Inside the Diet and Workout Routine of The Rock’s Stuntman

Keeping pace with D.J. ain't easy

The Rock's Stuntman
(Credit: Tanoai Reed/Instagram)

One of The Rock’s T-shirts from his Under Armour Project Rock collection reads “HARDEST WORKER IN THE ROOM.” He’s wearing it in 95 percent of the workout videos he posts to Instagram, and it’s difficult to disagree with him. After all, the man absolutely dominates life.

But even if there’s nobody working harder than The Rock, there’s one man who certainly has to keep pace. That would be his cousin Tanoai Reed, a Hawaiian stuntman of almost two decades, who has been on sets with Johnson from The Scorpion King (a cheesy Mummy prequel released in 2002), to his two-blockbusters-a-year MO of today, the latest of which is Fast & Furious spin-off Hobbs & Shaw.

Reed’s got a dangerous job, as you might imagine. He’s broken shins, ankles and ribs from on-set fights, torn ligaments running away from explosions or hanging off the back of cars, and once put his arm through a piece of glass, which an ER doctor likened to being bitten by a shark. But almost more difficult than all that, he’s gotta look like The Rock.

No easy feat. In a recent interview with GQ, Reed explained his process in mimicking The Rock’s preposterous (and often changing, depending on the role) physique. His day-to-day diet includes intermittent fasting; he’ll fast for 16 hours, consuming only water or black coffee, exercise on an empty stomach, then eat in an eight hour window that begins around 1pm. He’ll load his plate with chicken breast and vegetables and make sure he has twice as many vegetables as carbs. Unlike his doppelgänger, Reed won’t indulge in cheat meals once a week. When he eats a cheeseburger, he just makes sure his next few meals are clean.

As for working out, though, he does things by The Rock’s book. That means one body part a day usually, more abs if the next movie has more shirtless scenes. Check out an example of Reed’s warmup for a workout here. That thing he’s pushing is called The Tank; it uses magnets to push any force you exert on it right back at you. Making pushing it … really hard. Hang in there, Tanoai.

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