Heartbroken no longer, Kirkland’s Jason Mesnick, the newest leading man on ABC’s “The Bachelor,” flew to Los Angeles last October hoping his latest go at TV romance could yield better results than the first.
Comments posted online by the show’s followers focus on more than Mesnick’s renewed belief in love – his new body.
As it turns out, that’s no coincidence.
The 32-year-old Mesnick sought to enhance has thin build just three months before filming for the 13th edition of the reality series would begin.
Dissatisfied with the gym membership he had, Mesnick turned to Bellevue’s Elite Fitness Training studio, located in Old Main.
“The gym he was at, you kind of get hounded,” Elite president and co-founder Dave Johnson said. “He’d go in the gym and he’s such a nice guy, he’d talk to everyone, but he couldn’t get a workout in. So he was going to give us a shot.”
Mesnick wanted washboard abs, a chiseled chest and arms that looked athletic, co-founder Alex Wasserman said, so Elite’s staff customized a one-on-one training program for Mesnick to make him look more athletic, not beefing him up too much.
Some days, Mesnick, an account executive in estate and legacy planning, would run stairs with weights on his back. Other days, he’d be doing sprint intervals on a bicycle, performing pushups or catching football patterns in a neighboring park.
“The more variation you put into a routine the quicker and the more your body will respond to it,” Wasserman said.
Mesnick’s diet was restricted to the basics: steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast, lean chicken breast and salads for lunch and no food past 7 p.m. at night. And he was urged to get plenty of sleep.
“You hear that stuff all the time,” Johnson said, “But that’s why you see a difference in his body. How many people go to the gym year in, year out, and look the same at the end of their gym membership as they started out?”
After working out five days a week, one or two hours at a time for 90 days, the once-skinny Mesnick trimmed 3 percent of his body fat while building lean muscle.
ABC’s producers wanted Mesnick to look the same at the end of the show as he did when it started, so they paid for Johnson and Wasserman’s plane tickets to and from L.A. throughout the filming process, rotating trainers to replicate Mesnick’s experiences inside the Elite studio.
Mesnick, meanwhile, hasn’t hesitated to show off the fruits of his labor. During episode three, two of the women vying for his affection decided to apply baby oil on his bare chest.
“You’re not going to get in that kind of shape,” Johnson said, “by having someone stand there counting while you’re doing bicep curls and then go for a jog afterwards. You have to do work.”
Maks Goldenshteyn is a student in the University of Washington Department of Communication News Laboratory.
