Halle Berry Credits Her Six-Pack Abs to Boxing and MMA Training

To celebrate #FitnessFriday, Halle Berry showed off her six-pack abs in a photo taken at her boxing gym. As a longtime boxer, the 54-year-old actress has called the full-body workout the secret to her strong core, since it tones while burning fat.

“Who wants this smoke?” the Bruised star wrote. “p.s. @peterleethomas & I have curated a fitness program that takes #fitnessfriday to a whole new level 💪🏽 head on over to @respin to #respinyourfit.”

Even though she’s been boxing for over a decade, the John Wick 3 actress has been working seriously with her trainer Peter Lee Thomas for at least five years, and said in 2018 that boxing is “one of the best full-body workouts.” She continued: “You’ll sculpt every muscle and burn major calories and fat. It dramatically decreases stress levels, develops hand-eye coordination, and builds confidence and discipline. But most importantly…you’ll never stop learning.”

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In an essay for Women’s Health published last year, the former Bond girl explained that she built a strong core while doing gymnastics as a child, but the key to maintaining your core is switching up your workouts. “Over the years, I’ve done my fair share of crunches and situps, but one of the biggest game-changers for my abs over the years has been martial arts,” Berry wrote.

“Depending on the week, between 30 to 50 percent of my workouts focus on mixed martial arts (MMA) like jiu jitsu, Muay Thai, and capoeira. When you’re practicing MMA, you’re using your core the whole damn time. You’re constantly bracing, twisting, and ducking. It’s a recipe for really strong abs.”

While training for the film Bruised, where she portrayed an MMA fighter, Berry spent an hour doing strength training which included 15 minutes of ab work—in addition to four hours of MMA—every day. “What really made a difference, too, was that instead of doing bodyweight abs exercises, we added weight to everything. As a result, my abs muscles really started popping,” she wrote. “During my daily 15 minutes of core work, I did sit-ups holding a medicine ball or dumbbell, leg raises wearing ankle weights, and hollow holds with dumbbells or wrist weights and ankle weights.”

These days, Berry is back to four to five hour-long workouts per week, and based on her recent Instagram posts, she and her trainer Peter are hard at work developing fitness content.

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