How a fitness trainer can shape ‘normal’ people

Harry Bullmore gets workout advice from Tim Blakeley, who transformed the physique of ‘Gladiator 2’ star Paul Mescal

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Actors seem to transform their bodies in the blink of an eye.

One day they have a fairly relatable physique, the next they’re starring in an action film and look like a Greek statue.

But what happens behind the scenes to make these rapid changes possible? To find out, I went straight to the source: Media Physiques founder Tim Blakeley. Blakeley is a trainer with more than 25 years of experience, and the man behind Paul Mescal’s muscled torso in Gladiator 2 - not to mention his work with Glen Powell, Gerard Butler, Joe Quinn and many more.

As someone described by Mescal as “the biggest man I have ever seen in my life,” Blakeley is also a master of building muscle, with bulging biceps that double as a supplementary CV.

The methods behind his A-list clientele’s impressive physical transformations are surprisingly simple. But simple doesn’t mean easy.

You might expect a celebrity trainer to bombard their clients with exercises you’ve never heard of, high-tech training equipment and pricey recovery tools. Not so with Blakeley.

“This is a boring answer, because everyone’s always looking for that shiny new thing, but it’s the basics that will get you more results than any fancy new exercise or supplement,” he says.

Novel methods are easy to sell; that is why you see so many of them on social media. But Blakeley says the brawny person you see demonstrating a new exercise on Instagram most likely built it with good old-fashioned strength training, then filmed this visually interesting exercise as an afterthought.

“I’ve been in this industry for 25 years and I’ve been involved in bodybuilding at quite a high level, and nothing has really changed all that much,” he says “People are still pretty much doing the same stuff.