To have a fitness or muscle building site is to have the obligatory story and/or post on Arnold Schwarzenegger and his workouts.
And so here’s mine…
But let’s change things up a bit.
You can easily google or search for Arnold’s (okay, let’s keep on a first name basis – if for no other reason than – you try typing Schwarzenegger a 100 times in a post) and get endless articles, reprints and recopies of what he supposedly did.
I’ll save you the trouble…
Every article will say that he did between 5 and 6 exercises per bodypart. He did 5 to 6 sets of 6 to 8 reps. He worked out 2 hours a day or maybe 4 hours of day. I list it all over at this page.
That out of the way, let’s talk about something much more important. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s advice for building muscle. You don’t want to know what he did per se, but rather you want to know how you can profit from his experiences.
That’s the ticket…
But let me sidetrack for a moment…
Back in 1975, I was a 110lb scrawny, weak kid with 2 older, athletic and popular brothers. And like many geeks who read comic books, I would always look at that Charles Atlas ad on the back covers and secretly daydreamed it being me. And when I first saw Hercules with Steve Reeves; I for first time, saw a human being looking like all those comic book superheroes.
Shortly hereafter, I saw Arnold Strong. I saw Larry Scott. In 1977 or so, Rocky came out. And a most important book also came out – 
Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder.
By the time that book came out, I had already bought all of Arnold’s training booklets (along with Larry Scott’s, Franco Columbu’s, Weider’s, a few of the crazy contraptions on the backs of those comic books, etc.); so I was a diehard Arnold fan already. Still, I poured over that book.
And you know what – his advice back in 1977 is still pretty good advice now.
That’s what I want to talk about – his advice to ordinary guys like me – and maybe you. And even though I could never do justice to his body of work, I’m going to give it my best and I’m going to do it over three segments. This is the first.
The Mind
Arnold – if nothing else – embodied the Dr. Stephen Covey’s saying, “First things first.” And the first thing will always be where your head is. Arnold wrote,
“You must consider that in the beginning you are training the mind as well as the body. The mind, after all, makes you want to train; it turns on the body…If the mind doesn’t want to lift weights, the body won’t lift them…The mind is incredible. Once you’ve gained mastery over it, channelling its power positively for your purposes, you can do anything…”
An
d the key to this is to have a reason. I called it a “want-to.” I was sitting next to young soldier who was whining quite a bit many, many moons ago. A much older sergeant, a veteran, looked at the young man and said, “don’t give me that baloney, it’s got nothing to do with you can’t doing it – it’s you don’t want to do it.” You have to want to do it.
When you tired, you have to want to work out because your reasons for doing so is stronger than your reasons for not. In 1977, Arnold talked about writing goals down. Wow. All the positive mental attitude and goal setting books for past 20 years and Arnold was talking about over 35 years ago:
“write it down and put it where you’ll see it in the months to come…”
I live by the statement, “plan your work and work your plan.” Planning comes first. Analyzing comes first. Understanding who you are and what your limitations are come first. And as Arnold points out so well, you need a compelling reason that will cause you to choose getting a workout versus a night out.
It also means taking a hard, honest look at yourself.
“Be Honest. Honesty is the key to how much you can improve.”
Because you can’t get to where you want to go unless you know where you started. One of my other posts, I recommended weighing yourself daily, measuring yourself weekly, and taking pictures of your monthly to guage your progress. But to guage your progress you need a starting point.
And from that starting point, you have to visualize where you want to go and how you want to end it. After the visualization, you write it down as Arnold suggests.
It means being realistic…
As a rough generalization, there are:
- The Ectomorph: Thin person with light bone structure – your hardgainer.
- The Endomorph: Stocky, heavy boned – gains “easily” but can also get fat and have a hard time geting ripped or cut.
- The Mesomorph: Supposedly the ideal body type for muscle building.
Which are you? Or perhaps you’re a mix – a body composition mutt, of sorts. What’s important here is to understand that everybody is different and their bodies respond differently to weight training. An Ectomorph may never become an Arnold, but maybe a Frank Zanish physique is doable.
Not everyone is going to build 20″ arms. But a muscular 16″ arm could well be reachable. Be realistic in understanding where you start and where you can go. But even as Arnold cautions beginners to be realistic, he does throw this out there:
“…these are generalizations. The power of the mind is astounding…there may be an endomorph…who adamantly disagrees with me. He has it in his head that he’s going to become Mr. Universe and nothing Arnold can say will dissuade him. More power to him. If he believes it long enough and hard enough and matches his convicstion with hard, relentless work, he might just make it.”
A wise man once said that “as a man thinketh in his heart so is he,” and that’s really the point that Arnold is driving home here.
The takeaways are:
- Establish your reason for wanting to work out.
- Be honest in analyzing your start point.
- Be realistic in what you can achieve without self-limiting yourself (hey, you know the saying,”shoots for you stars – you could miss but you could hit the moon.”)
- Define and set your goals.
- Write your goals down and put it where you can see it everyday.
In the next installment, I’ll talk about Arnold’s advice on dieting and eating for building muscle.
So, until next time…
Be strong…
Be healty…
