Morgan Spector | Train Like | Men's Health - video Dailymotion

Men'sHealth

Morgan Spector | Train Like | Men's Health

Transcript

00:00There's part of me that has always been like,

00:02someone hire me to get enormous.

00:04Like, let me take steroids, let me get huge.

00:07But you can't be an actor and have a body like that.

00:09You have to be able to put on clothes and cover it up.

00:11So mostly I don't.

00:12Hi, I'm Morgan Spector,

00:14and today I'm gonna show you what my current leg day is.

00:25I actually have been lifting weights

00:26since I was like 10 years old.

00:27My father got me into it when I was little

00:28because I was kind of an awkward, clumsy kid.

00:30And he was like,

00:31look, your grades are good.

00:33You're plenty smart,

00:34but you look like a dumbass on the baseball field.

00:36So let's see if we can fix that.

00:38He had gotten into powerlifting training,

00:39and so I've trained pretty much in that modality my whole life.

00:42And yeah, I'm banged up and kind of bruised joints as a result.

00:46But yeah, I still love it.

00:47And it's a big part of my sort of mental health practice at this point.

00:50So I'm gonna be 45 this year.

00:53So my workout goals at this point are to stay healthy,

00:55to move well, and to be strong.

00:58It's balancing that with joint health.

01:00And yeah, I mean, you know, when you have to do photo shoots

01:02and then when you take your shirt off,

01:03you want to be able to be within a couple of weeks

01:06of not being embarrassed about that.

01:11So this is just a mobility exercise.

01:14It's a kickstand hinge airplane.

01:16I do have a hip injury.

01:17That's kind of gonna be a chronic thing, I think.

01:19It's not something that's gonna resolve itself.

01:21It's limited my mobility to a certain extent.

01:24So that's why we're using the kickstand instead of doing the full expression of the balloon.

01:29So this is a 90-90 knee tap, which is actually a new exercise for me.

01:33I'm just learning how to do it.

01:34But it's basically just, I think, mobility and control through the range of motion at the joint.

01:41This is a 90-90 heel tap, not a knee tap.

01:43I'm still learning how to do this, actually.

01:45So if I keep doing it, I'll grimace a lot.

01:48Yeah, this is just one set of 10 each side.

01:56So this is a split stance ball slam.

01:59So I'm catching here, basically like stabilizing in this off-balance position.

02:08Usually I use a non-decorative ball that bounces a little better.

02:13And you can see, probably, like, for me to get this position is a little bit more difficult than this side.

02:25So this is the second part of a three-movement warm-up circuit.

02:28It's just a single-arm down dog.

02:31I've been asked to stop working out before because it was playing period characters,

02:35and they didn't want me to, I mean, it's just not period appropriate to look,

02:38you know, like, yoked in a contemporary way.

02:40Between season one and season two of The Gilded Age, I was just at home.

02:43It was still kind of the pandemic.

02:45I didn't have that much to do, so I was just working out constantly.

02:49And I did put on, like, five pounds of mainly muscle.

02:55And you can see it in season two.

02:56There's a scene where I take my jacket off, and I look a little big for the period.

03:01Like, I don't look like a guy who sits behind a desk.

03:05Not ideal, but usually on that show, I'm, you know,

03:07I'm wearing big coats, so you can't tell I can look like anything.

03:11This is the third movement of this three-movement circuit,

03:14which is a side plank with a kettlebell.

03:19Supposed to be a medicine ball, but I don't have one the right size.

03:24So this is just held for six breaths.

03:26Okay, so now I am going to box squat.

03:36The way I'm doing a box squat is I'm landing on the plyo box.

03:39I'm actually, like, leaning back.

03:42I'm trying to then relax, and then I'm accelerating out of the bottom position.

03:47I don't know if Louie Simmons would find that acceptable, but that's how I'm doing it.

03:51I do a few warm-up sets before I get up to my work weight.

03:54Right now I'm doing three sets of five, and then I do two sets like max reps

03:58at a kind of percentage of my single rep max.

04:01So it's a sort of like 5-3-1 style program,

04:05but I'm in the phase of doing more sets towards the end.

04:13I haven't trained with my dad in a long time because he lives on the west coast,

04:17but whenever I'm home, yeah, he still has a great gym in our garage,

04:20and I always use it when I'm there.

04:21He had a great friend who was a welder who built all this gym equipment from scratch,

04:27which I didn't have access to, so I had to just buy it.

04:31Boy, it is incredibly weird having people watch you work out.

04:36What a weird thing to do.

04:37I mean, honestly, it's one of the more private things you do.

04:41Like, I wash myself alone, like, I shower alone, and I work out alone.

04:46Like, these are, yeah.

04:48I mean, it's funny because I was a child of the 80s,

04:52and it was that moment we used to watch He-Man.

04:55And there's a really interesting book about how He-Man was really developed

04:58sort of in the aftermath of pumping iron,

05:01and Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming this enormous star,

05:04and just sold to children as, like, this toy.

05:07I mean, the whole point was selling the toys.

05:08No, it wasn't the cartoon.

05:09But I was really steeped in that growing up,

05:11this sort of, like, form of male body that hadn't existed before.

05:16But yeah, it's not...

05:18There's part of me that has always been, like,

05:20someone hire me to get enormous.

05:22Like, let me take steroids.

05:24Let me get huge.

05:26But that's not really...

05:27You can't be an actor and have a body like that.

05:28You have to be able to put on clothes and cover it up.

05:30So the nice thing about training for strength is that

05:33you don't necessarily have to train for hypertrophy.

05:36You certainly don't have to eat for hypertrophy.

05:38So mostly I don't.

05:40Yeah.

05:41This is a front foot elevated reverse lunge.

05:45This is one of my least favorite exercises that I do

05:49because right now, anything unilateral really lets me feel

05:52how different I am right to left.

05:55You know, people talk about training age.

05:57I have been doing this now for 35 years,

05:58so my training age is really advanced.

06:01And the wear and tear on my joints

06:04and my back and all that stuff is real

06:06and something I need to sort of be aware of.

06:08You know, I've had bad injuries.

06:10I've had back injuries where I couldn't walk for, like, days.

06:15But yeah, so I'm trying to really strengthen

06:18all these muscles around here to the extent that I can without pain.

06:20So my hip flexors and my adductors to the extent that I can

06:25within a kind of comfortable range.

06:27So finding the sort of new range of my hip mobility,

06:30strengthening it within that range,

06:32and then trying to keep everything juicy.

06:37You know, when I find if I just totally back off,

06:40I feel much worse.

06:42My mobility starts to be limited.

06:43I can't, you know, I just don't feel good moving around in my body.

06:45So it's a question of sort of finding that balance of how much training stimulus

06:49is helpful and means you're stronger and healthier,

06:52and how much it means you're overtraining and damaging yourself.

06:56My father really educated himself when he got into weightlifting and then educated me.

07:00The thing that he always focused on more than anything else was just form,

07:03that you let form be a limiting factor.

07:05You never push beyond where your technique can take you.

07:08I think that has stood me in pretty good stead.

07:10Although if I had it all to do again, I actually think I would do Olympic lifting

07:15as opposed to powerlifting, just because it's technically more challenging,

07:19but it's more athletic and it requires more mobility.

07:22You can see the way powerlifters move as opposed to the way Olympic lifters move,

07:25and I think the Olympic lifters have an edge there, yeah.

07:29So that's it. That's my workout.

07:31Try it, have fun with it, and keep moving.

Morgan Spector | Train Like | Men's Health

Category

Transcript

Recommended