Updated October 26, 2026
Michael B. Jordan got up to 197 pounds for Creed II, and he gave the number himself, to The Globe and Mail in Toronto in November 2018, with the height to measure it against: “5’11 1/2″, give me every inch.” It is the heaviest figure he has ever put on the record, and it tops a chart that begins in 2014 with a trainer who says his new client “could barely bench 20 pounds.”
The fitness sites have turned that decade into meal plans he never described. This page is the sequence as he and Corey Calliet, the trainer he has kept since a 2014 voicemail, actually told it: 24 pounds for Creed, a “bigger than Creed” brief for Killmonger, the 197, and twins separated by shoe size rather than muscle.
2014 to 2015: Fantastic Four and Creed, “he could barely bench 20 pounds”
Calliet was a bodybuilder training people in Baton Rouge when the Fantastic Four production, filming nearby, called, and by his account to InsideHook in March 2023 he spent about a month on set with a cast that did not want to train until someone in the crew pointed him at Jordan, already cast in Creed. His verdict, to Shadow and Act in 2018: “he had never really trained like that before.” Jordan’s version, to Men’s Fitness for its December 2015 cover, is funnier. Calliet opened with “when we first started he could barely bench 20 pounds, his legs were flailing everywhere… he had nothing,” and Jordan, after a token protest, agreed: “No, he’s right… I hated it.” What changed his mind was arithmetic: “When you start bench-pressing 225 pounds 10 times and it ain’t nothing […] then it’s, ‘This is all right.'”
The figure he gave was 24 pounds of muscle, first at Comic-Con in July 2015, where E! found Kate Mara complaining that “every 30 minutes he was eating something.” His explanation: “Literally in the middle of takes, I would just be eating food. Chicken and rice and broccoli, a lot of it.” The method, in his words, was “Diet and exercise! Honestly, diet has a lot to do with it and lots of water,” the least marketable training secret in Hollywood and the one every trainer I know would sign.
2016 to 2018: Black Panther, “the goal is to be bigger than Creed”
The Killmonger build had a brief before it had a script. At Comic-Con in July 2016, six months from filming, Jordan told E!: “I’m eating tons of carbs, lifting. When we get close to the date I’ll start to shred down a little but the goal is to be bigger than Creed.” On the February 2018 cover of WSJ. Magazine he put the gain at 20 pounds and said where it went: “Chest, shoulders, back. My legs a little bit, my quads. I was just, like massive… It’s a job man.” On Ellen that month he priced the day: more than a gallon of water, two to three workouts, six meals, and a social life reduced to “Oh, wait! Meal prep!”
Calliet’s brief, as he told Shadow and Act, was blunter: “I wouldn’t have took Adonis Creed in Creed seriously against T’Challa in Black Panther. So I had to make Mike get big.” The numbers do not agree. Jordan said 20 pounds; Calliet, to Philadelphia magazine in April 2018, said “ten to 15 pounds of muscle.” Both stay on this page, because the trainer weighs the client and the client remembers the effort.
2018: Creed II, 197 pounds on “5’11 1/2″”
The sequel is where the chart peaks, and the plan was explicit. “We time our projects, so we used Killmonger to get ready for Creed II,” Calliet told Men’s Health that autumn. “I bulked him up on Killmonger, and then used that bulk to shred him down.” Jordan, to The Globe and Mail: “I was building off that frame and the foundation I’d built for Black Panther and I added on a couple more pounds.” The 197 came with the Philadelphia routine: small meals every three hours, two to three sessions a day, six days a week.
Calliet gave Philadelphia magazine the timetable before cameras rolled, mitts at 10, choreography until 2, weights at night, and called it “very military style, doing the same thing every day.” His cleanest description of the sequel body went to Esquire, quoted by Pedestrian that November: “Imagine that size he was in Black Panther, just more cut, like really really cut.” The montage that resulted was shot in the desert outside Deming, New Mexico, with a sledgehammer.
2021: Without Remorse, “his shirt on for one scene”
The Tom Clancy film reversed the priorities, and Calliet said so to HOLA! USA on release day, April 30, 2021: “This time it was more of a HIIT training style and CrossFit type of training.” The line that explains the program: “I knew he was only going to have his shirt on for one scene, so we had to focus on the conditioning.” Jordan, 34, told the Associated Press he did his own stunts and that playing a Clancy character he had spent “hours upon hours” with as a gamer made him “a kid in the candy store.”
