Arnold

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  2. WIDE-GRIP CHINS—These chins widen the lats and work on the entire shoulder girdle. Many top bodybuilders have built great upper backs with this exercise alone. It primarily develops the upper and outer regions of the lats and spreads the scapula, making it easier to widen the lats. Using a wide grip (see photo), pull yourself up until your chin is over the bar; lower the body slowly and give the lats a good stretch on the way down. I prefer 10 reps, and sometimes I add weight by placing a dumbbell between my legs for a few sets of 6 to 8 reps. You may not be able to do 10 reps. In that case do as many as you can, aiming for a total of 30.

  3. MILITARY PRESS—The military press is for the deltoid muscles. The front deltoid is the biggest muscle here and a pressing movement with a barbell is basic to its development. Your grip on the bar should be about 5 inches wider than your shoulders. Sitting with your feet approximately a foot apart, lift the barbell from the floor to the chest area, which is called cleaning the weight; then in a second movement press it slowly and smoothly over your head and lock your elbows. This exercise can also be performed from a standing position; however, I prefer the sitting version because it eliminates excessive strain on the lower back. I would strongly recommend that you use a sturdy lifting belt. Again, you can use the add-weight principle.

  4. BARBELL CURL—I believe in basic moves, and the standing barbell curl couldn’t be more basic for building the biceps. At first, I suggest you take a medium-wide grip (approximately shoulder-width) on the bar to hit the bicep directly, although later on you can vary the grip to the degree that you personally feel the greatest results. As with all exercises, start with a weight that becomes progressively more difficult to lift after about the fifth rep. This strain rams the blood into the biceps. Remember, this is a power-building as well as a muscle-building exercise so don’t be afraid to handle the poundage. Only your forearms should move. Keep your elbows stationary. If you allow them to move, the deltoids will do the work and you will not get 100% bicep action.

  5. FRENCH PRESS—Grip the bar with your hands approximately 10 inches apart and lift it over your head. Keep your upper arm in a stationary position close to the sides of your head. Let the weight slowly down behind your head. Then press the weight slowly back to the starting position. Do not allow your upper arms to move.

  6. SQUATS, WEIGHT BEHIND THE NECK—Squats will develop your thighs, strengthen your heart and lungs, and generally improve your circulation. It is better to do this exercise with the aid of a squat rack so you can use heavy weight. Holding the weight on the back of your shoulders, with your feet either flat on the floor or with the heels elevated by one-inch blocks, keep your upper body straight and lower yourself into a full squat. In a powerful exercise such as the squat it is essential to remember the rules about breathing. Inhale deeply on the way down, exhale while coming up. I would recommend that you do the squat in front of a mirror so you can observe your form and always keep the weight parallel and your upper body as straight as possible. One word of caution: If you do squats crooked you leave yourself open to serious injury in the lumbar region.

  7. LEG CURL—I do leg curls on the leg curl machine. No exercise works more directly on the backs of the thighs, the leg biceps. Lie on your stomach on the bench of the machine, hook your heels under the lever bar, then, holding the sides of the bench, pull the weight toward your buttocks. Bring your heels as far forward as you can, then lower the weight slowly. Let it go all the way down to give your muscles a long stretch. Be sure that your legs move only from the knees down. Do not allow your hips to help lift the weight. If you do, the curls will be far less effective. It is important to let the legs go straight, then to curl the weight up as far as possible. If a leg curl machine is not available, you can improvise by placing a dumbbell between your feet as you lie prone on a flat bench, and then curl the weight up. Naturally the curl machine is best because of its constant leverage and resistance.

  8. CALF RAISES ON CALF MACHINE—Standing calf raises work on the inside, outside, lower and upper parts of the calves to give them thickness and width. The normal position is to stand on the wooden block at the base of the machine, with your toes pointed straight forward. Situate your shoulders under the padded bars, as in the photograph, and lift as high as you can on your toes. Let yourself down slowly, allowing your heels to drop as far below the platform as they will. You should feel the stretch in your calves until it hurts. The most common mistake people make is putting on so much weight they cannot observe the strict form. When the weight gets so heavy it is difficult to get all the reps out, some people will bend their knees and use their thighs to complete the exercise. This is wrong. The right way to do the exercise and get the best results is to keep the knees locked, let the heels down as far as possible, and go up until the calf is cramped.

  Because the calf is a difficult muscle, you should do five sets of 15 reps.

  9. SIT-UPS WITH LEGS BENT—The stomach is the turbine of the torso. We should be concerned about it for both health and appearance. It is the center, the area from which we draw our life forces. In addition, the abdominals are the muscles the judges look at first in a physique contest. Without good solid abs you can never have a chance at winning trophies. We’ve discussed this exercise in the previous chapter. If you’ve done it properly, you should have noticed that your waist is trimmer by inches, your posture is 100% better, and your digestion and elimination are improved. To add resistance you can do the sit-ups on a slant board, as shown in photo.

  Do three sets of 50.

