There are a few Men’s Health cover moments from my teenage years that stand out as formative. Potentially chief among them is Jason Statham.
Not only is The Stath a thoroughly British bloke, but he was among a slew of leading men in this era who began to buck a trend that was still lingering from the Eighties and early Nineties: the muscle-bound action hero.
He didn’t have the bowling-ball delts of Arnie or the graphically chiselled abs of Stallone. He was lithe, sinewy. But not small by any stretch. There was no doubt the guy worked out, but more than anything he looked real. He looked like the sort of bloke you might actually see on the street. He possessed a physique that wasn’t just aspirational, but actually seemed achievable.
Nearly 20 years later, Statham is 59. And, well, not much has changed.
Surely there’s something to learn from that, right?
For sure. Here are 11 lessons we can take from Jason Statham’s decades-long training journey.
What to read next
1. Train to Be Capable, Not Just to Look Capable
Perhaps the defining feature of Statham’s approach is that his physique has always appeared to be a by-product of performance.
Back in 2007, Statham told Men’s Health that he was interested in training that improved ‘explosive power, core strength, coordination and reflexes’, rather than simply chasing muscle. His trainer at the time, Logan Hood, programmed everything from heavy deadlifts and squats to rowing, running, kettlebells, gymnastics and bodyweight work.
Almost two decades later, not much has changed. Stunt coordinator Eddie Fernandez, who worked with Statham on 2024's The Beekeeper and 2025's A Working Man, described him as extremely ‘functional’, with his training still encompassing bodyweight work, cardio, stretching and physical skills.
The lesson isn’t that bodybuilding is bad – building and maintaining muscle should absolutely be a priority, especially as we age. But the point is to regularly test what all that muscle can actually do.
Carry something heavy. Sprint. Climb. Jump. Pull your own bodyweight around.
Train to look capable, sure. But make sure you actually are.
2. Don't Just Train Your Body – Teach It
‘I want to learn new stuff,’ Statham told Men’s Health back in 2007. ‘I don't want to do the same thing every day.’
That philosophy has followed him throughout his career.
Boxing and martial arts have long been staples, but his training has also incorporated gymnastics, ring work, rope climbing and other movements that demand coordination as well as strength. Preparing for The Beekeeper, former UFC fighter James Moontasri had Statham drilling jiu-jitsu alongside boxing, kicks and punches – often practising individual movements repeatedly until they became automatic.
You probably don't have a choreographed warehouse fight on the cards this weekend, but there’s still something worth stealing.
Spend some time in a jiu-jitsu gym. Practise a handstand. Work towards a muscle-up. Try climbing.
Having something to practise, rather than simply another workout to grind through, gives your training a purpose beyond burning calories and pumping up your pecs. That can make a major difference to long-term motivation.
3. Get Really, Really Good at Moving Your Own Body
One thing that appears again and again throughout Statham’s training history is bodyweight work.
Pull-ups, push-ups, dips, rope climbs and gymnastics have all featured prominently. Moontasri revealed that even before their Beekeeper training sessions began, Statham would perform his own intense bodyweight workouts, knocking out pull-ups and even muscle-ups on gymnastic rings.
This brings up an important distinction between absolute and relative strength.
Adding weight to your bench press is one way to measure progress. Being able to move your own increasingly muscular frame through space is another – and arguably a better indicator of whether that muscle is bringing something useful to the party.
You might not have Statham's ring muscle-ups yet, but getting genuinely good at pull-ups, dips and press-ups gives you a strength-training repertoire that’s not just portable, but also a useful ongoing audit of your strength-to-weight ratio.
4. Lift Heavy – But Keep it Simple
That being said, although Statham might be synonymous with circuits and bodyweight training, heavy lifting has always been part of the equation.
A session he shared with Men’s Health in the past was exactly the type of simple savagery many of us could do with reducing our strength training to.
After warming up, perform a set of 3-5 light deadlifts, immediately add 2.5-5kg to the bar and knock out another set. Continue in this fashion, adding small increments until you're performing heavy, powerful singles... and eventually you can't pull another rep.
That's it. Go home.
No 14-exercise action-hero circuit. No BOSU-ball cable curls. Just getting brutally strong at one of the most basic movements in the gym.
At the time of sharing, Statham was reaching double bodyweight at the top end. A good target.
The takeaway here is simple:
Choose a big lift. Warm up properly. Progressively increase the resistance and perform a handful of high-quality working sets. Then go home.
When getting stronger is the goal, don't mistake complexity for sophistication.
5. Make Your Conditioning Measurable
One of the simplest workouts from Statham’s Men’s Health training week consisted of 6 x 500m rowing intervals, separated by three minutes of active recovery.
His recorded splits ranged from roughly 1min 39sec to 1min 50sec.
You don't need to stress over chasing those numbers. But what you should steal here is the fact that this workout is repeatable and measurable.
Pick a distance or workload and attack it hard enough that simply maintaining your pace becomes a challenge. Then record the results. When you return to the workout next week, you've got a score to chase.
Run 400m repeats. Row 500s. Hit fixed calorie targets on the airbike or SkiErg.
Fitness is notoriously difficult to eyeball. Give yourself benchmarks and you'll know whether the work is actually, well, working.
6. Building Work Capacity Doesn't Mean Always Chasing Exhaustion
One of the more eye-catching finishers from Statham's old training diary was 200 push-ups.
The magic, though, wasn’t in the rep count, but how he got there.
