The A-lister has shared her love of low-impact workouts like Pilates and Lagree in the past, and how she enjoys running, swimming, and cycling workouts with her family.
In 2014, she told The Los Angeles Times: “With fitness, I try not to be too strict with it and mix it up to make sure it stays fun. I run, ride my bike, do yoga – whatever I can do and wherever I am in the world.”
However, it appears Nicole Kidman is also a fan of another popular workout: strength training. On The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last year, her A Family Affair co-star Joey King revealed the lower-body workout Nicole swears by. The film is about a widowed writer who begins an affair with a young actor her daughter works for. Joey, who is 25, plays her daughter.
“She taught me the most epic, awful butt workout I’ve ever learned in my life,” Joey told Fallon. “It was so intense. I was like, ‘I’m a youngster. I can hang. I’m young, and I’m agile’. I thought I could hang, but I couldn’t hang.”
The workout includes exercises like donkey kicks, fire hydrants, and rainbows, which all focus on the glutes (buttocks), quadriceps (thighs), and hamstrings (back of thighs), and wouldn’t look out of place in a Pilates workout at home.
While Nicole apparently did the workout in jeans, Joey said it wasn’t a routine for the faint-hearted. “You have to keep your leg in the air for like 12 years, it’s so hard,” she said.
“I do it still, because it’s like so effective, so I send her photos whenever I do it. I’m like, ‘Call an ambulance, love you!!’”
Want to try the Nicole Kidman workout? Grab your yoga mat and have a go. Together, the workout should take you about 15 minutes.
Try the Nicole Kidman workout
1. Donkey kicks
- Come down onto your yoga mat on your hands and knees, making sure your hands are under your shoulders and your knees sit under your hips.
- Keep your knees bent but lift one back and up toward the ceiling.
- When you reach your upper limit, try to push a little higher
- Hold this position for a few moments and focus on squeezing your glutes.
- Slowly bring your knee back to the starting position.
Rebecca Douden, Pilates instructor and founder of the Pilates Prescription previously recommended this move to us too. She said one mistake people often make with the exercise is arching their back as they lift the leg, out of habit or a lack of mobility. “We want to avoid this,” she says. “Make sure to keep your spine long and your core engaged.””
2. Rainbow
- Start on all fours, same as the donkey kick position, with your wrists under your shoulders and knees under your hips.
- Raise your one leg, with your glutes engaged and thigh parallel to the floor.
- In a controlled way, rotate your leg from the knee towards your body and away, in an arc (or rainbow) shape.
- Stay in your range of motion and don’t push yourself beyond your capabilities.
3. Fire hydrants
- Set up in the same way as the donkey kicks and rainbow exercise, on all fours on your yoga mat with your shoulders stacked over your wrists and knees under your hips.
- Keep your spine long and back straight.
- Bring your heel towards your buttocks, squeezing your glute as you do so.
- Keeping your hips square to the floor, bring your leg out to the side of your body.
- Hold it there for a moment, before returning to the starting position.
Joey didn’t reveal the exact details of the other exercises in the Nicole Kidman workout and alludes that it contained a few more than this, but this simple three-step routine covers the basics for stronger glutes.
If you’re looking to build your core and lower body strength, you might also like to try the clamshell and bird dog exercises. Just like the ones in Nicole’s workout, they can be made harder by doing them as part of a Pilates with weights workout, too, using dumbbells or bands for resistance.
Along with low-impact strength moves, Nicole has shared a love for running and yoga. She told Women’s Health that she comes from “a marathon running family, so that’s been part of my life since I was a little girl”.
She also revealed her favourite yoga workout: “I do ashtanga. I like vinyasa, too. It’s very good if you run. For the IT band, you know,” she said. “Particularly as you’re getting older, you need to do the things that are not high impact.”
