The fifth installment of the Bourne series hits theaters this Friday. But since February, when the trailer for Jason Bourne debuted during Super Bowl 50, worldwide buzz has surrounded the stunning physical transformation of actor Matt Damon.
The Oscar winner is sporting significantly larger biceps and sharper traps more resemblant of an MMA fighter, which suits this version of Bourne, who these days has been crushing skulls of opponents in European underground fight clubs in an effort to clear his own head. Damon’s makeover into the “$100 million human weapon” is the result of a four-week, high-intensity, heavy-weight metabolic training program prescribed by celebrity trainer Jason Walsh, owner of L.A.’s Rise Nation.
Walsh is also the trainer who helped actor Bradley Cooper add 40 pounds for American Sniper and John Krasinski beef up for the Benghazi-based thriller 13 Hours and the upcoming Jack Ryan series. He first met Damon after receiving an offer to help the actor get in shape for his role in the 2013 film Elysium and began training him at his Rise Movement studio. “We had to build Matt from the foundation up,” Walsh recalls.
Reaching the finish line to JasonBourne, according to Walsh, was a humbling-yet-satisfying 18-month process for Damon, dating back to when he helped prepare him for his Golden Globe–winning performance in The Martian.
“[Bourne’s] an efficient killing machine. He looked like he had been doing a lot of street fighting and stuff like that. So that was the look we went for.” Walsh says. “Now the training that we did [for Bourne] was intense. But was Matt ready for it? Oh, yeah. His body was strong, resilient. All we needed to do was have fun.”
For Damon to pack on muscle, Walsh stressed solid movement patterns with lunges, squats, and crawls so when it was time to begin the loading phase, “the wheels wouldn’t fall off,” he says.
So the foundation was laid, beginning with body-weight movements to work on Damon’s overall mobility and strength, such as the Bulgarian split squat.
Walsh says most people lack mobility, flexibility, and strength, and Damon was no different. “We had to work on this in order to load him without breaking him,”
Walsh says. He began with performing 15–20 reps of bodyweight Bulgarian split squats, but over time, basic body weight became slow and more controlled isometric-type movements. From The Martian to his next project, The Great Wall in the spring of 2015, Damon’s progression climbed steadily.
By the time Bourne was set for filming, nearly a year later, Damon was repping out with a staggering 125-pound dumbbells in each hand. “That’s strong,” Walsh says. “He loved Bulgarian split squats. And those were really good for him because they helped him with mobility, but they also helped with strength. Try it. It’s a huge demand on the lungs and the metabolic system.”
Walsh would shock Damon’s metabolism further, pairing Bulgarians with single-leg landmine Romanian deadlifts and hip thrusts with a 60-second rest between sets: “Your heart begins pumping through your chest. That’s pure hell.”
From there, Damon became hooked on the idea of fitness. He would bang out 70 to 100 pullups daily, according to the various challenges Walsh would throw at his client. VersaClimber sprints at Rise Nation rounded out his conditioning with the occasional four- to five-mile “recovery run” to give Damon a break from the gym monotony.
“He digs it. Once you get a taste of it and know what true strength is, the fact that he’s eliminated all aches and pains, it all makes sense [to him now]. It’s like, if I want to play with my kids the rest of my life then I need to stay in shape, stay healthy.”