Statham and Hood used a ladder, climbing in sets of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 reps before returning to one and beginning again. Individual efforts remained deliberately small, allowing them to accumulate an enormous number of quality reps without repeatedly grinding themselves into the floor.
For movements such as pull-ups, dips and push-ups, try accumulating volume through multiple crisp, submaximal sets. A 1-2-3-4-5 ladder gives you 15 reps without any individual set becoming particularly daunting. Repeat it and those reps quickly add up.
The lesson?
Sometimes the route to doing more is doing less, repeatedly.
7. When it’s Time to Go Hard, Go Hard
The flip side of the above is a quote from Statham himself that’s always stuck with me:
‘Your body is like a piece of dynamite. You can tap it with a pencil all day, but you’ll never make it explode. You hit it once with a hammer: Bang! Get serious. Do 40 hard minutes, not 90 minutes of nonsense.’
He's not wrong. Session after session of steady, junk volume in the gym is a sure-fire path to boredom, a lack of results and eventual burnout.
Intensity matters.
You have to give your body a reason to adapt, and when it comes to muscle growth, that reason is often how close you’re working to failure on any given set.
Pay attention to how many reps, sets and movements you’re simply going through the motions on, then begin to trim the fat.
Warm up thoroughly, of course, but when it’s time to get to your working sets, hit that stick of dynamite hard.
Looking back now, we’re not sure Statham knows all that much about explosive ordnance.
Still, you get his point.
8. Treat Mobility Like an Insurance Policy
This may be one of Statham’s most useful lessons as he approaches 60.
‘If I stretch every day for six months, am I going to see the benefit in the mirror? No,’ he told Men’s Health. Nevertheless, he described the benefits as ‘huge’, particularly when it came to balance, avoiding injury and getting his body into the positions demanded by his work.
And he's kept doing it.
Nearly two decades later, Fernandez told GQ that regular stretching still forms part of Statham's routine alongside cardio, bodyweight training and practising skills.
There's an obvious lesson here for those of us increasingly measuring our training careers in decades rather than years.
Not everything worth training is going to show up in the mirror. Maintaining – and strengthening – the ranges of motion you can already access might not feel as rewarding as adding an inch to your arms, but the question is... do you want to lose them?
9. Find Some Cardio You'd Do Even if it Wasn't ‘Cardio’
One of the days in Statham's old programme was labelled ‘contextual effort’. Fancy terminology for an extremely simple idea: go and do something physical that you actually enjoy.
For Statham at the time, the example was a trail run lasting 73 minutes. Hood's wider prescription was essentially to pick a sport or activity and keep moving for more than an hour at an intensity high enough to challenge your aerobic fitness.
It's a principle that's aged particularly well.
Intervals and carefully prescribed Zone 2 work have their place. But your heart doesn't know whether you're looking at a treadmill screen or running through the woods.
Run trails. Hike quickly. Cycle. Swim. Play five-a-side.
If you're planning on being fit for decades rather than simply surviving an eight-week transformation, finding forms of conditioning you'd voluntarily choose to do makes accumulating all of that work considerably easier.
10. Make Quality Food the Default, Not a Punishment
Some of Statham's old-school nutritional rules haven't aged quite as gracefully as the man himself.
The idea that carbohydrates eaten after lunch are inherently more likely to make you fat because you won't have time to ‘burn them off’, for instance, isn't something we'd recommend you adopt.
But look beyond the noughties nutritional science and the bones of his approach remain surprisingly sensible.
‘I’d say ninety-five percent of my food is good,’ Statham told Men’s Health. His staples included fish, chicken, lean beef, beans, nuts, vegetables, fruit and oats – but he didn’t deprive himself of the occasional chocolate.
Former trainer Hood similarly described a diet built around eggs, meat, poultry, fish, vegetables, fruit and yoghurt, while heavily limiting highly processed foods.
Don't get hung up on making exactly 95% of your diet ‘clean’. Especially when no one can even agree on what that means. Just make it your mission to pack in as many nutritious, protein-rich, minimally processed foods as possible, and fill any ‘gaps’ as you please.
Make high-quality protein, fresh fruit and veg, some nuts and high-quality carbs your default, and you may find that those gaps disappear of their own accord.
11. Stay Ready So You Don't Have to Get Ready
This might be the biggest lesson of all.
In the past, ‘celebrity transformations’ have tended to follow a familiar script: actor gets role, actor has 12 weeks to ‘get shredded’, actor unveils new physique.
Statham doesn't really appear to operate like that.
Speaking ahead of A Working Man in 2025, Fernandez explained that Statham doesn't need to suddenly get himself into shape for a role because staying fit is simply what he does. Moontasri offered a similar account of preparing him for The Beekeeper: Statham arrived for their 12-week training period already in phenomenal condition.
And perhaps that explains why, almost 20 years after that Men’s Health cover lodged itself in my teenage brain, he doesn't look dramatically different.
There's no secret Jason Statham workout here. No magical exercise, diet or supplement.
There are just the same basic ideas repeated consistently for decades: lift heavy things, move your own bodyweight, work on your conditioning, maintain your mobility, learn physical skills and eat high-quality scran, most of the time.
Looks like it's working to me.
If there’s one thing Kori Sampson knows, it’s how to optimise your body composition for performance. To tap into his knowledge as an elite athlete and coach, we asked him to create a 4-week plan to help you move faster, recover quicker and keep pushing when the fatigue sets in – all while improving your muscle-to-fat ratio.
Ready to build muscle, burn fat and come out the other side looking, feeling and performing better? Click here to get 14 days of free access to the plan via the Men’s Health app.
