How Garfield became the lithe and limber Spider-Man

We were so used to seeing Tobey Maguire on the screen as Peter Parker until two years ago when Andrew Garfield was introduced as the new Spidey. The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012 was the British actor’s first leading role.

Although Garfield is naturally athletic and usually stays in good shape, the role of Spiderman was incredibly demanding. For the first movie, he trained nonstop for four months before filming in order to perform the high-flying aerial stunts and fight scenes for the film. Armando Alarcon was Garfield’s personal trainer and he developed a very specific program to prepare the new Spiderman for action.

The initial transformation

The first agenda was injury-proofing Garfield’s body. To improve both dynamic flexibility and core strength, he did Pilates.  Once the flexibility and core strength goals were achieved, weightlifting was added to pack muscle to his slender frame. The special training program also included plyometrics and parkour. The combination gave him the athleticism and coordination necessary to do his own stunts.

When interviewed if he was on a diet then, he answered,  ”Yeah, that was tough: a lot of bland food and existential dilemmas… with weights in my hands. It was a very confusing time in my life.”

On his workout, he quipped, ”For four months prior we did… don’t get too excited… seven hours a day, for four months, but two hours was body work and the next three or four hours was all the other stuff like the harness stuff, gymnastics, parkour training, wire work and all that, but it was like summer camp, it was like circus school. Just pure fun.”

Alarcon made Garfield follow the disciplined workout regimen five times in a week. His plyometric exercises included box-jumps, squat jumps, clap push-ups, sprint training, bouncing exercises, etc. targeted to build up his speed and endurance. His high intensity workout involved all the big and small muscle groups of the body.

To achieve the sprightly athletic physique, Alarcon divided Garfield’s workout in two parts. One part looked after his chest, shoulders, and arms or his upper body. The second part sculpted his lower body such as abdomen, legs, thighs, and butts. He practiced intense strength training with 40-pound dumbbells, doing eight to 16 reps and three sets of each exercise. Chin-ups, clean and press, and squats were important parts of his strength training exercises. For toning his lower body, machine leg press, lunges, and calf raise, among others, were added.

Building the second time around

Dedication, commitment, and hard work were involved in Garfield’s physical preparation for the first movie. Now, with a new sequel, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, star Andrew Garfield said that fitting back into that red-and-blue Spider-Man costume “was a feat nearly as reality-defying as Spider-Man swinging between skyscrapers.”

“You have to have a body that looks like it’s super human, which is almost impossible to do — and such a hassle,” he grimaces. “I’m not a gym guy — I like surfing and playing basketball, but I don’t like lifting weights.” He probably wasn’t thrilled, then, to discover that weightlifting formed an integral part of physical trainer Armando Alarcon’s plan to again overhaul Garfield’s body.

“Andrew will say that he is not a guy who likes to work out, or not a weights guy, but his physicality and his ability say otherwise,” says Alarcon, a former soldier and firefighter who now helps actors condition for movie roles. “So even though he says he preferred not to, we still did a lot of it.” In fact, the actor gritted through a one-to-two-hour training session with Alarcon almost every day for about 10 months during the preparation and filming of The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

That massive commitment of time and effort was necessary for the super hero look Garfield had to embody for the sequel — a Spider-Man who is slightly older and stronger than the last time audiences saw him. “He’s not that small teen that he was in the first film, so to make him older, we had to mature the muscles and make them thicker and denser while sculpting the super hero-style body: really nice wide shoulders, big thick back, and a really skinny waist,” says the trainer, who previously worked on films including Thor and The Green Hornet.

“We would stretch and warm up and then move into a very heavy-weighted exercise: all multi-functional moves so his whole body was being used. There were no regular exercises like a bench press or shoulder press,” he says, adding that about half the workout would be lifting weights and the other half consisted of body-weight resistance exercises. “We would then move into several sets of different kinds of exercises, like a reverse lunge with overhead press or catapult. And it would go in levels: something would be semi-hard and then it would be medium and then it would be bodyweighted exercises. And then at the end, we would close out with mostly core and ab work.”

But Garfield’s most intense training routines were used in preparation for the film’s punishing fight scenes. “We created workouts that made him feel so tired and beat-up that by the time he got on set, he was already in the place he needed to be. We did it by having him just constantly lifting and moving, wearing him down mentally and physically.”

Such intense physical exertion meant Garfield had to constantly fuel his body for the demands being placed on it — to the tune of 4,000 to 5,000 calories per day. But Alarcon didn’t let the actor chow down on just anything. “Andrew’s body doesn’t have much fat, which normally provides an immediate source of energy. Without fat, the body attacks muscle to create energy and we didn’t want him to lose any muscle, so we limited him to mostly vegetables and simple lean meats. Every once in a while, he would have pasta and then he would tease me by eating the occasional piece of cake,” Alarcon laughs.

All this was on top of the 12- to 16-hour days Garfield was logging on set. The key to keeping the busy star motivated? “Making it a very energetic environment, so he would get excited about training and we could get 100 percent out of him. That was probably the most difficult part, but then again, Andrew is a gift to work with.”

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(“The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is directed by Marc Webb and produced by Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach. Screen story and screenplay by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci and Jeff Pinkner based on the Marvel comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Opening across the Philippines on April 30 in IMAX 3D, Digital 3D, and 2D formats, “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International.)

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