Wellness
Jurnee Smollett is in her gym bag. And we mean that literally. The actress gained 20 pounds of muscle for her role in Apple TV+'s crime drama miniseries, Smoke, which premiered June 27. Playing the role of a former Marine meant getting stronger mentally as well as physically, something the 38-year-old believed was paramount to her portrayal of Detective Michell Calderon.
"I'm playing a former Marine, and so it just felt like I needed to put on more muscle," Jurnee shared in her Women’s Health "Strong Like" feature. She teamed up with celebrity trainer Jeanette Jenkins to focus on building strength week after week, "lifting heavier and heavier and heavier."
Her gym sessions usually start with some sort of yoga flow before and after. "My body truly needs some sort of warming up." Next, it's time for boxing drills followed by a full strength training circuit with an emphasis on glute activation.
"We fire the glutes before we do the heavy lifts because so many people will do heavy deadlifts, heavy squats," Jeanette explains, "and they'll feel a lot of the work in the quads and they won't necessarily feel it in the glutes."
Jurnee's Glute-Focused Strength Circuit includes:
- Banded Squat Abductions
- Deadlifts
- Sumo Squats
- Hip Thrusts
- Single-Leg Deadlifts (starting at 45 lbs)
- Cable Kickbacks
- Leg Lifts
- Straight Abductions
The one thing Jurnee can't live without in the gym? Music. "I only listen to hip-hop or Beyoncé when I work out," she tells Women's Health, noting that she keeps "I'M THAT GIRL" from Act I: Renaissanceheavy on rotation. "You have to hype yourself up, you know? Especially when it’s early in the morning, your hair is everywhere, and you don’t feel like doing anything."
Jurnee first got into strength training after the birth of her son, Hunter, while preparing for another role, the superhero Black Canary for DC's Birds of Prey. "My joints were feeling really wobbly," she shared of her fitness level at the time. "I had nursed him for a really long time. I nursed him for a total of three years, so my body was depleted of a lot of important nutrients. Kinda happens with being a mom."
She continued, regarding her training split at the time and how it informed her reintroduction into the world of strength training, "I was also doing a lot of stunt training... I was working out six days a week, making sure I could stay lean and flexible and strong... That's really where I started focusing on my strength training."
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Featured image by John Angelillo/UPI/Shutterstock
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