Joe Six-Pack, Redefined

Remember the paunch?

Lots of guys had one. Bankers lugged them around the tennis court, dads danced the polka with them at bars, TV cops swung them out of the Plymouth when they meant business. At every men’s club in the country, there were always a dozen of them bobbing in the pool, attached to the local lords of commerce. Younger guys had them too, even took them to the beach, strolling along large and shirtless as chieftains. They didn’t apologize for the extra weight, didn’t joke about it much, didn’t give themselves the bends trying to suck it in. In those days, guys were allowed, even expected, to taper out, to go a little soft with age.

“Larry’s doing great,” people would say. “Married, coupla kids, a little paunch.” By that they didn’t mean that Larry was a swelling heap of flesh; they meant he was living pretty well. He really was doing great.

Ah, the quaint charms of a faraway time--the late ‘70s, early ‘80s--when the world was still mostly innocent of nonfat mochaccinos, digital stair machines and personal trainers. Nowadays, no one has a paunch; we have the waist-to-hip ratio.

And we have fitness models. You know them, the guys who canter shirtless across beaches on magazine covers, who throw towels over their shoulders in gym promos, who appear in ads for everything from razors to bottled water--and whose collective image now stands in mute mockery of the average trying-to-make-a-living Joe.

The fundamental problem is this: These new models look so, well, fit. These are not the Charles Atlas-era, oily-muscled, top-heavy balloon-figures who functioned as out-sized--and comfortably unattainable--male ideals a generation ago.

“The look is much less extreme now than it was in the 1970s and 1980s,” says Tom Cortesi, 33, a magazine cover model who has headlined Gillette TV campaigns and done countless photo shoots over the last 14 years. “It has dropped from bigger and bulkier to leaner, and much more focused on the stomach, on the abs.”

Cortesi is a living archetype. At 5-foot-11 and all of 165 pounds, hanging around the house in a T-shirt and sweats, he looks--may we say so?--handsome but otherwise pretty normal. It’s when he does his thing for the camera that he presents a sculpted package of muscle, shrink-wrapped, his torso traced with as many ridges and gullies as a coral reef at low tide.

“Ripped, shredded, chiseled, all those words,” says Mike Ryan, 35, a trainer and model, who ran Gold’s Gym in Venice for years and now works with his own clients, including celebrities such as the wrestler and actor known as The Rock. “It’s the look everyone wants now. You’re going for smooth lines, muscle separation, the cut ab muscles--what we call the six-pack. But the point is that it’s very lean, you see it in all the ads and movies now--’Fight Club’ is a good example. Even bigger guys want to look that way. Peeled; did I mention peeled?”

“High definition,” says Jeff Henry, a 41-year-old model and actor living in Culver City who works steadily in TV commercials and print ads. “I take a lot of work from bigger guys because I’ve got it. I’ve got the washboard.”

The washboard, the cheese-grater, the anti-paunch: Get used to it, say trainers; it’s going to be around a while. Symbolically and physically, it lies at the center of the latest male body ideal. And, what’s most tragic, it cannot be written off as the bizarre product of too many steroids and hormones, of freakish hours in the weight room, or even of plastic surgery. No, my son, the way to the anti-paunch lies--gasp--within ourselves.

“Everyone’s got the muscles, down there somewhere,” Cortesi says. “The trick is getting them to show.”

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A simple matter, the infomercial barkers would say, of releasing the definition within. And herewith a guide, for the unpeeled, from those who do it for a living:

1. Quit your day job (or at least take some time off). Once you’re a ripped fella, you can lead a more normal life; but getting there is no casual hobby. When he was getting himself carved, several years ago, Cortesi put in more than an hour a day on the treadmill for four to six months, burning 1,000 calories or so, before working with weights for more than an hour. Then he had to experiment with what kinds of workouts best suited him.

Jerry Gilmore, 33, a fitness cover model who also does fashion shoots, says he now logs about a half-hour of aerobic exercise, usually running, first thing in the morning, plus 50 sit-ups a day, along with up to two hours in the gym five or six days a week. “And usually one weekend day devoted to cardio,” he says. “The Santa Monica stairs, Rollerblading, getting out in the sun.”

