aims were, what my goals were.
So cardio became a part of me retaining a fitness level,
which my character needs.
Of course, it was always a part of my life.
But then it became very specific to Okoye
because she's a very precise lady.
So she's gonna be very fit at all times.
Low impact, high intensity, interval training.
That's basically what became a key routine
that I developed much more specifically
during "Black Panther."
And I realized was perfect for the fitness needs I had
for myself, but definitely for Okoye.
- Next goal for Danai's character, which was so key,
and so important for the program, is a focus on
anti-rotational and rotational strength work.
The rotational and anti-rotational work
is so incredibly important for her character
really in "Black Panther" is because
she's slicing with force across her body.
And if she doesn't have the appropriate active muscle tissue
we want all the forces to be absorbed in the obliques,
in the multifidi, in our erector spine,
all those muscles that rotate.
We want those muscles to be strong, and to be active,
so that the forces are not being absorbed
in the passive tissues like the ligaments, cartilage, bursa,
all the things that do absorb forces,
and are very injury prone.
- That's the key thing about the character is that she is
using this weapon exactly across the body.
So it is so important, that posture.
It's so important for so many parts of my body as well.
Right down to the knees, the ankles, everything.
So much need of the right type of rotation
in order to actually be able to enact that.
And then get good enough at it
for it to be recorded on film.
- Last we have the recovery programs.
Recovery programs are so essential
for being able to hit your high intensity intervals,
for being able to gain strength.
It's so imperative to get those recovery programs in.
And so when she does high intensity interval training
one day, the next day we're performing longer,
slower aerobic work to make sure
that she's not stressing her body as much.
And then maybe, one or two times a week,
she's getting a recovery program
where she's not simply not moving.
But I'm recommending that she takes a long bath
while stretching, a hot shower, a long walk.
Something that's getting her heart rate up
so that she's getting the blood flow through the body,
which the blood flow does assist in recovery.
- Now bear in mind, when she says hot bath,
she means hot bath.
I mean, she'll literally be like,
get into a bath as hot as it can be.
Stay in there for as long as you can bear it.
It's never like, just take a bath.
The other thing that was really helpful,
there's this massive fight I had to do,
we had to shoot it over the course of three days.
And we ended up shooting it for another two days later on.
And she put me through a very extensive recovery process.
You could feel, it's very interesting,
'cause it was a lot of stretching and a lot of foam rolling
and different things of the various muscle groups
that were getting pounded by this fight.
But it was so crucial to being able to go back in
and keep going for three days.
Having someone who actually knows how to create one for you
where your body is, the key muscles that are going through
the stress, are getting the right type of recovery.
It could have been not great if we didn't have that.
- So just to reiterate,
our core goals were breathwork, core, posture,
cardio, rotational, anti-rotational, and rest and recovery.
- Thank you for watching this episode
of how I trained for "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever."
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