Star Trek's Chris Pine: How He Got Ripped at Warp Speed

He’s got a blockbuster career, leading-man looks, a fast car and an even faster starship. So why isn’t Chris Pine the typical A-list jerk? As we found out, there’s a lot more to Captain Kirk than just swagger.

- Karl Taro Greenfeld

You've never done a workout like Chris Pine’s.

Well, unless you’d describe your own routine as a martial-arts sequence from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon crossed with a big-league cleanup hitter’s on-deck routine, with a few moves from The Nutcracker thrown in for good measure.

It turns out that Pine—yes, Captain Kirk in the smash-hit Star Trek films, a fit, sharp-jawed leading man if ever there was one—maintains his physique not by hitting the weights like every other ripped big-name actor in Hollywood, but by swinging “Clubbells,” giant, heavy, metal bats. It’s a workout so throwback that his trainer, Mark Wild man, describes it as “Cain kills Abel.”

“These movements,” Wild man says, pausing to hoist a club bell that looks like a kid’s Fisher-Price bat—only made of steel—“are why wooly mammoths went extinct.”

It’s a Friday morning in Glendale, CA, and I’ve joined Pine at Wildman’s studio, a brightly lit space with exercise mats and floor to-ceiling windows, where we swing Club bells with varying degrees of success. In fitness terms, the workout’s closest analogue is a kettlebell session—you grip a weight and perform lunges, squats, presses, and lifts; but with Club bells there’s a greater emphasis on grace and flow. Only I’m not so graceful, and more than once I pound my club into the wall by accident.

Pine, meanwhile, looks firmly at ease wielding his giant Bamm Bamm weapons, and drives them elegantly through some invisible strike zone (or, if you’d prefer, mastodon’s skull) with crushing power, all the while managing to keep himself perfectly balanced.