"How Paul Walker Got Those Abs" Men's Health Article

Paul Walker's Adventure Sports Workout RoutineHow Paul Walker Got Those Abs
The star of "Eight Below" tells us about how he stays in shape
By: Daniel Duane, Photographs by: Steven Lippman

Golden Boy
Watching women react to Paul Walker can be humbling.



The problem isn't so much the blushing teenage fans, but the adults, the ones you wouldn't mind meeting yourself. And to make matters more confusing, you actually do meet them when you spend a day with Walker, because his seeming disinterest and sheer Paul Walker–ness tend to keep women from approaching him directly. I learned this in the middle of a typical Paul Walker day, which involves spending maximum time getting serious exercise outdoors. We were standing on a concrete seawall near Oahu's Diamond Head peak, checking the waves below his nearby apartment, when this lovely woman appeared, fit and tan and wearing a tasteful little bikini, and started talking to me. She was in Hawaii on a job, she said, and was tired of hanging out with her coworkers. She was a surfer, and she wanted to know if we were going out in the water just then. And right when I started feeling pretty flattered about being the one getting all the female attention, Walker leaned over and whispered in my ear, "I'm kind of feeling that."

Then he did something remarkable: He simply took off his shirt.

Now, maybe he was just overheated in the tropical noon sun. And we were at the beach. Could've been purely innocent. But the effect of this one simple act was clear: Looking this naturally fit and fair had simply taught the guy that if he wanted someone's attention, all he had to do was create a diversion that would make her look at him. If she happened to see his bare torso in the process, well then, mission accomplished. And there was nothing arrogant or calculated about this. It was just common sense.

Which brings up an obvious question: How does a man get to look like Paul Walker? The face, of course, we can't help you with. And he doesn't have a nutritionist or a personal trainer we can refer you to. But there is a program, a very effective and simple one. "My motto is, you have to get in a sport a day," says Walker, who just turned 32. "Playing a little basketball, volleyball, going out surfing, skating, whatever it is. It's the best way to live." As for diet, "My mom was always really healthy and cautious about her diet, so I'm not a big sugar guy. But other than that, I just eat lean."

Walker tried weight lifting back when he was shooting Varsity Blues, in 1998. "I was surrounded by all these corn-fed football players," he says. "Everyone's like, ‘Oh, you're going to be the action guy, you have to get bigger.' So I started this lifting program, and I'm taking creatine, and I got up to 205. Then I went on this surf trip to El Salvador." Not only did the extra muscle slow down his paddling, he says, but his endurance in the water wasn't as good. "I come back, and I'm down to 180, super-lean again, and I'm like, ‘You know what? Hell with it. I'm done.' It's better for me to stay lean."

Nowadays, the only formal fitness training Walker does is martial arts, which strips unnecessary bulk off his frame while building his speed, balance, flexibility, and coordination. He starts every day with 2 hours of Brazilian jujitsu at a studio near his modest Santa Barbara home, then follows up with an hour of Muay Thai kickboxing. After that, it's all about the water: "If there's any surf, any fishing, I'll whip out in the boat." That would be the fast rigid-inflatable that allows Walker to rip across to the Channel Islands and catch a few waves, maybe spear a calico bass for dinner, then have a buddy drive while he surfs the boat wake all the way home. And if he's still itching for a good time after all that, he and some friends might do a few downhill skateboard runs on a quiet canyon road, or take his Nissan Skyline (0 to 60 in 5.2 seconds) to the racetrack. (Walker had professional race training when he starred in The Fast and the Furious, and now he takes full advantage of his skills most weekends.)



Combat Training
All that fun serves to put a smile on Walker's face, sure, and gets him attention from bikini-clad surfer girls if he so desires, but it also gives him a kind of all-around fitness and toughness that comes in handy on the job. Shooting his new movie, Into the Blue, about four friends who discover treasure in a shipwreck, required relentless underwater work and long breath holds. Peter Zuccarini, who directed all the underwater photography, says, "At first, it was just Paul learning how to free dive, with Jessica Alba in a bikini, on a bright white sand bottom in beautiful warm water. They get sort of tender and intertwined, holding their breath, swimming along, doing dolphin undulations around each other—really graceful stuff. I think he was enjoying himself."

But later, Zuccarini shot a sequence in which Walker had to dive 60 feet without air tanks, then swim along the edge of a drop-off, where the coral suddenly falls 2,000 feet into an abyss. While the camera crew wore 7 millimeter wet suits against the cold, and chain mail against the omnipresent reef and tiger sharks, Walker wore nothing but board shorts. In the scene, his character is following a trail of airplane wreckage. "Every time he picked up a piece," Zuccarini says, "a shark would swim up, so he was having to do a long breath hold, pick up a part, react to it as an actor, and then deal with the fact that every time he picked up some scrap metal, a shark would come in to see if it might be food." Director John Stockwell (Blue Crush) says that what made it all possible was the hypercompetitive relationship that developed between Walker and costar Scott Caan. "When Scott showed some aptitude underwater as a breath holder and free diver, Paul was like, ‘Okay, I'm going to go deeper and stay longer.' So they kept pushing each other."

Walker attributes his fighting spirit to his grandfather, a World War II veteran who also fought twice for the middleweight boxing title, and his father, who was in the Air Cavalry in Vietnam and fought a few amateur bouts. Walker grew up with a speed bag and a heavy bag in his family's backyard. His dad taught him a lot of punch combinations, and he wanted to be like his forebears so much that when the first Gulf War broke out, he decided to enlist. The only reason he didn't actually go to war, he says now, is that "I went home bragging about the idea, thinking my dad would think it was cool, and he goes, ‘You say that one more time, I'm going to knock your ass out, nail you in a crate, and ship you to Canada.' " His dad had seen enough of war to want his son's energy directed elsewhere.

Thus the surfing, an obsession that Walker sometimes places even above his fast-rising Hollywood career. Growing up in Sun Valley, California, Walker surfed every time his family went to the beach; these days he surfs almost every day. "It keeps things grounded for me," he says. "It's where I came from, and it's who I am. I sometimes struggle, because my job is like the antithesis of what surfing is all about. Surfing's simple. It's real."

We were out in the clear, blue Hawaiian water now, and a wave appeared on the horizon as Walker spoke. He spun to catch it. While he was gone, our female friend from the seawall paddled up to me on her own surfboard and struck up another conversation. I assumed Walker would want to rejoin us—it was such an effortless and high-quality hookup—so when I finally caught his eye, I started waving.

Walker waved back, then pointed to the horizon: Another big wave was on the way, he meant to say, and shouldn't we try to catch it?



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