“Matt was reluctant to work with anybody,” Walsh says. “I went out to talk to him. He said: ‘Listen, I’m injured. My back is jacked, my shoulder is jacked. And it all came from trainers. I’ve worked with a dozen different trainers and every one of them has hurt me.’”
Walsh – who believes in focusing on biomechanics issues specific to each client – asked Damon to give him a week. They tentatively got to work, running through stretches and low-impact calisthenics movements. Seven days later, Walsh surprised Damon by throwing an American football at him. Naturally, Damon caught it without thinking. And without pain.
“I asked him ‘How’s that shoulder?’” Walsh recalls. “He had that Matt Damon smile on his face and he said ‘You son of a bitch.’”
Trust earned, the work could begin.
Lift Off
With injuries to heal (and further damage to prevent), Walsh doubled down on his ethos of natural, fundamental movement, led by calisthenics.
“The crawling movement is the most important movement that the body has,” he says. “You’re moving cross-laterally across the body. You’re developing muscle and coordination across the body in a way that’s very strong.”
So, instead of the typical routine of burpees and bench-press, Walsh’s emphasis was on functional movements that rope in multiple muscle systems without putting undue strain on any one area.
“I’ll have people learn to roll, or plank or crawl,” Walsh says. “It sounds ridiculous but they work. As a species, we’ve moved away from [those sort of movements] because we’re sitting at desks all the time and have bad posture. Even in the gym, we were never meant to just sit on a bike for hours or do lots of reps in a fixed position.”
Walsh says Damon was sceptical at first but quickly took to the workouts like a champ.
“Matt is an athlete,” Walsh says. “He’s just such a good guy, goddammit. He’s a real dude. He’s not trying to be something he’s not. He’s Matt Damon. And we got along really well.”
