Henry Cavill 'Man of Steel' Workout and Diet

The Henry Cavill Superman workout program

Gym Jones is keeping the exact workout Henry Cavill followed an understandable secret. Mark Twight believes in a personalized approach – a program with periodization modulating volume and intensity over the course of multi-month training cycles. We know it would not be your typical 4×10 gym-rat workout. A Crossfit-type workout gets closer, with it’s “constantly varied, high intensity, functional movement,” but it would need to geared towards greater mass gain.


To approximate Henry Cavill’s Superman workout, we suggest the following programs:

Option 1: A Crossfit football program

A typical Crossfit Football workout week looks like this:


Monday: 
Lift 10,000 lbs as fast as possible using only one rep of the following:

• 1 Squat
• 1 Press
• 1 Deadlift

* You can use any weight on the lifts and it can be done in any amount of rounds. You can only do one rep at a time and must cycle through all three lifts to complete one round.
* The goal is to lift 10,000 lbs as fast as possible.


Tuesday: Sprints
Complete:

• 8 x 50 yard 
• Rest 60 seconds

Wednesday: Rest
Thursday: As many rounds as possible in 10 minutes:

• 7 DB Bent Over Rows 
• 7 DB Power Cleans 
• 7 DB Push Presses

* Use 50lb dumbells



Friday: Complete 5 rounds
You have 60 seconds to complete the following…

• 20 KB Swings – 2 pood 
• Sprint 60 yards

* Rest 2 minutes between rounds.



Saturday: As many rounds as possible in 9 minutes of:

• 3 Back Squats 225 lbs 
• 6 Pull Ups 
• 9 Push Ups

Sunday: Rest



Monday: Complete 2 rounds:

• 1 minute – Max Rep 50 lbs DB Push Press
• Rest 1 minute
• 1 minute – Max Rep 50 lbs Weighted Pull Ups
• Rest 1 minute
• 1 minute – Row for Calories
• Rest 1 minute
• 1 minute – Max Rep Burpees

* Rest 1 minute between rounds.
This is just an example week, every week will bring additional challenges and workouts. Running a high-intensity program like this with a clean mass-gain nutrition regiment (below) should give you Super results

Option 2: The Juggernaut Method

The Juggernaut Method was created by Chad Wesley Smith, owner and head Performance Coach at Juggernaut Training Systems in Laguna Hills, CA. It is a peroidized program divided into 4 waves (reps of 10’s, 8’s, 5’s and 3’s). Each wave is subdivided into three phases: accumulation, intensification, realization. Each workout also has a few crossfit-type athletic routines thrown in – box jumps, sprints and tire flips.
Since the program is geared for strength and mass, it’s designed around four big lifts: Bench Press, Squat, Military Press and Deadlift.
An example day with the Juggernaught method could look like this:

Monday
Bench (300 max)
Warm-up complex (jump rope, arm swings, foam roller)

• 180 lbs x 3
• 200 x 3
• 210 x 8, 8, As many as possible

Assistant work:

• DB rows 5×10
• Dips 3×15
• Box Jumps

This is just one day of a phase and should only be used as an example – in this case this workout would be after several weeks of accumulation.
The peroidization and big lifts in the Juggernaut Method get us closer to the Man of Steel workout. Throw in some extra skill and performance work like box jumps and bear crawls and you have something that should pack on pounds of supermass if you watch your nutrition.

Tailpipe

One thing Mark Twight has talked about is something he throws in at the end of a workout–the tailpipe. This is a tag-team workout designed to work to exhaustion and teach correct breathing technique. Ideally you should have a partner, but if not, you can time your rows and hold the kettlebells for as long as the 250m takes you.
Tailpipe (at the end of the workout)

• Row 250m
• Hold two 24kg kettlebells in the ‘rack’ position while focusing on breathing
• Rest 45 seconds. Swap places with your partner, then repeat until you’ve done three rows and three racks.

Why tailpipe? “When you’re done,” Twight explained, “it feels like you’ve been sucking on the tailpipe of a car.”

The Superman diet

Henry Cavill, the new Man of Steel, admitted to having a diet plan that made him have a daily intake of at least five thousand calories. He consumed several protein-rich meal replacement drinks per day to make up his calories. This included a post workout shake that could contain coconut milk, peanut butter, maltodextrin and whey protein.
“Mark Twight, the chap from Gym Jones, has been putting me through the ringer big time. Two hours a day on a mix of calories depending on what sort of work we’re doing. We started off at about 3,000 a day plus shake.”
“That’s about 3,500. But, two hours of work and then we moved up to 4,000 and then up to 5,000 calories. Now, we’ve dropped down to about 3,500 while we’re doing an hour’s training every morning because if I keep that high calorie intake I’m going to start putting on fat weight, but if I drop too low I’m going to start losing all the new muscle I’ve gained. But, an example of the sort of workouts we’ve been doing recently?

A caloric cycle for mass should focus on clean, high quality protein and good fat. Avoid simple sugars and junk eating like fast food to make up calories. A sample program could run like this:


Weeks 1-2: 3,500 calories including 1-2 MRP shakes per day
Weeks 3-6: 3,500 calories including 1-2 MRP shakes per day
Weeks 7-8: 4,000 calories including 1-2 MRP shakes per day
Weeks 9-10: 5,000 calories including 2-3 MRP shakes per day
Weeks 11-12: 3,500 calories including 1-2 MRP shakes per day

Sample 3,500 calorie Man of Steel diet:

Meal One 5 egg whites 2 eggs ½ cup oats 1 apple multi-vitamin/fish oil	Meal Two 1 cup brown rice 1 chicken breast 1 cup broccoli	Meal Three 6 oz tuna 2 slices wheat bread banana PWO shake (probably just water/whey) and maybe a pear for carbs here
Meal Four (chicken wrap) 1 large 10″ flour tortilla 1 6-oz. chicken breast ½ cup lettuce (chopped) ½ tomato (diced)	Meal Five (shake + potato) 8 oz milk 1 cup oats 1 scoop whey 2 tbsp pb sweet potato	Meal Six 1 cup cottage cheese small yogurt mixed with CC for flavor almonds

Sample 5,000 calorie Man of Steel diet:

Meal One 56 grams Protein powder 3 cups Milk (low fat) 2 cups Cereal, cold 2 cups Blueberries 6 tbsp Almonds, slivered	Meal Two 1/2 cup Cottage cheese (light / low fat) 56 grams Protein powder 2 cups Grapes 3 tbsp Barley 1 1/5 oz Sunflower seeds	Meal Three 4 1/2 oz Chicken breast 4 oz Cheese (low or non fat) 4 cups Vegetable soup 4 Crackers 3 whole Pita 12 Peanuts
Meal Four 49 grams Protein powder 1 1/2 cups Yogurt (plain and low fat) 1 1/2 tbsp Barley 3 tbsp Almonds, slivered 1 tsp Olive, Flax, Hemp or Salmon Oils 2 Tangerines	Meal Five 11 oz Beef (lean cuts) 4 cups Cauliflower 2 cups Rice 6 tbsp Almonds 1 1/3 cups Fruit juice	Meal Six 11 oz Turkey (breast, skinless) 2 cups Chickpeas 1 cup Mushrooms 1/4 cup Onions 1 head Lettuce 3 cups Cherry tomatoes 6 tbsp Almonds

That’s alot of eating. “I’m on 5000 calories a day… You’ve got to eat protein first, then a little bit of carbs… you’ve gotta keep your hunger levels going,” Henry Cavill says, “I’m training two and a half hours a day, pushing my body beyond its normal limits, putting on a lot of muscle mass and just making myself look like Superman.”