Alan Ritchson’s Diet & Workout Routine

• Alan Ritchson packed on 13.6 kg of lean muscle to bring Jack Reacher to life on screen.
• Rather than spending hours lifting, he caps his training sessions at 20 to 30 minutes to reduce physical wear and tear.
• He credits Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT), nightly meditation, and weekly sauna sessions for keeping his body healthy through heavy bulking cycles.
• Eating around 4,000 calories a day to maintain his size, his diet relies on high protein alongside regular cheat meals like pizza and cookie dough.

Alan Ritchson is hard to miss. Standing at a towering 1.91 metres and packing over 100kg of lean mass, the actor’s breakout turn in Prime Video’s Reacher has made him one of Hollywood’s most physically dominant leading men.

That type of muscle mass doesn’t happen overnight and it takes commitment to maintain size year after year. The star revealed that he trains at least five days a week, eats cookie dough regularly, and he caps his workouts at 30 minutes to minimise wear and tear. While a diet heavy on cookie dough seems counterintuitive, spending six months of the year in an aggressive caloric surplus grants a degree of leniency. That said, Ritchson doesn’t coast. His sub-30-minute gym sessions trade duration for absolute output – a high-intensity approach backed up by his imposing frame.

After landing the role in Reacher, studio executives instructed him to pack on mass rapidly – leading to a brutal 13.6kg (30 lbs) bulk in eight months. The sudden gain took a heavy physical toll, resulting in shoulder surgery, depleted testosterone, and a complete overhaul of his approach to training. Here’s Alan Ritchson’s Reacher workout and diet plan in his own words. 

Who is Alan Ritchson?

Alan Ritchson is an American actor best known for his role in Prime Video’s Reacher since 2022. Prior to playing Lee Child’s famed investigator, Ritchson starred as Thad Castle in Blue Mountain State, voiced Raphael in the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot, and went toe-to-toe with Vin Diesel in Fast X. More recently, he starred opposite Henry Cavill in Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare – famously dwarfing the Superman star on screen.

In Lee Child’s original novels, Jack Reacher is described as a 6’5” powerhouse weighing between 106 kg and 113 kg. While Tom Cruise’s cinematic iteration diverged significantly from the source material, Ritchson closely mirrors the author’s original physical vision.

• Place of Birth: Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA
• Birthday: 28 November 1982
• Height: 6’3″ (1.91m)
• Weight: Around 107kg (235lb) when playing Reacher

Alan Ritchson’s Workout Routine

Ritchson typically trains at least 5 days a week, Monday through Friday, and likes to keep the weekends open for recovery. Sometimes he’ll toss in a Saturday workout if he needs to kick it up a notch, or if he misses a weekday lift. The sessions are short on purpose.

He told Men’s Health that he doesn’t spend a ton of time in the gym, capping his sessions around 20 to 30 minutes, tops. He said, “the less wear and tear on the body leaves you feeling good.” 

When training at home, Ritchson relies heavily on a cable cage system – equipment rarely found in standard hotel gyms during press tours. His routine prioritises full-body workouts with a strong aesthetic focus, targeting the chest and upper body to maximize his presence on screen.

While he rarely tests his one-rep max to avoid injury, Ritchson revealed he loaded 161 kg (355 lbs) onto the bench press, knocking out an extraordinary 10-rep set. The aim, he says, is to be able to hold his current size for years, even jokingly saying, “I want to be 100 years old and still playing Reacher.” 

The Original Bodyweight Circuit

Before playing Reacher, Ritchson stated that he barely touched weights and did the vast majority of his workouts using simple bodyweight exercises. A self-described late bloomer, Ritchson only began resistance training late in high school. He built his initial foundation around four bodyweight staples: push-ups, pull-ups, dips, and sit-ups, followed by a distance run. The punishing 400-rep circuit quickly earned a reputation – one he notes few training partners ever agreed to repeat.

• Pushups: 4 sets of 25 reps
• Pullups: 4 sets of 25 reps
• Dips: 4 sets of 25 reps
• Sit-ups: 4 sets of 25 reps

This simple 400 rep routine always ends with a run once completed. Friends would occasionally join him, only to never show up the next time. 

The Full-Body ‘Reacher’ Session

In order to attain his Reacher size, bodyweight sessions just weren’t going to get the work done in order to help him add 13.6kg (30 lb) of muscle on his body. To get to where he is today, it takes “a next level set of resistance,” so he built his home gym and started using weights seriously for the first. Now, over four years later he’s still lifting as seriously as ever and has opted away from the bodybuilding classic body part splits and goes for more full-body sessions every weekday, trying to include a little legs, arms, chest, back, and core into each session.

Here’s what he considers an all-inclusive, intense training session:

• Lower body: Lunges, split squats, leg extensions, and leg curls
• Upper body: A goal of 100 bench press reps, starting at 102kg (225 lbs) and working down the ladder, while starting off on the incline and finishing on a decline bench

“If I can get through that, I think I’ve won,” Ritchson said.

Though, don’t ask him about squatting, as he jokes he could “maybe hit 145 (pounds).” He has stated that attempting to do back squats with a barbell always pinches something in his back or hips, so if he does squats, he utilises elevated low-pulley squats, which are equally as effective.

Implementing Ritchson’s Intense Workout

While his interview reveals little insights into the exact nature of his intense full-body session, here’s a simple way to implement it yourself.

