Slyvester Stallone
TRAIN TO A SCHEDULE
'Sly's training is more comprehensive than most people give him credit for,' says Peterson. 'He's one of the few guys that gets that you have to book training. You treat it like an appointment, and then it gets done.'
DIFFERENT FILM, DIFFERENT LOOK
'If you look at Sly, he had different looks for Spy Kids and Rocky Balboa and Rambo. Right now he's lean, but for the Expendables he went for that shredded look with big forearms and traps and a goatee, because that's who he decided the character was. He's a writer and actor first, and he immerses himself in whoever he's playing.'
KEEP IT FRESH
'Sly does everything in the gym from traditional power stuff to bodybuilding supersets and drop sets, to kettlebells and single-leg work. We don't do a "typical" workout - I write a different workout for him every day he trains.'
BELOW THE BELT
'We do a lot of lower-body work - from a mass-maintaining standpoint, you have to. Sly is not one of those top-heavy bodies. He knows you have to work the glutes, hamstrings, quads, beat up the calves. He'll do deadlifts and then shrug the same weight, so he hits his legs and traps, and because he's holding the weight it'll pump up his forearms.'
PROTECT AGAINST INJURY
'We work on things that challenge the balance, or include rotations with bands, so that he's just as strong as he looks. We don't want him wrenching his back during a stunt. He gets some ridiculous injuries. In the movie, he wears a leather sling around his thumb, but that's a real injury - he had to write it into the script to cover it.'
Randy Court
STAY BALANCED
'Randy works a lot on his footwork and balance, so he'll do a lot of work on agility ladders and movement drills,' says Bonacci. 'We'll also change moves to emphasise balance - for instance, he might do a shoulder press while standing on one leg. We'll also work a lot of Olympic lifting, because it addresses a lot of qualities you need - balance, power and explosiveness. I'm also big on lateral moves - lunges for the legs and med ball throws for the core.'
A LITTLE VANITY
'My job is to get Randy in the best possible shape to fight, so we didn't change much during The Expendables. We will do a bit of vanity work when we're not in fight camp, though - direct work on the biceps or whatever.'
FIGHTING CONDITION
'About five weeks from a fight, we'll start to focus more on conditioning. A lot of it comes from fight-specific training, but we'll also do a lot of sprinting, rowing and work on the Airdyne bike, which gets harder to pedal as you go faster. We'll work five-minute rounds in the build-up to a fight, rather than making them longer, I'll work on getting the rest periods down. By the end of camp I'll try to get Randy resting for 35 seconds between rounds, so that when he gets a whole minute during a fight it seems like forever.'
REDUCE ACID LEVELS
'Nutritionally, the main thing he does is avoid too much red meat, sugar and dairy. They make your system more acidic, which makes it harder to recover from the volume of training he does.'
