It takes nothing less than extraordinary resolve and determination for an actor to become successful and be loved by everyone, and Halle Bailey just proved it. Through recent tweets via Twitter, the actress can be seen training super hard for her role in the new movie The Little Mermaid.
Playing the female protagonist, Halle Bailey is said to have trained rather rigidly with a weighted headgear for strengthening her neck muscles for the movie. And that is just one of the many workouts she had to go through for her role.
Halle Bailey’s Brutal Weightlifting Workout With Her Head
After the release of the movie The Little Mermaid, a lot of behind-the-scenes have been surfacing lately. And one such report showed Disney making Halle Bailey do brutal weightlifting with her head to build up her neck muscles.
Halle Bailey’s personal trainer for the movie, Sana Shirvani explained how the Little Mermaid actress had to train day-in-day-out to get fit as well as graceful for her role. In an interview with Women’s Health, Sana Shirvani discussed the importance of such training.
“As the Mermaids have no legs, they are heavily relying on their core and back strength to hold them up. This required a huge amount of abdominal strength as well as a huge amount of strength through their back extensors. They also need to be able to sing/dance and act whilst in the rigs. While the neck muscles are often overlooked in traditional strength training programs, they play a crucial role in providing stability, supporting good posture, and reducing the risk of neck-related injuries. We used a variation of neck isometrics and resistance-based methods, which involve applying resistance without actually moving the neck.”
But despite all these gruesome workouts, the actress agrees that while filming, she was in the best shape of her life. Well, at least something good turned out of this ruthless training!
Halle Bailey’s Intense Workout Sessions to Play Ariel
However, this savage neck workout wasn’t the only workout that Halle Bailey had to do to be able to play Ariel. According to Bailey, she had to go through a lot of mermaid workouts as she was constantly training in wires suspended in mid-air on the blue screen. One such workout included swimming lessons as well, which involved her swimming wearing a mermaid’s tail.
In a Q&A session on a YouTube video posted to her channel in September, Halle Bailey discussed how ‘intense’ her workout was and she had to wake up at 4 a.m. every day for the same.
‘I was in intense physical training for three months, and then every single day I’d either be up on wires and a harness or I’d be in the water all day. It was super exciting but my body was like — that was probably the hardest [part], and the most in shape I’ve ever been in my life. That was the toughest part, I think — having to be that strong.’
But even these intense workout sessions weren’t enough to make Halle Bailey back down from her role. And perhaps it is nothing but her sheer determination that seems to have won her everyone’s love and appreciation.
You can catch The Little Mermaid in cinemas now.
Source: CBR.com
