Sheridan Smith’s Workout Routine: The Tom Brown Plan

Sheridan Smith’s training focuses on foundational strength movements.

When Sheridan Smith turned up on BBC’s The One Show recently, a chunk of the online chatter skipped her upcoming drama projects entirely and went straight to how she looked: leaner, squarer in the shoulders, noticeably stronger. The 44-year-old is training hard for the ITV mystery thriller “Two Birds” — physical prep is part of the job for this role.

If you’re a working adult with a desk, a commute, and the kind of lower-back twinge that comes from sitting eight hours a day, you might have watched and wondered what she’s actually doing in the gym — and whether any of it would work for you. The principles underneath, shared by her trainer Tom Brown in Women’s Health UK and elsewhere, turn out to be boringly applicable, in the best possible way.

The programme Tom Brown built for her

Her coach, Tom Brown of 1st Class Bootcamp, runs a programme built on a principle, not a trend. Sheridan strength trains four to five times a week, and each session is a focused 45 to 60 minutes — not two-hour marathon sessions, not endless cardio. That time cap matters. The whole thing is held together by what trainers call progressive overload. In plain English: each week, you make the workout slightly harder. Add 2.5kg to the bar. Do one more rep at the same weight. Shorten your rest between sets by 10 seconds. Any of those counts. Over six months, those tiny increases add up to a completely different body composition.

One full rest day every week is non-negotiable in Brown’s set-up. As he’s described it, that downtime is when muscle fibres actually repair and rebuild — without it, you’re not training, you’re just accumulating damage. It’s a high-frequency plan, but with enough recovery baked in that it doesn’t spiral into injury, which matters a lot once you’re past 40. That balance — train often, but recover properly — is the reason actors who start lifting in their 40s can keep doing it in their 50s.

The six movement patterns her sessions are built around

Forget the machines that isolate one small muscle at a time. Brown’s programming for Sheridan is built around six fundamental human movement patterns: squat, hip hinge (the deadlift family), horizontal push, horizontal pull, carry, and rotate. These are compound lifts — movements that involve multiple joints and big muscle groups at once — and they’re the closest thing to a shortcut that strength training has. More calories burnt per minute, more coordination developed, and strength that translates into actually useful things: lifting a grandchild, shifting a sofa, carrying Sunday shopping up three flights without your back going.

Why does this beat hours on a treadmill for body-composition change? Muscle is metabolically expensive tissue. The more lean muscle you carry, the more calories your body burns at rest — literally while you’re asleep. A squat-and-row session doesn’t just burn calories during the session itself; it lifts your resting metabolic rate for a couple of days afterwards and remodels how your body stores fat versus muscle. For a 40-something starting out, the loads are unembarrassing. Goblet squats holding a single dumbbell. Romanian deadlifts with a pair of light kettlebells. Press-ups against a wall if the floor’s still too much. The rule Brown keeps coming back to is form first, weight later.

Compound lifts like the deadlift form the core of the programme.

Pre-activation: why her sessions start with 10-15 minutes before she touches a weight

You’ve probably had that moment where you walked into the gym, put the bar on your back, and felt stiff enough that the first rep was half-hope and half-prayer. That’s exactly what Sheridan’s pre-activation window is designed to stop. The first 10 to 15 minutes of every session are low-intensity, specific, and deliberate. Bodyweight glute bridges to wake up the glutes (a near-universal weak spot for anyone who sits a lot). Single-leg bridge variants to test and build stability. Dorsal raises to switch on the back of the body, from hamstrings up through lower back to rear shoulders.

The point isn’t just warming up. Raising core temperature is a side effect — the real aim is neurological. You’re reminding your brain which muscles should be doing which job, before you add load. When your glutes are firing properly, your lower back doesn’t have to do their work for them. When your lats are engaged, your shoulder joint isn’t carrying weight it wasn’t built for. The home version, if you’re not going to a gym: five minutes of glute bridges, bird-dogs, and cat-cows before you pick up a single dumbbell. Boring. Unsexy. Does the job.

Conditioning — the five-minute finisher that replaces ‘doing cardio’

Steady-state cardio — the 45 minutes on a treadmill watching Homes Under the Hammer on the gym telly — isn’t a terrible thing, but it’s not what Sheridan’s doing. Her sessions end with short, brutal conditioning finishers: rope slams, maximum-effort intervals on a Ski-Erg, or weighted burpees. Typically 30 seconds hard, 30 seconds rest, repeated for five minutes. That’s it.

What makes this protocol effective is the metabolic disruption it creates in a short window. Your heart rate spikes, your cardiovascular system has to scramble, and you spend the rest of the day burning slightly more calories to recover — the EPOC effect (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption). High-intensity interval training, especially when layered on top of strength work, is one of the few cardio approaches that actually spares muscle while still pulling energy from fat stores. For anyone working with a commute and a family and 30 minutes to spare three times a week, a five-minute finisher is an absurdly efficient use of time compared to an hour of moderate jogging.

The diet side — high protein, 2-3L of water, and what ‘limits toxins’ actually means

Sheridan’s nutrition approach, as reported, isn’t a fad. It’s high protein — the training research converges on roughly 1.6 to 2.2g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight for anyone doing serious strength work, which for a 65kg woman is about 105 to 145g of protein a day. That’s achievable: eggs at breakfast, chicken or tofu at lunch, fish at dinner, a whey shake if you’re short. Hydration next: two to three litres a day. Dull advice, consistently under-done by most working adults.

Then there’s sleep, which is where most transformations quietly succeed or fail. Seven to nine hours is where growth hormone does its work and tissues actually repair. Skimp on sleep and you can train perfectly and still see nothing happen. When coverage from outlets like Good Housekeeping UK references Sheridan “limiting toxins,” the translation is: less alcohol, less added sugar, fewer ultra-processed foods. Not elimination. Reduction. Alcohol in particular wrecks sleep quality and blunts muscle protein synthesis, so cutting midweek drinks is probably the highest-leverage change most readers could make.

A realistic three-session weekly template for a working UK adult

You’re not going to train five days a week, and you don’t need to. A sustainable split for a busy adult is three sessions of 45 minutes, Monday, Wednesday, Friday — or whatever three days fit around the school run and work calls.

Equipment you actually need to start: a pair of adjustable dumbbells (the selectable kind), a resistance band, and ideally a doorway pull-up bar. The rule from here on is the one Brown uses with Sheridan: each session, try to do one thing slightly better than last time. Add a rep. Add 1kg. Improve your depth. Clean up your tempo. That’s it.

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Last updated: April 2026 · Written by the Walton Surgery editorial team · Information is for educational purposes only and does not replace advice from a qualified healthcare professional.