Jason Momoa has never exactly looked like a man who needs to ‘bulk up’. Long before Aquaman, Conan, Lobo or any of the other larger-than-life characters he’s portrayed, the man already had the raw materials: the height, the hair, the shoulders, the general sense that he could carry a fridge up a mountain without breaking a sweat.
But Momoa’s physique has never been the product of chicken, broccoli and the bench press alone. His training history is a mix of serious graft, role-specific gym work and a long-standing love of rock climbing. His diet, meanwhile, appears to oscillate between superhero fuel and hero level hedonism. Think rice, avocado, sardines, seaweed and eggs when it’s time to lean into Aquaman mode – but also biscuits and gravy, Hawaiian food, buttered spaghetti with caviar and, he always adds with glee, room saved at the end of the day for ‘my three Guinness’.
Which is why his latest role as Lobo in the upcoming Supergirl sounds like a dream gig in more ways than one. Momoa has apparently wanted to play the DC antihero for years, but this time around there was one major difference from his Aquaman prep: he didn’t have to build the body himself.
‘I didn’t have to do shit!’ he said of the Supergirl process, speaking to website Men's Journal.
That’s because Lobo’s outrageous upper body is, in this case, largely the work of prosthetics. Momoa said there was ‘no way’ he could get that big – and, more importantly, no way he would want to.
‘I don’t want to walk around like that, I can’t fit in a suit, can’t even fit through a doorway. I’m big enough,’ he said. ‘But I want him to look that way. You want him to have that size.’
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That doesn’t mean Momoa has never done the hard yards. For Aquaman, he trained under Mark Twight, the coach behind 300 and Man of Steel, with Twight reportedly working around Momoa’s rock climbing obsession by cutting back on pull-heavy work and targeting underused areas – especially his chest.
One example of that approach was brutally simple: incline bench press, standing dumbbell press and push-ups, followed by high-, mid- and low-angle cable fly drop sets. In other words, plenty of pressing, plenty of volume and plenty of pec work. You can see the full workout here.
The takeaway? Momoa’s build is part genetics, part lifestyle, part climbing wall and part brutally specific training when the role demands it. But Lobo proves something else together: sometimes even Jason Momoa's size looks at a character’s physique and says, quite reasonably, ‘we can fake this’.
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