That’s maintenance: Laying the foundation took more of all the above.

Ryan still gets up well before 6 in the morning and does one hour of grueling exercise almost every day, running stairs or through deep sand on the beach. Then he heads to the weight room.

“If you’re starting with a normal physique, soft, a little belly, trying to build that ripped lean look, it’s a full-time job,” Cortesi says. “That’s what you do with your time,” in the beginning.

And speaking of efficient use of time:

2. Stop staring at yourself in the gym mirror. The sultans of shred save their posing for the cameras. In the weight room, they work like a pit-stop crew. “You work fast, you don’t waste time between sets,” says Henry.

Their routines reflect different body types. Naturally thin, Cortesi usually does exercises--barbell bench presses, arm curls, squats--and starts with weight he can lift 10 times or fewer. Such heavier lifting maintains muscle size on bodies prone to losing it. Bigger types who want to better define what they have often work with lighter weights they can lift more than 20 times.

“Doing all those reps will cut you up pretty quickly,” says Gilmore.

Very few of these guys say they need more than three or four weight room sessions a week, for an hour or less, to keep the look.

“The misconception is that you have to be in the weight room all the time,” says Keith Neubert, 35, a former tight end for the New York Jets and Philadelphia Eagles who dropped 15 pounds before coming out to L.A. to start a career as an actor and TV writer-producer. “But what you really need to do is crank the cardio and be strict about diet.”

Which brings us to tip No. 3:

3. Eat like a saint (and not the rotund St. Thomas Aquinas). Diet is the great equalizer, and its taboos are familiar: no fried food, no junk food, light on the fat, heavier on protein.

Cortesi has egg whites, turkey bacon and toast in the morning; maybe a turkey or chicken sandwich for lunch; and lean meat and salad for dinner. Henry’s diet is similar: tuna, lean meats, very little fat. “Watching the diet is one of the hardest parts,” says Gilmore. “Anyone can work out, but staying away from all that good food? Sometimes I think that 90% of the battle is diet.”

It’s a battle that doesn’t get easier with age. For while fashions may change, the principles of paunchitude are eternal: Namely, that up through the age 25 or so, most guys can live on malt liquor and Philly cheesesteaks and remain as wiry as a drug addict. A few years later we’re forcing down smoothies and fighting a Homer Simpson profile. Part of the change is physiological: The body’s base metabolism drops, and (for reasons that aren’t clear) it stores excess fat in the middle.

But the more important changes are social. They involve that ongoing triathlon--full-time work, marriage, children--which is plenty exhausting but hardly the sort of workout that puts ribs on a fella’s stomach. For example, researchers have found that married men are significantly more likely than single men or married women to be overweight (more than 10% over ideal body weight). The reason is simple, nutritionists believe: food supply. Where single guys often skip meals or design their own menu, married ones usually do not. Dinner is one of the central rituals of marriage, and husbands aren’t known for refusing seconds, even if they’re full.

That’s why it helps to:

5. Date, or marry, someone who understands. Cortesi is engaged to a fitness model. Neubert’s wife runs a wellness center in Redondo Beach. And Ryan’s girlfriend is herself a model and fitness consultant who also trains at Gold’s in Venice. “It does help when you can work out together,” he says.

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Now, in the interest of full disclosure, it must also be reported here that all of these swains looked pretty glam to start with. That is to say: It helps to bring a first-rate genome to the gym, along with your sweats.

Take Cortesi. At the top of his profession now, he gets by with only a light, five- to 10-minute warmup on the treadmill before lifting, a few days a week, plus some swimming, and the occasional hike in the hills behind his house. “People hate to hear it, but now that I’m in shape, I don’t really need to do that much. Stay active, live clean, watch the diet. And I don’t really drink. A little wine, sometimes, but no beer,” he says. “One reason more men don’t have this lean look, I think, is that they’re out there drinking a lot of beer.”

No beer? Hold on now. Maybe--just thinking through this whole shredding shtick one more time--maybe it’s better just to wait for the paunch to make a comeback, after all.