For the past six years, I’ve been on a fitness journey. I’ve lifted weights with professional rugby players, been pushed to nausea-point by £100-quid-a-minute PTs, and shrunk my particulars cold swimming. Yet even though I also hit the gym twice a week (doing bear crawls in the back garden during lockdown) and regularly run 5km, my love handles cling like barnacles.
This time, though, I think I’ve finally nailed it. I’ve arranged a joint workout and fitness mentoring session with David Gandy, the world’s most famous male supermodel, a man who is iron-willed enough to maintain a perfect six-pack for the past 15 years. Naturally, he arrives at the chichi subterranean gym in Mayfair perfectly styled — Harrington suede jacket, brown suede Chelsea boots, and cowboyish charcoal-grey skinny jeans that show off his neat-but-meaty bum. He is the paragon of male beauty — exquisite jawline, piercing blue eyes, strong nose. It’s such an exciting face, it’s quite hard to take it in. I am consumed by an enormous wave of remorse for the past 20 years spent secretly eating Wotsits in my car.
Gandy and his six-pack became famous after an iconic Dolce & Gabbana shoot in 2007 that depicted him floating about in the Med like Apollo after a couple of stiff drinks. Until this point, male models were built like consumptive chimney sweeps. Remarkably he’s managed to keep in the same shape (he’s 42, married to barrister Stephanie Mendoros, and has two daughters under five — but no dad bod here). If anyone can help us to emerge from our party season chrysalis of pork crackling and cashews it’s this guy.
In his ad campaigns, he’s the image of a louche Narcissus. The real Gandy is softly spoken, focused and with an accent more Surrey than Essex (the county of his birth). Before the shoot, we sit down for a dab of powder. The make-up artist looks at him and suffers a brief existential crisis: “Why am I here? You don’t need anything!” I get plastered with a decorator’s sponge-worth of concealer. Gandy politely asks if I’ve trained much. I reply that I lift weights twice a week, run and swim.
“Hmm,” he says.
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“But I’m not really getting anywhere with it,” I add. Then (casually): “What are you doing then?”
“Four 45-minute sessions of weights a week,” he says. “Just weights. I do no cardio whatsoever. Which no one ever believes. But I take the dog for a five-mile walk every morning.”
He trains late — working out in the gym (no personal trainer) at around 8pm four nights a week. It is, he says, the only time he can fit it in. On a typical day, he takes the girls to school, manages his new business — a leisurewear brand, David Gandy Wellwear — does charity work for the Watches of Switzerland Foundation, plus “I’m checking on the builders at the new house, making sure there is food for dinner, picking kids up from school, getting dinner on, then putting them to bed”. Then, if he’s not at an event, he’s at the gym.
Part of my mission is to emulate his workout regimen for a week. I have a suspicion he’s not flicking through Vogue while phoning it in on an elliptical trainer.
We start at the weight benches. Gandy pulls out three sets of dumbbells (10, 12 and 14kg) and arranges them neatly at the foot of the bench. I’m mesmerised by his physique and the fact that when his T-shirt rides up, exposing skin above his waistband, it’s all one clean line. Next to him, I feel like a human shar pei, and don’t even try to suck in my gut. He instructs me to complete 12 shoulder presses of each weight, in good form.
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“Mostly people start light and move to heavier weights,” he says. “The problem with this is that it is harder to push — you’re going to be on a heavy weight at your weakest point. I prefer to reverse it and end on the lighter weight. We naturally as men go into thinking the heavier the weight the better. That’s the biggest myth.” (I note the “we” — as if we’re the same species.)
I pre-emptively explain that I have a terrible back, after squishing a disc while putting down some heavy-ish dumbbells. He gently suggests that this could be partly because I’ve neglected training my core, and possibly my glutes.
“I’ve always been fortunate in having bigger legs that I didn’t need to train,” he says. “Then I got to a certain age, I walked past a mirror and realised things were going south.” (With respect, now it’s my turn to say “hmm”.) “That led me to start training my glutes, which helped me even up and look much better.”
He adds that we should look at old videos of Arnold Schwarzenegger — the god of weight training — to see the importance of proportion, and one muscle group’s relationship to the next. “Make sure if you work on your chest, you also work on your triceps. And if you are doing back and shoulders, that you are doing a bit of biceps work. Lots of guys end up with pigeon chests because their favourite thing is arms, they neglect the chest.”
Gandy splits his four weekly sessions into legs and abs, shoulders and back, chest, and finally arms. The important thing, he says, is to keep mixing things up. “Don’t get stuck repeating the same thing week after week. You have to change up your training all the time because your muscles are very clever, they get used to the exercise. It’s about changing up and seeing how your body reacts.”
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● David Gandy: Excuse me if I look a little rough today
He believes we overcomplicate our workouts. “There’s way too much information.” His strategy is to “shock your body. Pick three different exercises and do them as a superset, one after the other.” Don’t start with ridiculously heavy weights. “Bigger weights will come. Be patient.”
After I’ve completed the shoulder press repetitions, it’s his turn. The photographer snaps away. I ask Gandy if he minds if I use the photos to start up my personal training business on Insta. (“This is my first client, Dave, he’s doing really well.”) He nearly drops the weight, laughing.
I wonder whether he’s always been into fitness. He rattles off answers, almost as if he’s shy talking about himself. At school, he was “a loner, got bullied”. To get away, “I either went to the gym, or to the library, I didn’t really have any friends. I was training hard but didn’t know what I was doing.”
His fondest childhood memories are spin bowling sessions with his father in the back garden. “I played cricket three times a week. I captained my school as an all-rounder and trained with Essex.” He recently had a practice session with his dad’s cricket team for the first time since he started modelling. (“I started by bowling the balls into the top of the net, but once I got my arm in, I was flying, getting bounce, swinging it in again.”)
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● David Gandy: My swimwear, my body and me
He is as far from the brash Essex stereotype as it’s possible to be. His parents, who ran their own business, took him on family holidays to Africa, Alaska, the Amazon. His childhood clearly imprinted on him a love of escape and adventure. As we speak, he is shipping his vintage Jaguar XK120 out to the UAE to compete in the Mille Miglia, an open road endurance event for classic cars. Prior to this, Gandy was part of a team that won the Cowes to Torquay powerboat race at a record speed.
He confesses he “hates” his weekly abs session, which he finds the most uncomfortable part of training. I ask him to demonstrate. He rests his shoulders on the bench and raises his abdomen and legs into the air — a bench lying body raise. The last time I saw this was in the log cabin training sequence in Rocky IV. This requires incredible core strength. Note to self — make slightly more effort in the gym.
Gandy explains that he has to be careful not to accumulate too much muscle as it becomes a problem with clothes: “I can be a tailor’s nightmare.” Tell me about it. “I have a 32in waist, which goes up to 42in shoulders. I can go back to the tailor three weeks later and he’s like, ‘Hang on, you’ve put on an inch’ — because I’ve been training so much.” But that’s changing, he says. “The older you get, the longer it takes to get into shape. I think I was harder on myself preparing for the last two [Dolce & Gabbana] Light Blue shoots.”
You get the impression that he trains not for vanity but sanity. Bullying does something to your self-esteem that never really leaves you. It’s quite a response to choose a career where your appearance is under such scrutiny. When I ask him when he realised he looked different from the average bloke, he dismisses the question entirely, indicating that his mates wouldn’t let him live it down (I’m guessing he caught a bit of flak for the white pants shoot back in the day).
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● South by southwest: David Gandy does a Cary Grant
“You become used to people being deeply critical of how you look,” he says. “But they will never criticise me as much as I criticise myself. The worst phrase I hear, at work, and in the gym, is ‘that’ll do’.” A lot of people, he notes, do a few exercises, “then they sit on the weight bench looking at their phones. If you are in the gym for 45 minutes then you are not stopping for 45 minutes. We are constantly looking for the easy way but it doesn’t exist.”
Feeling seen, I ask him about food. He doesn’t eat breakfast (“the most important meal of the day? Bollocks!”). Other than that, he isn’t fussy. “You learn, when you are travelling 100 times a year, when something is put in front of you, you eat it because you are not sure when you are going to eat again . . . I’m the easiest person to feed. I don’t even need to look at a menu, people can just bring me food, I’ll eat it.”
I’m sensing that people don’t bring him frozen pizzas and packs of biscuits. “The only thing I really stay away from is processed foods, like white pasta, white bread, anything packaged,” he says. He remembers his grandparents in the East End, making sandwiches — “thick layers of butter and dripping on doorstop bread. They were never fat because the food was real. Not full of preservatives.”
I confess that I live on 2,000 calories a day but still can’t lose weight. He tactfully brings up the example of a “friend” who lost his belly by cutting out beer and junk food. “If you are training enough and you are active enough then you shouldn’t have to worry about calories,” he says. He has to eat about 3,500 calories a day or he drops weight. “Getting the right amount of protein is critical.” But he isn’t a low-carb fan. “You’re not going to gain anything just eating protein either. You need fats and carbs as well.”
Is Gandy doing Dry January like half of the British population? No, because he hasn’t overindulged. If he drinks he’ll opt for something “clean” — a gin or vodka. His mantra is moderation, not obsession. “You want to enjoy life.”
For the next week, I follow his advice. As I don’t own a dog, I try to swim in the morning (fasted) and then eat well — protein, vegetables and low GI carbs, no junk. I’m surprised by how much I enjoy the four high-intensity weight sessions. I embrace the idea of finding the most unpleasant exercises and fully committing. It’s hugely rewarding, even though I’m hobbling around days later. Plus, going to the gym in the evening is a stress buster, and I wake each morning feeling positive. If I can mimic this consistently over 15 years, you might be looking at the next face of Wotsits.
davidgandywellwear.com
David Gandy’s guide to strong shoulders and a rippling back
Exercise 1: Hanging row
Find a barbell (a Smith machine is a safe bet). Get under it, grip with both hands and bring your body up to the bar as if performing an inverted press-up.
Exercise 2: Ts and Ys
Make this part of your weekly routine. To perform a “Y”, grab a couple of light dumbbells. Begin with them together, in front of your pelvis and raise them up to extend into a Y shape, with the dumbbells slightly behind you. To perform a T, make like the Messiah.
Exercise 3: Pyramids — seated shoulder press
Collect 3 dumbbells of ascending weight at the foot of an upright weight bench. Do 12 controlled reps of the heaviest weight, then move to the next. Keep pauses between sets to a minimum and pile on the pressure.
