Phil Dunster He may be one of the best-known fake soccer players on television, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t make an effort to train like the real ones. The 30-year-old English actor plays mercurial forward Jamie Tartt in the Apple TV+ hit Ted Lasso, and embodying a world-class athlete requires sweat and effort. And a lot.
So when he began preparing for the role, Dunster knew he would have to find a discipline that wouldn’t make physical appearance a huge bore. Since Jamie’s character is such a speedy goal scorer, you would expect most of his show to be soccer-specific. But Dunster had other ideas. “One of the things that I really wanted to do as I approached preparing for Ted Lasso was to find a type of exercise that I would enjoy. and that it wasn’t as tedious as lifting heavy things and putting them back down,” he told the Men’s Health team. “One of the things I really wanted to do was Olympic weightlifting.”
Dunster worked with trainer Nat Liu Roach to develop a hybrid plan of Olympic weightlifting and hypertrophy so that he could throw heavy weights and train to develop explosiveness while honing some of the “Hollywood muscles” that would appear on screen. “Footballers have to work a lot on explosiveness. Fortunately, I don’t have to have the stamina of a professional footballer,” says Dunster. “So I was able to work on explosiveness a lot.”
Dunster and Roach walked through an example of one of their sessions, going from a substantial warmup to an Olympic weightlifting block. which uses an EMOM structure: Dunster performs two repetitions at the beginning of each minute, then rests until the next one begins. After that, he shifts the workout to some muscle-building focused moves, then ends with a quick conditioning move.
Check out Dunster’s training while the third season of Ted Lasso premieresBut don’t jump into the Olympic lifts without the proper preparation. Be sure to learn the form (preferably from a trainer like Roach if possible) before adding these explosive moves to your own sets.
Phil Dunster and his training for Ted Lasso
The warm-up
iron copenhagen
2 sets of 15 seconds
Arm Bar with dumbbell
2 sets of 15 reps
One leg box jump
2 sets of 15 reps
olympic lifting
7 minutes – snatch
2 reps every minute
7 minutes – Hang Clean
2 reps every minute
Hypertrophy Block
Bulgarian split squat
3 sets of 6 reps per leg
Dumbbell Bent Over Row
3 sets of 8 reps
Incline Dumbbell Bench Press
3 sets of 8 reps
abdominal wheel
3 sets of 12 to 15 reps
Conditioning
sled drag
3 rounds of 30 meters
