Robert Irvine Has One Intense Workout Routine
All it takes is one look at Robert Irvine's biceps to realize the man takes fitness seriously. He works out for an hour and 15 minutes a day, seven days a week, no matter where he is. Even on 20-hour flights.
"On the plane, coming back from Sri Lanka, on a 380 Emirates, I was doing push-ups in the bar, on the top level of an aircraft," he said. "I was doing push-ups and sit-ups while the rest of the people were still sleeping."
It's par for the course for the Restaurant Impossible star, who's so committed to fitness he helped design Gold's Gym Largo, devoted a section of his online magazine to exercise, and has written two cookbooks on the topic: Fit Fuel, and Fit Fuel Family, out later this year. It's no surprise then, that when Irvine was tapped to organize an event during the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, cardio was just as important as carbs.
"If I don't work out, it's like not eating. I get angry," Irvine laughed.
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He launched Barry's Bootcamp & Bites, opening the class to 200 people willing to wake up bright and early on a Saturday morning to sweat it out for 45 minutes, then enjoy a bellini bar and a Fit Fuel-approved brunch. It sold out almost immediately. Don't let the name (or the bellini bar) fool you — this wasn't a jog-in-place-and-do-light-stretching affair. The workout's intensity surprised the Royal Navy veteran himself.
"Let me tell you, the warmup! Just the warmup I was tired," he said. "I can lift weights and lift rucksacks and jump out of planes, you know, and swim underwater and do silly things. But this workout was very functional. It uses muscles groups that we — definitely I — don't use."
This bootcamp workout was all squats, lunges, mountain climbers, and burpees. The high-intensity combination of nonstop cardio and toning using your body weight caught Irvine — and many others, including this reporter — off-guard. (Real talk: I spent 30 of the 45 minutes chanting "please don't die, please don't die, please for the love of bellinis hold out until they hand out champagne. And don't die.") It wrapped with a six-minute plank — I repeat, a six-minute plank — which Irvine toughed out, while I spent the last 30 seconds murmuring "nooo" while curled up in the fetal position, arms trembling.
"It was very difficult for me," Irvine admitted afterward, giving us all a little comfort that if the jacked chef — who devotes 30 minutes a day to cardio, the other 45 to targeting a specific muscle group – struggled, the rest of us mere mortals weren't so weak for struggling too.
While Irvine typically works out an hour and 15 minutes a day, eating small meals every 2 1/2 to 3 hours to keep his metabolism up, he doesn't believe the average person needs to adhere to such a superhuman regimen.
"You don't have to go 100 percent all the time. If you're tired and you want to stop for a minute, you can stop for a minute," he said. "It just means raising your heart level, spending some time with your kids and family, and hopefully, cooking with them."
That's Irvine's ultimate goal — to get people to see cooking and exercising as two parts of the same whole, so they can live more balanced, healthier lives. He hopes that his inaugural bootcamp will inspire a whole food and fitness movement, making it an annual event at the festival.
"I want to encourage people, daily, through food and fitness to be the best they can be," he explained. One six-minute plant — chased with a bellini — at a time.
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