How I train: a male performer's gym routine, in plain English

"What's your routine?" and "what do you take?" are predictable questions for anyone who works with their body on camera, and the internet's answers to them are usually some mix of supplement spam and aesthetic theater. The honest version is much more boring: it's mostly the same thing a serious recreational lifter does, with a few tweaks that come from the job.

This post is the boring version. It is not medical or coaching advice — talk to an actual coach and an actual doctor before changing anything. But if you've been wondering how a working male performer structures a typical week, this is roughly it.

What I'm training for, exactly

The first thing to be honest about: my training goals aren't bodybuilding, and they aren't powerlifting. I'm training for two specific outcomes:

1. Looking and moving well on camera — symmetry, posture, conditioning, and the kind of strength that lets you hold positions without it showing.
2. Recovering between long days — the work has weird hours, hard travel, and unpredictable sleep. Recovery wins more often than peak performance does.

A lot of online fitness content is optimized for the first one and ignores the second. That trade is bad. The performer career is a marathon; aesthetics mean nothing if you can't show up for a six-hour shoot two days in a row.

The week, at the highest level

A typical training week — when nothing else is going on — looks like this:

That's it. Five real sessions, one easy outdoor day, one true rest day. The hardest part of this template is not adding more.

When a shoot week is happening, this collapses to two strength sessions and one easy conditioning day, plus the shoot itself. Don't lift heavy on shoot day or the day before. Bad math.

The lift days

The split is upper / lower / full body, in that order, with progression run in three- or four-week blocks. Each session has the same structure:

1. Warm-up (10 min). Bike or rower, then mobility work for whatever joints feel like they need it that day. Skipping the warm-up is a long-term injury bet.
2. One main lift (3–5 sets, 4–6 reps). Squat, bench, deadlift, overhead press — depending on the day. Heavier than feels comfortable.
3. Two assistance lifts (3 sets, 8–12 reps). Things that build the muscles the main lift used. Rows, lunges, pull-ups, dips, etc.
4. One isolation movement (3 sets, 12–15 reps). Whatever the camera actually sees a lot of. For me, that's shoulders and arms.
5. Five-minute core finisher. Something that hits the obliques and lower abs. Plank variations, hanging leg raises, ab wheel.

Total volume per session: ~16–20 working sets. That's enough to drive adaptation without trashing recovery.

Conditioning, separate from strength

A common male-performer mistake is doing cardio inside the lifting session, which usually means neither one gets done well. I keep them separate.

Two flavors:

• Easy conditioning (the Friday session, plus the long Saturday walk): zone 2 cardio, conversational pace, 30–90 minutes. This is where a huge amount of the recovery and resilience comes from. Underrated by everyone.
• Hard conditioning (the Tuesday session): 20–30 minutes of intervals. Bike sprints, hill repeats, kettlebell complexes. Once a week is plenty.

If you're doing more hard conditioning than that and you're also lifting hard four days a week, you're going to spend most of your time tired and sore. Don't.

Food, briefly, without making a fuss about it

The food piece is the one I'd most strongly recommend you talk to a real nutritionist about. Performers have body composition demands that are specific enough that generic advice will get you into trouble.

That said, the framework I use:

• Protein first. A gram per pound of bodyweight, give or take. Easier to hit than people think if you front-load breakfast.
• Carbs around training. Not zero, not infinite — enough that the workout actually has fuel.
• Hydration is huge and almost everyone is bad at it. A water bottle on your desk at all times solves this with no other intervention.
• Caffeine before the gym, not after. Coffee with lunch wrecks sleep whether you feel it or not.
• No specific supplements I'd recommend universally. Creatine and vitamin D have decent evidence; everything else is heavily marketed and weakly supported. Save your money. (There's a small short list I do personally take for performer-specific reasons; I wrote about that separately in my supplement stack post.)

If your body composition needs are aggressive — leaning out for a specific shoot, or putting on a few pounds for a different look — that's where a real coach earns their fee. Don't crash diet. Don't dirty bulk. Both age you faster than the work itself does.

Sleep is the actual training program

If I had to pick one piece of the routine to defend over all the others, it would be sleep, not lifting. Eight hours, in a dark room, screens out an hour beforehand.

Performers travel, shoot at weird hours, and post late. All of that fights with sleep. The performers who last in this job ten years are not, in my experience, the ones with the best gym programs. They're the ones who treat sleep like a contractual obligation.

Recovery between shoots

Two-day shoot weekends or back-to-back travel happen. The recovery routine afterward is dull and effective:

• One easy walk the day after — sunlight, slow pace, 30+ minutes
• Stretch + foam roll for 15 minutes that evening
• Sauna or hot tub if available; cold plunge if you're into that, but it's not magic
• Light eating, lots of water, real bed time
• Skip the gym for 24–48 hours and don't feel guilty about it

The version of you that pushes through a hard recovery is the version of you that gets injured.

What I'd do differently if I were starting today

Three things, looking back:

1. Lift less, sleep more. I spent my first two years overtraining. The physique came faster once I stopped training six days a week.
2. Walk every day. Daily 30–45 minute walks did more for my body and my head than any gym program I ran.
3. Stop reading fitness content from people whose income depends on you buying supplements. That includes about 80% of the fitness content under your favorite niche tag.

The basics work. They've worked for fifty years. The supplement-of-the-month crowd will be selling something different next year, but a barbell, a kitchen scale, and a real bedtime are all going to look exactly the same.

— Sly