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National Geographic for Disney+

Giving up his smartphone meant Hemsworth had to find his way, old school: He read maps before hiking into the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales. And he memorized routes—stimulating the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center—to avoid getting lost in Australia’s largest highland area.

“That was tense,” Chris Hemsworth acknowledged after working through stress by swimming with wrists and ankles trussed, at the Sydney Aquatic Center. Such fraught situations taught the actor not to panic.

Wearing an MIT-designed suit that replicates aging by limiting movement and dulling the senses, Hemsworth spent three days in a retirement community. Listening to people whose deaths were imminent, he said, was a lesson “in many ways of health and wellness but, most importantly, in how to live a beautiful life.”

While fasting, Hemsworth plays underwater hockey—another extreme activity filmed for the Limitless series.

Hemsworth puts his surfing skills to use in the Norwegian Arctic. “It was physically painful beyond measure from anything I've ever felt,” he said of swimming sans wet suit in the freezing waters. His skin turned red, as his brothers stood on the shore, bundled against the cold.

In his new National Geographic series, Limitless With Chris Hemsworth, the actor completes a test of the body’s reactions to fear: He climbed up a hundred-foot-long rope suspended from a cable car, high above a canyon floor in Australia’s Blue Mountains.

The team makes camp on a moraine on Edward Bailey Glacier en route to the formation known as Pool Wall. It's unclear exactly what the data collected during the expedition will reveal, but the glaciers in the area, compared with other parts of Greenland, showed little sign of melting. “This area," says Sevestre, "could be one of the last strongholds that hasn’t quite caught up with climate change just yet."

The expedition team celebrate Greenland guide Adam Kjeldsen's 40th birthday after a day of trekking across the Renland Ice Cap. (left to right: Findlay, Mikey Schaefer, Adam Kjeldsen, Honnold, Aldo Kane, and Heidi Sevestre)

Composed of three-million year old gneiss, Ingmikortilaq presented the climbers with numerous challenges—loose rock, holds breaking off in their hands, and slick marble-like surfaces that required extra grip strength to hang on.

During down time at base camp, Honnold hangs from a fingerboard to strengthen his grip.