Mark Strong’s decades-long career has consisted mainly of playing blokes who look like you don’t want to start trouble with them. Invariably, he’s a villain, a role he relishes.

‘They get the best parts, best lines, best clothes,’ he told Brummell.

But that does mean at some point, no matter how menacing he looks, the hero of the piece is going to want to throw hands. Staying ready to not just look the part, but act it, has meant bringing real physicality into those roles, even in his sixties.

His approach, however, is refreshingly low-lift – and impeccably British – in a sea of Hollywood transformations.

Speaking to The Times, Strong explained the demands of rehearsing fight scenes, then performing them repeatedly throughout a day’s filming.

‘So you need to be as fit as you can possibly be,’ he said. The newspaper reported that, when in London, he’d been playing football twice a week for around 25 years, alongside trips to the gym.

In the more recent interview with Brummell, regular football training remained firmly on the agenda. But, despite also spending regular time with a trainer, his gym ambitions came with a qualification: ‘I don’t pump iron – I have no desire to have nipples that point downwards.’

We’ll leave the direction of your nipples up to personal taste. But a sport you enjoy, played regularly, alongside some lifting? That’s a triple-threat recipe for physicality, fitness and fulfilment.

While most of us aren’t preparing for a day of stunt work, simply training to be ready for whatever action life has to throw at us is possibly the noblest goal of them all.

Strong has previously described working with trainer Giacomo Farci throughout the week. Speaking to GQ, he explained that they’d shortened their sessions from an hour to ‘half an hour of very intense weight training’.

The work included cable exercises, bench presses and rows, sometimes broken up with short efforts on a bike. Boxingalso featured heavily and was something he particularly enjoyed.

He and Farci shared a running joke about always keeping him ‘three weeks away from peak fitness’, a state of play we can get on board with.

So, basic compound lifts, spicy intervals, ‘fun’ conditioning sessions and workouts that don’t require clearing half the day. There’s a lot to be said for having a manageable amount of training you can keep coming back to, especially when work and the rest of your life is pulling you in other directions.

Of course, having a trainer and a multi-million-pound reason to stay in shape doesn’t mean you wake up desperate to get stuck into the iron every morning. Strong admitted that he didn’t always look forward to exercising.

‘But I always feel amazing after,’ he said.

That’ll sound familiar to anyone who’s ever spent longer negotiating with themselves about a workout than it would have taken just to do it. The trick is really letting yourself relish that post-gym buzz, paying attention to it and giving your mind a good reason to want to feel it again.

This will give you some bargaining power next time you’re contemplating skipping leg day.

Strong has described eating chicken, fish and salads, with snacks such as fruit and nuts, while avoiding red meat. He’s also admitted a fondness for chocolate and an occasional cocktail.

A well-worn trend in most successful nutrition plans, especially ones that are sustainable: nail the high-quality basics most of the time, leaving yourself enough grace to actually enjoy yourself the rest of the time.

For us, the useful takeaway is the place fitness has kept in his life. A sport he enjoys, efficient gym work that helps him stay capable, and an acceptance that he won’t always fancy doing it… but doing it anyway.

You don’t need to have a tussle with Russell Crowe in the diary to make the most of this approach.

With almost 18 years in the health and fitness space as a personal trainer, nutritionist, breath coach and writer, Andrew has spent nearly half of his life exploring how to help people improve their bodies and minds.    

As our fitness editor he prides himself on keeping Men’s Health at the forefront of reliable, relatable and credible fitness information, whether that’s through writing and testing thousands of workouts each year, taking deep dives into the science behind muscle building and fat loss or exploring the psychology of performance and recovery.   

Whilst constantly updating his knowledge base with seminars and courses, Andrew is a lover of the practical as much as the theory and regularly puts his training to the test tackling everything from Crossfit and strongman competitions, to ultra marathons, to multiple 24 hour workout stints and (extremely unofficial) world record attempts.   

 You can find Andrew on Instagram at @theandrew.tracey, or simply hold up a sign for ‘free pizza’ and wait for him to appear.