British film star Tom Hardy is bulking up - for his upcoming role as villain Bane in Christopher Nolan’s next Batman installment, The Dark Knight Rises.

The Bafta winner showed of his already impressive 12 stone ripped, muscular physique when he appeared on Alan Carr’s Chatty Man on Monday, but revealed to the host that he has to gain more weight in order to reach the 13 and a half or 14 stone target.

"I'm going to need to bulk up a lot for it. That's a lot of weight to put on and I've got to start shooting in May. I'm 12 and a bit now, so I've got under three months to do that. Fat - a lot of fat. And trickery." He told Carr.

Hardy is no stranger to bulking up for starring roles, he famously gained an excessive amount of weight to portray Britain’s most notorious prisoner Chrales Bronson.

In order to gain the weight for Bronson Hardy’s regime consisted of non-specific exercises such as press ups, push ups, abs work and resistance training. When interviewed by AskMen Hardy said “My approach was to do a lot of repetitions in order to send messages to my muscles: this helps them start to grow in a way that you can’t make them in the gym. To achieve dense muscle, you need a specific kind of training.”

When asked how do you lose the weight once you have gained it Tom said “It’s much less daunting once you’ve put your foot on the road to it. I’m a notorious couch potato and I don’t like exercise. Half an hour of physical exercise, like jogging or fast walking a day is a start. Then there’s your diet. You cut out sugars, fat, soy sauces… anything that’s nice. Tea and coffee is replaced by boiling water with lemon. It’s amazing how quickly you get into it. There’s also herbal tea and a lot of water, obviously… about two litres a day. It’s about motivation and it has to be something that’s realistic for you to keep up.”

Scientist from the University College of London have discovered a link between having your heating on at a high temperature and gaining excess weight.

Having the heating on means that we don’t have to burn calories in order to warm our bodies up naturally.

When we do venture out of the house in the winter to do our daily chores, it is usually via transport to places such as offices where the temperature will often be controlled by heating units. Throughout this time our body no longer feels the need to work to burn calories.

Research has shown that if your body is warm then it does not need to convert a specific type of fat known as ‘brown’ fat (adipose ­tissue) into energy to generate heat, the study said. Previously it was thought that adipose tissue was only in the body of infants, which in turn helped in keeping them warm, but recent studies into the human body have found it also present in adults.

The study suggest that the more exposure you have to heat then the less likely your body will be able to burn ‘brown fat’.

So think twice before cranking up your heating on a cold winters night, as it could have an impact up on your energy balance and eventually begin to have an impact on body weight.