• Target: 100 total bench press reps. Ritchson begins at 102 kg (225 lbs) and works down a drop-set pyramid. As fatigue accumulates, lower the working weight to maintain high repetition output across every set.
  
  • Sample Upper Body Split:
    • Set 1: Incline bench – 20 reps at 43kg
    • Set 2: Incline bench – 20 reps at 43kg
    • Set 3: Flat bench – 20 reps at 43kg
    • Set 4: Flat bench – 20 reps at 39kg
    • Set 5: Decline bench – 20 reps at 39kg
      
  • Sample Lower Body Split:
    • Lunges: 4 sets x 8 reps (each leg)
    • Split Squats: 3 sets x 10 reps (each leg)
    • Super set: Leg extensions with curls: 3 sets x 12 reps

Tips

• Make it easier: Another way to break up this challenging workout is to do your lower body exercises in-between the bench sets. Say, do sets 1 and 2 on the incline, then do the lunges exercise for 4 sets, then go back to the bench, and so on (break it up to what is best for your level). 
• Increase the intensity: Do the complete lower body workout first, then move on to the bench. The goal should be to maintain the same weight and do it in as little sets as possible.

Cardio

Ritchson has stated that he utilises sprints to improve his cardio, and there is strong evidence that consistently sprinting can drastically increase testosterone, too. Other than that he uses fight training to get in his cardio.

Fight Training

The show’s stunt team handles all of his fight prep, and it is also where he gets in some serious cardio workouts. Every time he thinks that he’s in decent enough shape, he says that a little fight training leaves him “gassed in three minutes.” 

Alan Ritchson’s Training Recovery

Even though he typically caps his sessions at 30 minutes max, those shorter sessions are about as hard and intense as they come. “Putting on that much weight that fast isn’t natural or healthy,” he said of his original bulk, which left him with a broken joint in his shoulder. Now, he prefers the less-is-more approach, in terms of session length.

His recovery is simple: weekends are for rest, with 15 minutes in the sauna, which he refers to as his “zen time.” He also incorporates meditation regularly, and a prayer ritual every night before bed. 

Supplementation and TRT

When you’re pushing yourself as hard as Ritchson does during his sessions, topped with consistent sauna use, he finds himself sweating more than the average person, so utilising things like Trace Mineral Drops and Trace Mineral Performance Electrolytes are crucial to rebalance those levels and keep him recovering properly. 

Ritchson has been remarkably transparent about his use of Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) after his initial bulk severely disrupted his endocrine system.

“Getting on testosterone was huge for me,” he told Men’s Health UK. “I had none by the time I was done with season one, due to the stress and the fatigue and what I had done to my body.”

He sees it as a way to stay in shape for the job during the long term: “I don’t want to have to have surgery after every season, and testosterone helps.” TRT is prescription-only, so that one is a conversation for you and your doctor.

Alan Ritchson’s Diet Plan

If you came here expecting a super-strict, low-carb diet plan, we’ve got bad news. “I eat whatever the hell I want, and I’m not kidding,” Ritchson said. He just so happens to be bulking half the year for Reacher, so getting in the calories roughly every hour (mostly four main meals) to get in his reported 4,000 calories a day is work itself. So, he eats everything in sight, including cookie dough and pizza.

The trade-off is that he pushes his workouts to the max more times than not. “You gotta put the work in – you gotta be a friend with pain,” he says.

Breakfast

Two packets of instant oatmeal (maple brown sugar and apple and cinnamon are his favourite), microwaved to the precise time of just 27 seconds. Eggs are another breakfast staple (always cage free) and instead of coffee for caffeine, he uses 5-hour Extra Strength Energy shots. 

Lunch

His lunch staple consists of high-protein turkey and Swiss cheese roll-ups (which he jokingly calls ‘tacos’). To prepare them, he layers sliced turkey over Swiss cheese, tops them with mayonnaise and mustard, and rolls them up. Low in carbohydrates and dense in protein, Ritchson admits he can easily consume dozen in a single sitting.

Dinner

One of his current faves is his wife’s homemade turkey meatloaf, which is made lean and packed with protein, served with greens such as a salad or green beans. If he needs to up the carbs, he’ll enjoy some mashed potatoes. 

Snacks and Protein Shakes

To up the protein and calories, (and fat count) he opts for cottage cheese, yoghurt, and even string cheese, plus he confesses, his daily intake of cookie dough (gotta enjoy life a little). He also opts for Muscle Milk’s 40g shakes in strawberry and chocolate flavours to up his daily protein. His go-to homemade protein shake is a little healthier, to make up the difference:

Alan Ritchson’s Go-To Protein Shake:

• Ice
• Almond milk
• “A ton of protein powder”
• 1 banana (sometimes)
• 3 large handfuls of spinach
• Peanut butter
• Cacao for depth
• ½ – 1 avocado
  • Oats if he needs more carbs

Cheat meals/snacks:

• Pizza
• Cookie dough
• Cheese filled chili hotdogs
• 2 a.m. snack? Key lime pie

When he isn’t playing Reacher and is working on roles for other films, he works on slimming down to limit his size. This means cutting back on carbs, cheese, refined sugars, and yes, his cookie dough.

Alan Ritchson Diet & Workout FAQs

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