With The Northman hitting theaters on April 22nd, I got the chance to experience a small part of the training required for Alexander Skarsgård to play Amleth.

As a young boy, Amleth was destined to take the throne. But, after witnessing his uncle (Claes Bang) murder his father (Ethan Hawke), Amleth is forced to flee his home. Bursting at the seams with rage, Amleth becomes a vicious Viking berserker. While raiding a village, Amleth is reminded of his vow to avenge his father, so he turns that ferocity and battle prowess back towards his uncle by posing as a slave working on his uncle’s farm in Iceland until he's ready to make his move.

The Northman social alexander skarsgard
Image via Focus Features

If you’ve seen even the tiniest stitch of footage from The Northman, you’re well aware that Skarsgård went through an intense training program to be able to shoot Amleth’s fight sequences safely and successfully. We were able to learn a little bit about what that process was like straight from Skarsgård’s trainer, Magnus Lygdback, at the "Train Like the Northman" event in Los Angeles.

Lygdback began by breaking down the three phases of Skarsgård’s fitness program — the bulk-up phase, the cutting phase, and then the maintenance phase. Here’s how he put it:

“You’ve got the build-up, the bulk-up phase, which is the phase where you want to gain as much muscle mass as possible. You want to build a strong foundation making sure that you don’t get injured later when filming. That’s also the phase where you get to eat a lot of food, which is the best, best phase if you ask Alex. Alex loves to eat so ask him and he’ll tell you, that’s his favorite cycle. Then we have a cutting cycle is where you want to try to keep all that muscle mass on and shred some fat. For The Northman we had about three weeks when we did that. Normally I do eight to ten weeks, but we didn’t want Alex to be too shredded. He’s shredded enough, right? And we wanted him to look a little thicker. The maintenance cycle, which is what I’m gonna take you through today, I’m gonna show you what a normal day before working on a set would look like. That’s when you want to keep all that muscle mass on, you want to make sure that you prepare every single day so you don’t get injured while swinging an ax for 12 hours straight.”

For our experience, our maintenance cycle training consisted of a bear crawl warm-up followed by four sets of work that included some shoulder stability, hip mobility, and banded work. You can see the full workout for yourself below:

The Northman Trainer Magnus Lygdback
Image via Ivanna Jackson at 1 Hotel West Hollywood

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After our workout, Lygdback took a moment to break down his personal approach to nutrition. Here’s how he put it:

“I’m a big believer in not having any food restrictions. There’s so many different diets out there. When I work on a movie, I try to approach the nutrition part with the most balance or most sense as possible. So when working on The Northman, we allowed Alex to have a glass of wine on Saturdays and eat food that he likes to eat. My philosophy is that you should eat five time per day. That’s 20 meals in four days. So in a four-day cycle, I think that 17 meals should be on point. Three meals out of 20, whatever you want. It’s real hard to stick to a diet if you don’t get to eat the food that you like to eat, right? So at the end of the day, it comes down to calories in, calories out and macros. Marcos, which are macronutrients — protein, fat and carbs. Proteins are the building blocks of muscle and tissue, and then fat and carbs are both fuel for the body. So if you make sure to eat enough protein, then you can kind of figure out what you want to eat, fat or carbs, or a combination of both. There’s many different strategies, but I prefer to eat a combination of everything.”

The Northman Training Food
Image via Ivanna Jackson at 1 Hotel West Hollywood

Lygdback applied that thinking to Skarsgård’s nutritional plan on The Northman. He further explained:

“On a movie set, I’m actually designing the menu with the chefs. I’m making sure that someone like Alex is getting the food at the right time and that he finishes everything that he gets. If that means that you need to stand over and tell him to finish, that’s what’s gonna happen.”

If you’d like to see the results of Lygdback’s work with Skarsgård, be sure to catch The Northman in theaters nationwide this weekend!