What Is Hugh Jackman Doing On The Concept2? I Think I’ve Worked It Out

Hugh Jackman returning to the role of Wolverine in the forthcoming Deadpool 3 film, which can mean only one thing—he’s hitting the gym very, very hard.

As he prepares to play the clawed crusader, the Aussie actor has been sharing workout clips with his modest 31.5 million followers on Instagram.

These include touch-and-go reps of trap bar deadlifts (at somewhere between 285lb and 330lb by my estimation) and a bit of bench press accompanied by the caption: “Hurts so good.” Because not even Wolverine is above a bro sesh.

And while Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine workouts will always involve heavy lifting, that’s not all he does. Jackman’s latest post shows him in the gym hitting what looks to be a short, max-effort interval on a Concept2 RowErg.

He paired the post with the description: “Literally a millisecond more! #throwbackthursday #becomingwolverineagain.”

But what on earth was he trying to do?

When the camera pans round to the monitor it shows that Jackman was on the fourth interval of his rowing session, covering 126 meters in about 20 seconds at 40 strokes/minute. The screen also reveals the rest time he has remaining (a little over one minute) and his total rowing distance of 614 meters—suggesting short, sharp and fast efforts.

Jackman tags trainer Beth Lewis in the Instagram post, who recently shared a video on the social media site about 100m repeats.

She describes them as max-effort intervals. For her session, she did six intervals in total, each taking about 20 seconds. Her total workout time was just over 11 minutes, suggesting rests of about 90 seconds.

Lewis writes that intense training protocols like this can be “invigorating, give us a rush of adrenaline, train much needed power production, take less time, and they aren’t boring”. But she warns against exercising like this every day.

“If you are always ‘maxing out’ or even moving like you’re maxing out, something is eventually going to break.” That’s where working with a coach such as Lewis pays dividends—they have the experience to know when to add max-efforts into a training plan.