Many celebrities are actors first and athletes second, if at all, but sometimes there are exceptions. Ryan Kwanten started as a competitive triathlon years before going to Hollywood, and the Ryan Kwanten workout is a reflection of his serious training before he came to the US.
Ryan Kwanten Shirtless
Fortunately, Kwanten is open about how he trains, and it is easy to piece together the kind of workouts that it takes to get his build. He is a firm believer in the power of muscle confusion, where you rotate different exercises and intensity levels so that your body can never fully adapt to any one way of training.
This forces your muscles to constantly adjust to new challenges, keeping them improving on a regular basis. Many times people reach plateaus in the gym because they do not rotate the exercises, and the body reaches a comfort level that slows down muscle gains.
Anyway, Kwanten trains more outside than he does in a gym. He regularly runs through forest trails, goes biking, swimming, and has been known to go bungee-jumping and other thrill-seeking behaviors. For strength training, he does many of his workouts at home, using body weight exercises such as sit-ups, pull-ups, push-ups, and jump rope.
One mistake that many aspiring body builders make is thinking that it takes constant work with heavy weights such as doing deadlifts and bench press to get stronger. These exercises definitely play a role in bulking up, but are not needed for most to get the lean-and-toned Hollywood physique. You can go far with body weight exercises and HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training).
Here is one Ryan Kwanten workout that you can do at home. Kwanten uses this as a go-to routine when he needs to workout wherever he is without having time to go to a gym or get specialized equipment. Note how the routine combines HIIT and body weight exercises.
Over 20 minutes do the following:
- Warm-up with 2 minutes of running as a fast as possible
- Do 2 minutes of push-ups, ideally without stopping. Rest as little as possible
- Over 7.5 minutes, do six rounds of: 30-second sprints and 45 seconds rest. This is classic HIIT, by having you train at max intensity then rest over short intervals
- Do 2 minutes of planks only resting if necessary
- 2 minutes of supine jackknifes. A supine jackknife consists of you laying flat on your back while raising your legs straight into the air, putting you into an L-shape. Then use a crunch motion to curl up your shoulders off the ground while extending your arms out to your toes. While keeping your legs straight, raise and lower them six inches off of the ground. When raising your legs, hold them with a one-second pause at the top for each rep
- Finish with 4.5 minutes of shadowboxing. To get the right kind of intensity, visualize yourself in the last round of the grand championship, and put everything that you have left into the fight
Bear in mind that this is a single workout, and Kwanten’s full exercise regime goes through many different ones. At the same time, this is something that you can do with just some floor space and room to sprint outside. Also, if you have experience with CrossFit or related systems the general setup of this workout should be familiar: while Kwanten does not reportedly follow CrossFit, this workout would definitely mesh with that system’s approach.
Now, while this workout covers quite a bit of ground, if you simply repeat it over and over again you will be back in the position of reaching a plateau and not advancing. To get muscle confusion, you would need a series of workouts like this and then regularly rotate them in and out.
Anyway, this type of training will get you the muscle tone for the ripped look that Kwanten pulls off. In order to also have your muscles show as well as his, you would need to get your body fat quite low. Kwanten is a fan of the Paleo diet, though he does not follow it strictly–he has been known to have a beer or two, sometimes even before competing! Either way, you definitely need a good diet for getting cut if you are not already there before you can pull off looking like Jason Stackhouse from True Blood.
To do a good Ryan Kwanten workout at home, you should check out programs that give you a mix of HIIT and muscle confusion style training. Getting your cardio conditioning in by running outside and biking/hiking/etc. would certainly help as well.
Lastly, here is a video that takes a good look at Ryan Kwanten’s True Blood workout:
