'Eclipse' Is 'Big On Fighting,' Kellan Lutz And Jackson Rathbone Say

'We're all hitting the gym pretty hard so we can have the endurance,' Lutz tells MTV News at Teen Choice Awards.

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So when they rolled into the Teen Choice Awards to pick up an evening's best 11 trophies, they had a brief respite to celebrate the past ("Twilight"), talk about the present ("New Moon") and prepare themselves for the future ("Eclipse").

"Oh, it's exciting, man," Jackson Rathbone told us about recent meetings the actors have had with David Slade, the bloodthirsty "30 Days of Night" director who will oversee them for the soon-to-shoot third film in the series. "We've all met with him. We've all been up to Vancouver doing training and getting ready for all the action."

But since Rathbone plays Civil War soldier-turned-vampire Jasper Hale — and confirmed to us that Jasper's 1863 transformation will be included in "Eclipse" as a flashback — the charismatic star has been blessed with one bit of training that the other Cullens don't get to partake in.

"Horseback training," Kellan Lutz sighed. "I'm jealous."

"Yeah, I've spent two and a half hours a day riding horses and two and a half hours a day fighting," Rathbone revealed of his preparation for "Eclipse," the plot of which will depend far more heavily on Jasper, Emmett and the other Cullens than the first two films. "We've been training in the gym."

" 'Eclipse' is big on fighting, so Jasper trains all of us," Lutz said of a key sequence in the book that has Rathbone's war veteran teaching the werewolves and vampires fighting techniques in order to defend themselves against newborn vampires. "All of us characters are actually going through fight training, stunt training. We're all hitting the gym pretty hard so we can have the endurance."

The noticeably larger Lutz, who has spoken before of his desire to be an action hero, said he can't wait to unleash Emmett in full form. "You can't really do scenes like that, that are so crucial, [unless you train]. You need to know what you're doing, you need to know how to take blocks, how to go on the offense, prepare yourself for defense," he explained. "It's a lot of training, but it's great when we're all done with the training and get to shoot it."

"Yeah," Rathbone laughed. "Once all the black eyes and bloody lips heal."

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