Celebrity workouts often set tongues wagging because of their brutal nature; the 300 cast’s fabled 300-rep lift-athon; Jennifer Garner’s Elektra prep; anything Arnold Schwarzenegger touches. However, this one from Chris Hemsworth isn’t so brutal – trust me, I tried it.

That’s not to say it isn’t effective. The session has all the hallmarks of a potent muscle-building workout, it just didn’t leave me feeling trashed like other trendy fitness challenges.

This “look good, feel good” approach was key for Hemsworth’s longtime PT and CENTR trainer Luke Zocchi as he prepared the star for 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday.

The focus, he tells me, was on beefing up certain body parts in line with what would be on screen. “He’s seen the costume, and you can really see his shoulders and his arms”. This was done with 45-minute strength training sessions, completed every other day.

I quizzed Zocchi on what these efficient muscle-building sessions might look like and, ever-generous, he shared one of the pair’s five-move shoulders, arms and chest workouts.

It felt rude not to take the protocol for a spin, and when I did, I was impressed by the return on investment it offered.

How to do Chris Hemsworth’s Avengers: Doomsday workout for bigger arms and shoulders

Complete the exercises listed below as straight sets – perform all sets of one exercise, resting for 60 seconds between each set, then move on to the next exercise. For the first (seated dumbbell shoulder press) and last (cable machine straight bar triceps pushdown) exercise, perform a three-step drop set on the final set.

To perform a drop set, complete as many reps as possible with your working weight then drop the weight by 10-20 per cent and immediately complete as many repetitions as possible with this lower weight. After this, lower the weight by another 10-20 per cent and, without rest, complete a set to failure. Repeat this process one final time to complete the three-step drop set.

Exercise	Sets	Reps	Rest
Warm-up shoulder circuit with light dumbbells (lateral raise, front raise, overhead press)	3	8 (on each exercise)	60 seconds (after each circuit)
Seated dumbbell shoulder press (three-step dropset on final set)	4	8-12	60 seconds
Incline dumbbell bench press	3	12	60 seconds
Single-arm cable lateral raise	4	12 (each side)	60 seconds
Cable machine rear delt flye	3	15	60 seconds
Cable machine straight bar triceps push-down (three-step drop set on final set)	3	12	60 seconds

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In ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’, Zocchi says Hemsworth reached a size he was uncomfortable with as it impacted his ability to do activities he loves such as surfing (Marvel Studios)

Four things I found when I tried Chris Hemsworth’s Avengers: Doomsday workout

Intention is king

For optimal muscle-building, there is an overwhelming amount of research pointing towards the need to take an exercise to, or close to, the point of muscular failure. In action this means that, over the course of a set, your working muscles have tired to the point that you can’t perform another rep with good form.

To achieve this, you can’t coast through your workouts. Every exercise must be performed with the correct intention, using a weight heavy enough to challenge you for the requisite number of reps.

I found the drop sets in this workout were a fantastic way to reinforce this message. By lowering the weight and taking the subsequent sets to failure, I was repeatedly delivering a muscle-building stimulus to the working muscles. This approach ensured intensity too – each drop set left my brow sodden and my shoulders feeling like they were filled with lead for a minute or two afterward.

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Centr trainer Luke Zocchi has revealed the workout Chris Hemsworth is using to build muscle in his shoulders and arms for Avengers: Doomsday (Centr)

Sweat is not a measure of a good workout

As a fitness writer, A-list trainers and elite athletes have set me plenty of challenges over the years. Many of these challenges have put me in the proverbial bin, but this one didn’t.

Sure, it was challenging in places – training for muscle growth needs to be if it is to be effective. But by keeping to five exercises, 45 minutes and a nice blend of compound and isolation movements, the workout managed to avoid obliterating my nervous system and left me energised for the day ahead.

As I stood in the gym changing room after my morning workout, enjoying the momentary post-workout pump to several mirror muscles, I still felt fairly fresh. For Hemsworth, I imagine recoverable sessions like this are preferable when an intense day of filming lingers on the horizon.

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Chris Hemsworth has been playing Thor since 2011 (YouTube)

Strength training sessions don’t need to take hours

The marathon workouts of golden-age bodybuilders such as Arnold Schwarzenegger suggest you need to spend hours in the gym to see results. But you and I are not training for Mr Olympia, and Schwarzenegger was not working a 9-5 office job during his competitive bodybuilding days.

You will only benefit from training volumes you can recover from. Given most of us balance our exercise efforts with a busy job, social life, family commitments and more besides, streamlining your time in the gym can often produce improved results. Identify your primary desired outcome, then shape the vast majority of your training around it, cutting out any junk volume that might detract from your goals.

Zocchi’s 45-minute session is a good example of this. By the end, I found the target muscles – the shoulders, triceps and, to a lesser extent, chest – felt well-worked, but not demolished.

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I enjoyed the workout, but because it doesn’t fit with my wider training goals, it isn’t one I would use regularly (Harry Bullmore/The Independent)

Balance is key

The best workout plan is the one that works for you – it has to be sustainable and performed consistently to get results. This is why Zocchi stripped back Hemsworth’s workouts for *Avengers: Doomsday. *

“When we did Thor: Love and Thunder, that was during Covid so we had a year to prep,” he tells me. “[...] We trained super hard for that film, and Chris was huge in it.”

But the heavy gym sessions and high training load left Hemsworth’s body feeling beaten up. He didn’t enjoy eating 10 meals per day to support this intense regime, and found his heavier frame made it harder to surf – one of his favourite hobbies.

“This time he was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know if I want to do that again’,” Zocchi continues. “We haven’t killed ourselves anywhere near as much on this one and he still looks really good. Because he’s built that foundation [of fitness and muscle] so many times, I think it’s a bit easier to get back to that point.”

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Pictured here in ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’, Hemsworth’s costume for ‘Avenger’s: Doomsday’ highlights his shoulders and arms, so building muscle in these areas has been a focus of his training (Marvel Studios/Disney)

The split didn’t fit my specific needs

A big problem with the fitness world at the moment is the lack of nuance. A trendy workout does the rounds and everyone embeds it in their exercise plans; a new study comes out and everyone uses it to dictate their training.

The problem is, everyone has a different training focus and physiology which needs to be considered to deliver the best results. Science is excellent for informing your training approach – trial, error and experience are undervalued tools for finding what truly works for you.

This workout nails the brief for Hemsworth, but misses the mark for me as an individual – not because it’s a bad workout, but because it doesn’t align with my current training aims.

I think it’s a great time-efficient session for building larger arms and shoulders, but because it focuses on just a few muscles as part of a wider push-pull-legs workout split, it requires several further strength sessions to cover the entire body and hits each muscle group just once per week.

For me, I’ve learned that working each muscle group two or three times per week, via either full-body workouts or an upper-lower body split, serves me well for keeping my strength and muscle on an upward trajectory. This also leaves a few free days for other pursuits such as sports, running, CrossFit and whatever else takes my fancy.

For that reason, it is not one I’m likely to repeat on a regular basis. But I will be stashing it in my back pocket as a fun, efficient hotel gym session for an enjoyable holiday pump.

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