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Lupita Nyong'o is no stranger to intense workouts — see: her exercise-ball ab workouts [2] and the six-week workout plan [3] she used to get strong for "Black Panther [4]" — but her role in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" required a special kind of training. For the highly anticipated "Black Panther" sequel [5], Nyong'o had to be ready to visit the aquatic world of Talokan, which meant training on their turf . . . aka underwater.
Nyong'o recently gave fans a taste of what that was like. In an Instagram video [6] posted Nov. 18, the 39-year-old actress showed snippets of her underwater workouts and captioned the post, "Swimming down to Talokan was not as easy as it looked!" No kidding. Nyong'o wasn't just logging laps [7] or practicing her flip turn. Her training consisted of swimming drills, crawling and walking along the bottom of the pool, and walking up underwater steps — all while holding one or two dumbbells in her hands. And of course, Nyong'o did it all while holding her breath, with no oxygen tank in sight. "I felt like a crawfish," she says at one point during the video.
It's not a regimen you'd attempt without some expert guidance and coaching, and Nyong'o assures us that she was "safely supervised" by Mark Roberts [8], a human performance specialist and trainer with XPT Fitness, a "performance lifestyle system" by former pro athletes Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece. In a 2014 article he wrote for Men's Journal [9], former pro surfer Hamilton extolled the benefits of working with weights in the water, an approach he attributes to ancient Hawaiians.
"It's a brilliant technique, because it removes any injury-inducing impact from a workout [11]," Hamilton explained in the article. He added that the weighted water workouts produce "better results than strength training or swimming alone," because a weight that might feel manageable on land "takes far more effort to swim with underwater, and it boosts your heart rate faster than a freestyle stroke."
Turns out, it's also a pretty smart way to train for an action movie with lots of underwater scenes. Check out Nyong'o's full training video above.