2021 to 2023: Creed III, “director by day building a body at night”
The third Creed was the first he directed. Calliet’s Instagram caption in November 2021, over a video from an Atlanta gym, was “Director by day building a body at night!” By March 2023 he was telling InsideHook they had “about four months” and that on set the sessions shrank to “half an hour here and there.” Jordan put the goal in Men’s Health’s own video that February: “to transform myself physically and mentally.”
He was 36 when the film opened on March 3, 2023, and he told Yahoo Entertainment what no poster says: “It’s a commitment. And it’s not easy. The older you get, it gets a little bit harder. But I love exercise. I love working out and staying in shape. But walking around like that is really hard to do.” The reward was the edit suite, “sitting in this dark room, eating snacks.” The photographs he posted a month later, by Jack McKain, are what those four months bought: an airstrip at sunset and a mirror on wheels.
@michaelbjordan What’s your favorite scene ?
Creed III now available on @primevideo to Rent or Buy
ADONIS MONTAGE Photos by @jackmckain
2024 to 2026: Sinners, two brothers and two shoe sizes
For Ryan Coogler’s twins the changes were made outside the gym, which makes them the most interesting entry here. Jordan told Variety’s Actors on Actors in December 2025 that he wore shoes too small for Stack “because I liked him angsty,” a size too big for Smoke, who “didn’t move much,” and that removing his gold caps between takes changed how he held his mouth. To W in January 2026 he added twin consultants and “chakra and spiritual work to determine where Smoke and Stack held their childhood trauma and how that informed their posture and their speech cadence.” His mother “didn’t see me, her child, which is the biggest compliment.”
Mike Fontaine, the film’s prosthetics designer, told E! at the Oscars on March 15, 2026 that the gold grills were made to tell the twins apart: “They each have their own specific grill.” The one body statement of this period is about age. Jordan, 38, told CNBC Make It that his day now starts with stretching, meditation and breathing, because “when you’re young, you’re like ‘I don’t have time to stretch,'” and that food is now “discipline and moderation”: “I don’t cut it out.” The Stack portrait he posted on April 26, 2025, pinstripes in a Delta field, is the only physique picture of the Sinners year he put out himself.
@michaelbjordan Stack 😈 by @eli_joshua
Only one more week to see @sinnersmovie in @imax 70mm !!
2026 to 2027: an Oscar and a heist
He won Best Actor for the twins on March 15, 2026, and told the room, “Thank you for betting on me.” The next body has a release date before it has a still: The Thomas Crown Affair, which he directs, produces and stars in, opens worldwide on March 5, 2027. Amazon MGM’s July 2026 announcement puts Adria Arjona and Kenneth Branagh beside him, and the title promises a suit rather than a shirtless scene. On CBS Sunday Morning in January 2026 he said the line that holds the decade together: “The first time I transform my body, you know, learned a skill that I continue to do today.” And then: “Yeah, it’s a part of me at this point.”
Where this leaves him
Jordan’s chart has exactly three numbers he spoke himself: 24 up for Creed, 20 up for Killmonger, 197 at the top for Creed II. Everything since is measured in sessions and shirts, and the last two roles, the SEAL who keeps his jacket on and the twins told apart by their feet, were built by a man who had learned that a camera notices posture before it notices a lat. Calliet still gets the credit for the muscle. The shoe sizes were Jordan’s idea, and they are the part that won the award.
Sources
- The Globe and Mail: Adonis Creed comes to Toronto (197 pounds, “5’11 1/2”, Black Panther “soldier” quote, Philadelphia routine), Nov 19, 2018
- E! Online, quoting Men’s Fitness (Dec 2015 cover): 24 pounds, Calliet “barely bench 20 pounds”, Jordan “225 pounds 10 times”, “sacrifice all of my 20s”, Nov 25, 2015
- BlackAmericaWeb, quoting WSJ. Magazine (Feb 2018 issue): 20 pounds, “Chest, shoulders, back… It’s a job man”, Jan 18, 2018
- Philadelphia magazine: Calliet on the Creed II pre-production day (“ten to 15 pounds” for Black Panther, “very military style”), Apr 2, 2018
- Mandatory via Yahoo, quoting Variety’s Actors on Actors: shoe sizes, gold caps, Dec 15, 2025
