How to Get Strong (and Stay Strong) Like Hilary Duff - Women's Health Australia

How to Get Strong (and Stay Strong) Like Hilary Duff

Her PT nerds out on all the details

After spending years trying to live up to Hollywood’s standards of the perfect body, and even battling a year-long eating disorder when she was 17, Hilary Duff decided to shift her focus to getting strong.

“Because of my career path, I can’t help but be like, ‘I am on camera and actresses are skinny,’” the star of How I Met Your Father admits in the January issue of Women’s Health Australia. “It was horrifying.”

But now, Hilary says she’s proud of her body. “[I’m] appreciating my health, doing activities that make me feel strong instead of just bettering the outside of my body. Spending time with people that make me feel good and share similar views on health and body positivity and getting enough sleep and balance in my diet.”

One person who has helped her do exactly that is her personal trainer Dominic Leeder. Here, Leeder shares – in detail – how he helped Hilary Duff get into the best shape of her life and maintain it, so that you can too.

Your goal needs to be realistic

“The most common unrealistic goal people have is wanting to lose a significant amount of weight, fast. I feel that it’s exacerbated by a lot of famous people who have gone on, what I would call, a fad diet, and lost an incredible amount of weight. They take photos, you see it, but no one knows what happens after that. And often with fad diets, things deteriorate straight away afterwards.

Reaching your fitness goals is more of a marathon than it is a sprint. And making it a marathon means that my main focus for my clients is to not just to reach their goal but to keep their goal. And doing it quickly often doesn’t allow them to keep it.”

Hilary Duff Women's Health Australia January 2023 cover

Focus on resistance training rather than cardio

“When I met Hilary, we decided to focus on resistance training, because we wanted to build lean muscle mass and up her metabolism. Her diet was also a huge factor and I wanted to make sure that she was eating the correct amount of macros for the goal that she needed. I know a lot of people like to avoid weights because they feel like they’re going to get big and bulky. But what I tell my clients is that if you only realised how hard it is to get big and bulky! You don’t just pick up a weight and then suddenly you build muscles.

With Hilary’s training, we were super-setting two types of exercises: a strength exercise with a stability exercise. We are looking at around, 75 to 85% of her one rep max. So, that’s a weight that you can quite happily do eight to 10 reps with perfect form. After that we would then drop the weight down and do eight reps at a slower rep range. I’ve found it’s the best way to gain lean muscle mass if it’s mixed with a sensible science based diet.

Here’s an example of a superset: if you were to perform eight push-ups and then straight away you get onto a stability ball with some light weights and perform a chest press with the rep range of a 4-2-1 count. That’s four seconds down, holding for two at the bottom of the movement, pressing up for one. That would be a good example for a chest superset. With Hilary, we did four one-hour sessions a week, and then up to five sessions a week.”

Don’t cut carbs

“There’s a huge misconception that carbohydrates are the devil. Complex carbs, in my opinion, are imperative. If you don’t have carbs, your body will use other things for energy, like protein. And because of the way I work with resistance training, we want that protein to go to the lean muscle build to help their metabolism. We need carbs, and the right carbs are gonna one satiate you. For Hilary’s macro split, we did 50 per cent complex carbs, 30 per cent healthy fats, and 20 per cent protein.”

Hilary Duff Women's Health Australia January 2023 cover

It’s okay if you struggle

“I don’t feel like she’ll mind me saying this: yes, her fitness and health are hugely important to Hilary. What’s more important to her is her family and work. When she comes home from work, she wants to spend time with her family because she spends very little time with them when she’s hard at work, so every moment counts.

So after reaching her initial goal, we had to find a new goal around [her priorities]. It was down to me to work out how best to maintain what we have [achieved], while she’s also enjoying her life and doing what she needs to do as a human being that has three children, a job, and so many other things. So I think it’s useful for people to know that it was a struggle.

Setting the new goal [with Hilary] was a struggle. What we ended up going with was, well, our goal right now is to maintain what we have while still having a fantastic life work/balance that’s important to her. She then went into filming for another show so it became even more difficult [to train together]. But because that was our goal, we more times than not managed to keep that going, so she can stay mentally happy. And then when she finishes that work, we’ll ramp back up again and we’ll find some new goals.”


Photography: Daniella Midenge. Styling: Kristen Saladino. Hilary Duff cover story: Karen Valby.


The January issue Women’s Health Australia featuring Hilary Duff is on sale now. Subscribe so that you never miss an issue.

Hilary Duff Women's Health Australia January 2023 cover

By Lizza Gebilagin

Lizza Gebilagin is the Editor-in-Chief of Women's Health Australia by day and boxer by night (and early morning). Prior to joining the team, she was deputy editor of body+soul, Cleo and Dolly magazines. She's also represented the NSW state boxing team at the National Championships and Women's World Qualifiers.