Margot Robbie’s Crazy Workout Plan To Prep For ‘Suicide Squad’
How to be like Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn? Here’s her intense workout plan that helped prepare her for her role as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad.
Suicide Squad has been a huge success, regardless of the number of negative comments the film has received the past few days. But it is undeniable that much of the success of Suicide Squad is in its incredibly awesome characters–Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn to name one.
Margot Robbie’s flawless Harley Quinn did not just naturally come to her, it seems. Robbie exerted a huge amount of physical and mental preparations to really get into her character. In fact, physically, she had to call up her longtime trainer Andie Hecker to come to Toronto to really drive her to get that Harley Quinn shape. Harley Quinn wore super short sequined pants, cropped top, and a baseball hat–it was the world’s smallest costume and Robbie had to fit into that in just two weeks!
But it’s not all trimming and slimming down. Hecker notes that a huge part of their training was really building Robbie for the supervillain fighter that Harley Quinn is. Since Robbie did most of Harley Quinn’s stunts in Suicide Squad, Robbie really had to get her game face on and face Hecker’s crazy workout plan head on.
“[Margot Robbie] wanted to lean out and tone up. She’s already slender, but we wanted to make her a little stronger.”
To achieve this, Robbie had to do her workout with Hecker two to three hours a day, religiously, in between filming. Before Suicide Squad, Robbie typically trained with Hecker only in one hour durations, four to five times a week. She really had to pump herself and ramp up her workout time for the role.
The LA Times reported the following as what the 26-year-old Robbie had to do every day to get into that perfect Harley Quinn vibe.
CARDIO
Robbie spent between 45 minutes to an hour on a high-energy cardio circuit that alternated between jumps on and off a rebounder trampoline to rope jumping to skipping across a Bosu balance trainer, before ending with rounds of ballet jumps and grueling “mountain climbers.”STRENGTH TRAINING
Lateral raises and circles: Using 3- to 5-pound weights, Robbie would lift arms out to the side for 30 repetitions, before doing 20 circles each, forward and backward. Weighted arabesque: Robbie would lift her leg straight back while wearing 5-pound ankle weights (mere mortals should probably stick to 2.5 pounds) for 20 reps on the right leg and repeat, before moving to the left leg.CORE WORK
Tabletop crunches: Lying flat on her back, with legs in a tabletop position — a 90-degree bend in the knees, shins parallel to the ceiling — she’d extend legs straight out, and then bring them back in for a crunch involving the upper body. Robbie then made them tougher by adding resistance, strapping her feet into the pulleys of a Pilates reformer.Inner and outer thigh work on a Pilates reformer: Standing on the reformer – set on medium to high resistance – Robbie would press out on the carriage for 30 reps with one leg, while simultaneously doing an overhead press with 3- to 4-pound dumbbells. Once those reps were complete, she’d pulse the leg out to the side for an equal number of reps, while holding her arms out to the side in ballet’s second position.
The workout sounds perfectly doable and pretty easy to understand. Hecker’s secret in all her workouts, it seems, is alternating the muscles used in the exercises by mixing up all kinds of things–using full-body exercises plus butt, legs, abs, and arm movements using different tools such as resistance bands and free weights–so the muscles are cheated and do not get used to the exercise. But the real challenge here is the discipline to commit and continue the workout to continue toning your body.
Are you ready to dive into your own Harley Quinn workout?
[Featured photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Carrera]
