Just to kind of talk about boxing a little bit and how boxing gets into your blood, I didn't appreciate boxing at all. After four to four and a half hours a day, six days a week for three months before we started filming, I wanted more. I felt like I maybe only needed about two months of training. "I found that the second I thought I knew something about boxing, I really didn't know that much. Swank did not have that specific experience, but was surprised by what boxing took to master on even a basic level. Morgan Freeman's character in Million Dollar Baby says that boxing is backwards. That's the only way I can probably explain it." The only way I can explain it is if you were to take a jump rope and go as fast as you could for three minutes while someone's punching you in the stomach. The cardio, you don't stop moving, you don't stop punching and you're getting hit. Three minutes? That's nothing.' In my second round, I was halfway through three minutes and I about threw up, the first time I sparred. The first time I heard a three minute round, I thought, ‘Wow, I'm going to kick someone's ass.
"Boxing is the most intense workout you can ever experience. But I'm not in a gym lifting anymore and I'm not drinking egg whites and I'm not drinking flax oil and I'm not waking up and drinking protein shakes." I'm not obsessed about it but I like to do it. "I've dropped most of the weight just I don't lift weights. Needless to say, Swank can no longer afford to devote that much time to her physique, but she still stays in shape.
So I slept nine hours a night but I had to wake up in the night and drink protein shakes because I couldn't go that long without eating." "The thing was, I needed nine hours of sleep a night because your muscles have to be able to rest in order to build or you actually reverse yourself. Like one tablespoon of Flax oil has like 15 grams of fat in it."Įven her sleep was coordinated into her daily regimen. Flax is a really important oil for your brain and to also just keep everything moving when you're eating that much protein. So with a meal, I would drink my egg whites because I could never eat 8 to 12 egg whites in a sitting. Now, your body can only assimilate so much protein, so I had to eat every hour and a half. And in order to do that, I had to eat 210 grams of protein a day. "The producers asked me to gain 10 pounds of muscle. "My training was two and a half hours of boxing and approximately an hour and a half to two hours lifting weights every day, six days a week," Swank said.
To portray a female boxer, she had to not only learn how to box, but mold her body into the guise of someone who has probably spent her whole life training. Take Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby. From Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 to Jennifer Garner on TV's Alias, women have been transforming themselves to appear in short segments of entertainment through means that take months and months of real time. With all the tough girls in Hollywood now, audiences may take for granted what it takes to be buff and toned. Hilary Swank talks training, boxing and Clint in Million Dollar Baby