After becoming bored with his day-in, day-out regime of ‘wake up, go to work, go to the gym, repeat’ Mark Webster decided to shake things up a bit.
And what better way to redress the balance in your life than to spend a month trying to eat and train like Dwayne Johnson – aka The Rock.
In order to maintain his legendary physique, Johnson eats more than 5,000 calories a day.
He spreads these over seven meals, including a mighty 2.3 pounds of cod a day as well as eggs, steak, chicken, vegetables and potatoes.
When Webster read about Johnson’s daily routine he saw a life he wanted to try for a month, and he decided to document his experience online.
The main things he took away from the experience is that being The Rock is tiring – and pretty damn expensive. He spent a total of $1,262 (£873) on food, which works out to about $42 (£30) per day, including $18 (£12) worth of cod.
It’s not just the financial cost though – it also takes up a lot of time.
According to FiveThirtyEight, every two or three days Webster spent an hour and a half on food prep.
On top of that, each of his seven meals takes about 20 minutes to eat, meaning he has to dedicate two hours and 20 minutes a day just to eating.
Webster said:
The biggest thing with the eating is the interruption of your day. Every few hours, you have to stop and eat again.
To offset the calories, he imitates The Rock and does an hour of cardio and 90 minutes weight training six days a week.
This routine burns about 3,550 calories every day and is loosely based on the workout Johnson did for Hercules.
So that’s about five hours a day spent prepping food, eating food and working out.
By the end of the month Webster’s weight had barely moved but he had gained a solid amount of muscle mass and estimates his strength has gone up 10 to 15 percent across the board.
However, the major difference he noticed was more subtle:
I’m 37, I got little aches and pains all the time but I have none of those anymore. I feel better than I did before I was doing this.
My resting heart rate has dropped by like four beats per minute over the past month. I feel fantastic.
Amazingly, The Rock heard about Webster’s efforts and even responded to his progress on Twitter.
At first he doubted…
Then he started to come round to the idea…
By the end Webster had earned the big man’s total respect:
However, beware, the plan is not for everyone and Webster told FiveThirtyEight:
You could definitely not go from couch potato to doing this plan. You would probably kill yourself!
He has also gained an incredible amount of respect for The Rock:
This is what this guy does – this is his livelihood.
The fact that he looks like this and trains like this every day of his life while making his movies, being on set 14 hours?
That kind of discipline to me is absolutely amazing.
Mark, we also tip our hats to you! That’s not a diet and workout plan for the faint-hearted…
