68 MUSCLE & FITNESS 09.10 MUSCLEaNdFITNESS.CoM 69

Profile John Morrison

MroLyMpIa.CoM 69

WWE Superstar John Morrison ’s training program could cripple a common man, but it keeps him flying high

By mark thorpe // photos By paVel ythjall

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North America — New Albany, Indiana; Hopkinsville, Kentucky; Toronto; Miami; Los Angeles — an arena is stuffed to the klieg lights with 20,000 screaming men, women and children, a spectacle that would make the Roman Coliseum look like a first-grader’s party at Chuck E. Cheese’s. In the center of this frenetic cauldron, a man will clam-ber up a 10-foot ladder in the middle of a 20x20-foot ring made of wood and canvas, with maybe a slip of carpet in between for cushioning, and come crashing down on his back.

What will separate him from the 8,300 common folk who fall from lad-ders every year, about 50 of whom die, is that he’ll peel himself off the canvas

and do it again. Not only that night but night after night, for years.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re a trained professional. It doesn’t matter if you’re the king of crash landings with a PhD in physics. It doesn’t matter if you’re John Morrison, the WWE’s rising superstar, and you make the gym your sanctuary because training dili-gently is the only thing that gets you off the canvas every night. It doesn’t matter because 215 pounds of man hitting the floor from that height generates more than 10,000 pounds of force. “You can fall perfectly and it’s still going to hurt for days,” Morrison says.

And therein lies the rub of success as a sports entertainer: How do you deal with the pain?

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MroLyMpIa.CoM 7170 MUSCLE & FITNESS 09.10

You train. that’s how you

deal with the pain of the WWE. The physi-cal reality of profes-sional wrestling can be summed up in one

word: punishment. To combat its side effects and collateral damage, to help stave off the minor tweaks and prevent permanent ones, the savvy wrestler trains hard. The truly savvy wrestler trains to accommodate the specific attributes he brings to the ring.

Morrison’s athleticism demands a unique approach to training. He’s known as one of the most athletic and acrobatic performers in the WWE. His shows are high-flying affairs in which he unleashes a kind of gladiatorial gym-nastics on his opponents.

“When he steps into the ring, he hits you with an amazing arsenal of moves,” says Rey Mysterio, a 22-year wrestling veteran whose athletic style greatly influenced Morrison. “You can’t really prepare to wrestle him because he’ll come at you with moves you’ve never seen before.”

Yet Morrison’s early life wasn’t marked by athletic exceptionalism. He wasn’t that precocious, snot-nosed daredevil everyone has a story about. “I was never the first kid to do some-thing,” he says. “I did everything by progression, without really knowing it.” Although he wrestled and pole-vaulted in high school, it wasn’t until he was in college that Morrison began to subconsciously prepare himself for a life in the WWE. He had a vague sense that he wanted to be a stuntman or an action hero in movies, but he had no skills specific to those endeavors.

At the University of California, Davis, he joined the kung fu club, the gymnastics club and the breakdancing club. That’s right, breakdancing. And he would learn everything through that steady, unwavering progres-sion. “I’d do hundreds of backflips. First from the ground, then from a little higher, then off a rock-climbing wall,” Morrison says. “I did all of this without knowing I was training myself to be coordinated, to move my body through space.”

Like all marquee wrestlers,

Morrison deals with severe time constraints — currently he flies and drives around the country five days a week, with two

days off — and has to make the most of his time in the gym. To do that, he and training partner Jeff Carrier, NASM-CPT, a personal trainer at Equinox South Bay near Morrison’s home in Manhattan Beach, California, created a program called Out-Of-Your-Mind Training (see page 74).

“If you look at Bruce Lee’s jeet kune do, he basically took all his strengths and the things he liked from other mar-tial arts and made his own discipline,” Morrison says. “That’s what we’re doing, except instead of martial arts it’s a workout that fits my purpose. It’s cos-metic. It’s functional. It’s high-intensity and it stresses injury prevention.”

The program functions much as Morrison does, by using everything at his disposal to build an ever-evolving

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“it’s a workout that fits My PurPose. it’s cosMetic. it’s functional. it’s high-intensity. it stresses inJury Prevention”

Profile John Morrison

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72 MUSCLE & FITNESS 09.10

protocol. “We just created a bunch of movements and workouts that are influenced by urban sports such as parkour, breakdancing, mixed martial arts and surfing,” Carrier says. “Really dynamic movements such as muscle-ups and flagpoles, and we brought them into the gym.”

In the case of the windmill and hyperextension plus lateral raise in Morrison’s back and triceps workout, they combined moves to hit body-parts that need extra care in the ring. Although the various routines in Out-Of-Your-Mind Training may emphasize

specific muscle groups, they almost always indirectly involve the core and stabilizer muscles. Morrison, for his part, prefers to hit his abs directly nearly every time he trains.

“My core is essential to what I do,” he says. “A lot of sports entertainers have low-back problems because when you fall, the impact shoots through your hips to your back. If you don’t have a strong core, your whole body is going to be thrown out of whack. For that reason, I try to do abs 4–5 days a week.”

Supersetting is another reality that defines his training approach. By turn-

ing up the intensity this way, he gets his cardio, ab training and workout done in 45 minutes. But to superset efficiently requires some premeditation. “I like the triceps and ab moves because they fit together nicely,” Morrison says. “If you’re doing lying triceps extensions, the dumbbells are right there — it’s easy to put one between your feet and do a set of weighted leg lifts. When you’re at the dip bars, you can get your abs in there, too.”

