UrbanUpdate

Since the beginning of time (or, you know, since the beginning of Arnold Schwarzenegger), men have hit the gym to get as jacked as their favorite movie heroes. And while we may never get (or even want!) arms like Arnold, we can learn valuable fitness lessons from actors who got serious about fitness just to take their shirts off for the camera.

Read MoreHow to Get Abs Without Ever Doing Another Crunch

We asked celebrity trainers to kvetch about crunches with us.

By Lauren Larson

So we asked Stephen Cheuk, the founder of S10 Traininga gym dedicated to getting its clients to a silver-screen-ready 10-percent body fathow to follow in the sweaty footsteps of Brad Pitt (Fight Club), Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy), Gerard Butler (300), and a couple old favorites.

Brad Pitt In Fight Club: Abs Worth Fighting For

"The thing with abs is that everyone has them, but you just need to achieve a lower body-fat to see them. If you’re just looking to make them more defined, you can do hanging knee-raises which are toe touches where you’re hanging from a pull-up bar and touch your toes. And then there’s also diet. The worst thing for your abs is alcohol. Beer is probably the worst, but any excessive drinking will make you eat like shit, and then you wake up hungover, so you eat like shit and it’s a vicious cycle."

"Something that’s also great is sprinting. If you’re sprinting with the right form, moving your arms the right way and lifting your legs high enough, it rips your abs up. It’s basically the same as doing crunches but you’re also burning fat, too. It’s all about intensity, and sprinting is obviously 100-percent intensity. Just look at any 100-meter sprinter and you’ll see that they all are ripped. And they usually only lift about once or twice a week. The rest is just from the sprinting itself."

Tom Hardy in Warrior: Become a Trap Lord

"One of the best things for traps (the muscles between your shoulder blades that run up to your neck) are what’s called farmer’s walks. Basically you just take heavy weights we use long poles with weights on them in your hands and walk about sixty feet across the floor. Make sure your shoulders stay up and back.

The next thing you will want to do are heavy weight deadlifts, but using a rack to start the weight a few feet off the ground. Normally with a deadlift, the bar is on the ground and you’re bent over almost ninety degrees, but with it starting on the rack you’re going to only be bending about twenty degrees, which will make it easier to lift up, and it’ll also use your traps a lot more."

Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy: How to Go From Chubby to Chiseled

For someone like Chris, it would take about twelve weeks, working out five to six times a week, to change your body the way he did. You’d definitely have to do a lot of high-intensity cardio to start. And then we’d have you do weight training in three-to-four-week cycles, with a lot of sets to build a lot more muscle.

Basically you want to find your one-rep max the amount of weight you can do one rep of and then be working at about 70 to 80 percent of that. At S10, we also consider factors like time-under-tension, which refers to how much time your muscles are actually being worked, and that metric allows us to play with tempo, say four seconds up, four seconds down for a bench press.

Diet plays a major role here too. In the beginning, you have to cut a lot out. Refined sugars, carbs, even fruit. And you’d be eating leafy greens, lean protein and good fats. And then from there, see how your body reacts if you slowly add in berries, tomatoes, fruit, and other things. If you’re not losing body fat after adding something in, you know not to."

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"I actually used to do Wing Chun, which is the type of martial arts Bruce Lee did. He never lifted weights, because that can slow you down, but there’s a big difference between power and strength. And the way you get power is by training with moves that are explosive.

Say you’re doing push-ups: You don’t just want to do regular push-ups. They should be jump push-ups or clap push-ups. Then things like jump squats or box jumps are great for building power in your legs. Also good is conditioning like jumping rope and battle ropes, and especially work conditioning that tracks wattage, which is how much power you output. I like using the assault bike as it uses upper body and legs. We use it at S10 and it is widely used in the MMA/UFC community.

But what’s also important to remember is that if you are going to be practicing any type of martial arts, you have to condition your joints and body for the intensity. For example, there’s a drill you can do with a partner, where you’re basically punching and connecting at the forearm to familiarize your arms with getting hit. These types of drills will get your body used to the intensity of the movements and will prevent injury."

Gerard Butler in 300: The New Spartan Workout

"There’s a program called German Volume Training that’s similar to the 300 Workout that got a lot of attention when the movie came out. The key to G.V.T. is doing sixty percent of your one rep max, and doing ten sets of an exercise of ten reps, with a one minute rest in between sets. What makes it work is just the volume and amount of weight. Say you’re doing a move with 100 pounds, and do it 100 times: That’s 10,000 total poundage, which is actually a lot more than you might do at your seventy or eighty-percent max. It’s a figure people usually don’t pay attention to, but is key if you’re trying to get bigger.

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They also did a lot of Strongman training, which is where a lot of people saw them doing, like, tire flipping, sled pulling, and generally a lot of anabolic cardio work, which means you’re building muscle while you’re doing cardio"

Paul Rudd in Ant Man: Because You Don’t Actually Want a Dad Bod

"The thing about dad bods are that they usually mean the guy doesn’t have any muscle. From the looks of it, Paul Rudd probably had barely ever lifted weights before training for this film. So starting out, for the first four weeks, you’d want to start with moderate weights and high-intensity cardio just to start burning that fat off. In general, most people need four weeks of general preparation, where you’re getting your body moving the right way, correcting any bad habits, and getting the person ready for a real program. That’s when the real work starts, where you’d use something like the German Volume Training to build muscle."

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"I have a ton of clients who travel, so I’m constantly giving them workouts that they can do on their own. There are always places to do pull-ups, push-ups, and a lot of other bodyweight exercises. One good regimen includes several different exercises all done in succession, so you get every muscle group together. Start with sixty seconds of body squats, then move into push-ups, then into a minute of jump-roping, into jump lunges, into ab crunches, into burpees."

Edward Norton in American History X: Transform from Scrawny to Scary

"If you’re skinny and are serious about getting big, you should do two-a-day training where you would train the same muscle part twice a day. It’s called super compensation where your body is actually stronger in that window before muscle soreness sets in. You would train heavy in the morning say before work and then maybe have a nap mid-afternoon to help recover and increase growth hormone. Later that evening, once you’re home, you’d do something with higher volume like German Volume Training. It may seem unrealistic to get to the gym twice a day, but this type of training should only be done for two weeks as it’s very taxing for the nervous system, but amazing for getting results quickly.

As for your diet, you would want to increase your calorie and carb intake but not just any carbs. Don’t go reaching for ice cream and pizza. You want to stick to rice as your main source of carbohydrates. And you want to increase the carbs as you increase your workload on training days. So when you’re doing heavy lifting with your legs, increase the carbs to 250 to 300 carbs per day. If you’re just doing arms, about 150 should be good. We actually train designer Waris Alhuwalia, who is a skinny guy, so I’ve been telling him to make a shake before bed with oatmeal, almond butter, and other stuff that comes to be almost 1,000 calories, but good calories. He’s not eating, like, Shake Shack.

UP NEXTJake Woolf is a writer who has covered men’s style for over ten years and has contributed to GQ since 2014. A graduate of Parsons The New School for Design (good school, long name), he also has bylines at Robb Report, HighSnobiety, Pitchfork, and the defunct #menswear website Four Pins... Read moreWriterXRelated Stories for GQBrad PittHealthHealth