Genius! Halle Berry demonstrated a workout that anyone can do from the comfort of their own home — as long as a towel is handy.
The actress’ trainer, Peter Lee Thomas, broke down the details in an Instagram post earlier this month. “This is the perfect at-home, non-weighted, resourceful workout you’ve been looking for!” he wrote. “These moves will truly turn up the heat making great use of our cooling towel during and after training.”
In the accompanying video, Berry, 55, and Thomas did the workout together. They began with a straight arm towel sit-up followed by a straight arm slow Russian twist. The duo then transitioned into a squat, press, jump through and burpee combination as well an overhead towel Bulgarian back lunge and side knee movement. They finished the routine with mega plyo skaters, suggesting 10 to 20 reps for each step of the workout.
Thomas told Shape earlier this month that moving with control is more important than speed when doing the towel exercises. “Slower is usually harder, faster is usually easier, and people do things fast to rush through them so they can just get it done,” he explained, noting that more reps could be added to increase the difficulty level.
The fitness guru revealed that when training Berry, he uses workouts that she “can get a whole lot [from] with very little.”
“I’ll do a ‘resourceful week’ where we’re just using all the things in her path,” he continued, citing split squats with a bench or push-ups with patio furniture as examples. “The following week we’ll do purely outdoor training where we’re flipping tires, we’re using sledgehammers, we’re pushing a sled, we’re doing a lot of animal movements and keeping it primal and fun and integrative and multifaceted versus always being stuck in the gym.”
Berry is committed to her regimen with Thomas. When it rained during an outdoor shoot they had planned, he “told [Berry] we should literally do a rain check and she looked at me and goes, ‘No, we’re going to work out in the rain and we’re going to film it and it’s going to look epic,’” he recounted.
Thomas applauded the Oscar winner’s dedication to fitness in October 2018. “She’s one of those special individuals who, even if she has one to two hours of sleep, she’ll get work done,” he exclusively told Us Weekly at the time. “It will take a lot for her to say, ‘Hey, I can’t train today.’”