And this dedication to his body doesn’t stop when his travel schedule cuts into his beauty rest, either. Myste-

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rio says that even if Morrison gets only 3–4 hours of sleep the night before a show, he’ll drag himself out of bed and hit the gym. “And on days when he doesn’t have time to train, he’ll be back-stage doing some crazy-ass push-ups and handstands,” he says.

Even one of the sport’s biggest stars can’t help but notice Morrison’s work ethic. Says John Cena: “His athleticism is unparalleled. He can do things that no one else can do. It’s a result of not only his God-given talent but his per-sistence in the gym. He’s so well-versed in flexibility and balance that he’s in his own league.”

John morrison could easily be dismissed as a cosmetic anomaly. His physique and rock-star looks, contrived for the arena, suggest that he was meant to sip cock-

tails at Chateau Marmont with a Hilton sister on his arm. But fragile-boned

Out-Of-Your-Mind Training

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models don’t climb ladders, and looks alone won’t get you off the canvas time and again when it feels like your spleen is caught in your throat. For Morrison, the act of getting up defines him.

“I’m always sore from something,” he says. “A jump, a fall that didn’t go right. I never wake up and feel great. But I can’t wait to feel good to work out. I have to force myself to go to the gym whether I want to or not.”

Morrison has seen the better side of seven years in professional wrestling. That means he has had thousands of collisions with the canvas, with ring posts, with other wrestlers. By his own recollection he has been hit with baseball bats, stop signs, ladders, trash cans, kendo sticks, folding chairs, coal miner’s gloves and items long since for-gotten. He has one good knee and one with a torn MCL. Recently he sprained his ankle flying off the top rope onto some Russian heel. Yet his discipline in the gym sustains him.

“Vince McMahon said that intelligence is the application of knowledge,” Mor-rison says. “If you’re training for a reason and disregarding stuff that you know to be true, that’s just stupid. Find your purpose and train to meet it. That’s what I do every time I go to the gym.”

John Morrison and Jeff Carrier, NASM-CPT, a personal trainer at Equinox South Bay in Haw­thorne, California, have trained together for about two years. As Morrison’s career grew increas­ingly busy, he needed a more efficient way to meet his diverse training needs.

His impressive strength, dexterity and flexibility are off the charts, and since his back­ground includes so many dif­ferent disciplines — kung fu, gymnastics, breakdancing, parkour — the duo began fit­ting movement from those activities into a gym environ­ment. The results suited Morrison’s needs perfectly, but the workouts tend to be very advanced and require sub­stantial strength. Because they saw potential in their program for people who might not be so physically gifted or aren’t yet at an advanced level, they’ve adapted it for mere mortals.

“Most people can’t do these moves, so we started regress­ing them,” Carrier says. “We now have several regressions for each movement, which means anybody could come up with a starting point from which to work up to that movement.”

Take the flagpole, for exam­ple. You grasp a pole and hang parallel to the floor, arms fully extended. One regression would be to hook your feet in the cable crossover with the pulley set at the top. Carrier says you actually do the flag­pole in this position but you’re slightly assisted because the cable relieves some of the pressure.

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ExErcisE sEts rEpsMuscle-Up 3–4 6–8Morrison: “This is the only exercise with no superset. I rest 60–90 seconds between sets. I usually get in the zone here because once I move on to the rest of the workout, it’s nonstop.”

Weighted Pull-Up (not pictured) 3–4 4–6

— superset with —

Dumbbell Push Crunch 3–4 15–20Morrison: “Do sets of 4–6, then drop the weight and rep out to failure.”

Morrison: “Anchor your feet, then lift the dumbbells overhead. Your upper abs should burn on this one.”

Low Row 3–4 8–10

— superset with —

Bench Dip With Ball 3–4 8–10 Morrison: “Pull the handle to your lower abs, below your ribs. You want to keep it low.”

Morrison: “This a good way to warm up your tri’s. You can usually switch between the moves quickly.”

Windmill 3 10–15 each side

— superset with —

Pike Chin 3–4 8–12 or to failureMorrison: “Grasp a dumbbell in your right hand and turn your left foot out 90 degrees. With the weight directly overhead, touch the floor by your left instep with your left hand and keep your shoulder engaged. I find that when I look up at the weight, I have the easiest time balancing.”

Morrison: “When you hang from the bar, your palms should face you. This is a brutal superset.”

Hyperextension + Lateral Raise 3–4 10–12

— superset with —

Rope Pushdown + Weighted Crunch (crunch not pictured) 3–4 8–10 Morrison: “Hold the dumbbells just off the floor. Do the hyperextension, then maintain that position and lift the weights. Keep your lats engaged. This really decorates the Christmas tree.”

Morrison: “I do 8–10 reps of standing rope pushdowns, then 20 rope crunches, and repeat. Be sure to keep tension in the cable as you switch between moves.”

Dumbbell Lying Triceps Extension (not pictured) 3–4 8–10

— superset with —

Dumbbell Leg Lift 3–4 10–15Morrison: “Keep your elbows in.”

Morrison: “Hold a dumbbell between your feet, lower it to the floor, then pull your knees to your chest.”

Dip + Leg Lift Superset 3 10,8,6Morrison: “Do this sequence without stopping. Ten dips and 10 leg lifts, eight dips and eight leg lifts, six dips and six leg lifts.” M&F

John Morrison’s Back, Tri’s & Abs Superset Routine

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“find your PurPose and train to Meet it. that’s what i do every day in the gyM”

Profile John Morrison

Catch John Morrison in action at WWE SummerSlam, live on pay­per­view Aug. 15 from the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

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