Pro Athlete Trainer Critiques Jake Gyllenhaal’s “Road House” Workout

If you wanted to know all about Jake Gyllenhaal’s workout for his new movie “Road House”, then you’ve come to the right place. In this video, I am going to break down what Jake’s workout looks like and what he did in pursuit of the body that he achieved for this movie. Just like I’ve done for every celebrity workout critique that I have done in the past, I am going to be respectful and provide an unbiased review of Jake Gyllenhaal’s workout for Road House. Not only that, I am going to break down what parts of the workout you can add to your own as well as what might be unnecessary for your training. To preface this video, I don’t have access to Jake’s entire workout program that he used to prepare his body for this movie, but we do have a snippet thanks to a recent video from Men’s Health. In that video, you get an example of the type of training that Jake Gyllenhaal did, but because it’s simply a small sample size of what he did, I can’t necessarily say that his programming was entirely good or bad. Without the important information, saying one way or the other would be an unfair critique and that’s what I want to avoid when doing these celebrity workout reviews. That said, to start off, Jake does some flexibility work with poles. Now before you think that there is something special or even gimmicky about the poles, that is not the case. These help you to perform assisted stretches. In very much the same way that a squat rack could help you increase a pec minor stretch or a bench can improve a thoracic mobility drill, these help push you beyond your passive limits. From here we see some work on the Proteus. This athletic training device is one that many pro athletes and sports teams use. It provides three dimensional resistance, particularly for rotation dominant athletes. Here, with Jake preparing to be a fighter in Road House, he wanted to move and perform like one. Given the dual benefit of conditioning to help him get cut and lose weight for the movie as well as train his core, this seemed like a good choice. If you don’t have access to this you can perform a landmine twist exercise, as shown in the video. Next we see some isometric work. While I think traditional isometrics performed as resistive holds are good and can increase strength within a limited range of motion from where the isometric is performed, I think there are even better benefits that come from performing overcoming isos. There are a few examples shown in the video to help you get the concept and learn how they improve type ii muscle fiber recruitment. Keeping with the theme of athletic training, up next is sled work. Here we get a good eccentric free exercise that can be done for both strength development in the legs as well as conditioning. Because of the lack of eccentric stress we can perform these multiple times per week without accruing muscle soreness. Now some would argue that there isn’t any traditional weight training being performed here. Well, that’s where the squat and bench press come in. Both exercises are here and have been progressively overloaded. The choices of a safety squat bar and swiss bar seem to be to accommodate a bad shoulder for Jake Gyllenhaal. Though different, I don’t believe they are a compromise and therefore have no problem with them. Continuing on we have chain pushups. This is actually not a gimmick exercise. The chains help to better match the resistance curve of the exercise to make it challenging throughout the entire range of motion. At the bottom of the rep the chains are piling up on the floor and unweighting. At the top, where we are strongest, the chains are lifted and more total weight is added to the system. We finish up with some cross body movement patterns, push/pull combos and some interval based cardio to end. I like the placement of the cardio at the end of the workout so as not to interfere with hypertrophy training as a rule, but here, where the pattern of the workouts is very conditioning based as it is it seems like more of a finisher than it does an avoidance of cardio early on. The push pull patterns are athletic and a great way to train the core. If you are looking to build more strength you can opt for a hang clean and press. Overall, I like Jake Gylllenhaal’s workout. It checks many of the boxes helping him to achieve the body that caused you to look up the workout in the first place. Workout Like Jake Gyllenhaal - Subscribe to this channel here - if you are looking for a step-by-step workout program with a meal plan included, be sure to head over to and use the program selector to find the program that best matches your current training goal and ability levels. For more celebrity workout reviews, make sure to subscribe to this channel here on YouTube and remember to turn on your notifications so you never miss a new video when it’s published.