  10. WRIST CURL—Wrist curls work on the flexors of the forearm and also increase finger strength. The forearm muscles should not be neglected. They are as important as the muscles in the shoulders and lats and calves. I prefer doing the curls in a sitting position, resting the back of my forearms on the bench and holding the barbell in a close grip. It is very important to keep your elbows together. To be sure that the elbows always stay in a close position, I lock them between my knees (refer to picture). Moving only your wrist, curl the weight up until your forearm is fully contracted. Allow the weight to go down slowly, then at the bottom let the bar roll out on your extended fingers. The forearm, like the calf, is a hard muscle to reach. Do as many full reps as you can, then continue with partial reps until your forearm is tight and burning. Don’t worry about pain; it means growth.

  Muscle Awareness

  Certain areas of your body will get sore during training. I’ve already mentioned that the first time I worked out I couldn’t walk or lift anything for days afterward. You’ll have experiences like that, and you should remember them as being beautiful. Memorize those feelings, remember why they happened. “Because of a standing press my deltoid was sore from the collarbone to the biceps.” This puts you in touch with your body; in the future when you do standing presses you’ll know what to concentrate on. This is only the beginning of what I call muscle awareness. You should use it and push yourself to the point at which you feel your mind is actually in your muscle. Eventually you’ll find that if you concentrate hard enough you will be able to send blood to a particular muscle just by thinking about it. So memorize the soreness and use it as a reference for concentration.

  When you exercise you should be totally aware of the muscle you are working on. You’ll be able to borrow power from other areas of your body. When that happens, you’ll know you’ve made the connection between mind and body, mind and muscle.

  Words of Caution to the Beginner

  Unless you were unusually fit, you should have trained for at least four to six months on the freehand exercise program before going to the gym. This period of “foundation training” is necessary to tune your body for actual weight training. You will never regret the time you invested in it. The worst mistake the average aspiring bodybuilder makes is attempting to do too much. This results in overtraining, no muscle growth, and total discouragement. Follow my instructions and you’ll stay on the right path.

  You should not favor one muscle or m
uscle group over another. Perform all exercises with equal energy and enthusiasm. The name of the game is to do as much for each muscle as possible, and to develop the entire body uniformly.

  Progress and Advancement

  Your rate of progress depends on the goals you’ve set. If you are training just to get in shape, you can stay with this program for six months. If you want to get into competitive bodybuilding, you will take less time; you’ll be giving it more thought and training more seriously, and you may very likely move on to the next program in three months.

  Overtraining

  Training too much is as bad—if not worse—than not training enough. Somehow you will have to trust your body to tell you when you are overtraining. It lets you know through excessive aches and pains. However, with the kind of program I’ve given you here I don’t think it’s possible to overtrain—and you shouldn’t misread simple soreness. As I’ve said before, soreness is a sign that you are reaching the muscles, that they are responding and starting to grow.

  Stretching

  Stretching is important while you’re exercising. When you are first starting, it can be as important as the training program. You should understand how to develop yourself so you don’t end up with a clumsy, “musclebound” body. The musclebound body is created by people who only lift weights and flex and contract their muscles, whose only thought is to get muscles. They never go beyond the flexing and contracting to the other movements the muscles need in order to stay supple. Stretching the muscles, making them long and limber, is one of the things that sets off the champion from the guy who is as big as the champion but who doesn’t look as good.

  As soon as I started doing the stretching exercises my muscles started flowing together, my whole body began looking more symmetrical. My movements became more balletlike, my posing improved, and the way I walked and handled myself was more elegant. My body had more flexibility. It felt better. You can imagine what your body goes through when you do only heavy resistance training and never allow the muscles to straighten out. I’ve seen musclemen who couldn’t bend over and touch their toes any more. They had flexed so much that their tendons had shortened.

  I got into stretching movements very late. I had already won the Mr. Universe title twice and had moved to America before someone introduced me to stretching. This was a guy who was into yoga as well as bodybuilding. He told me how important it is for someone doing weight lifting to stretch. I became aware of it when I watched him do yoga and saw how supple and limber he was. I started to analyze what it takes for the body and the muscle to stretch right after an exercise. I devised some stretching exercises I could do after every workout, and it helped me tremendously. You can do the same, taking your cues from your own body and what you feel it needs.

  The point of stretching is to elongate the muscle, relax it, and let the blood flow through it, so it should not be done with the same kind of contraction as the exercises that go before. On days you exercise your legs, for example, you can do stretches dancers use: sit on the floor with your legs spread and knees straight and pull your toes as far up toward your body as they will go; or, standing, lift your leg and brace the heel on a table or chair back as high as you can manage without bending your knees. Hold these positions for 30 seconds.

  For the back, hang from a chinning bar and let your back stretch (this is also good for the pectorals). For the abdominal area, stand with your hands clasped behind your head and pull the abs till they’re firm. Hold positions for about 30 seconds, breathing naturally. You can also grab hold of a bar or machine and pull back with your body, concentrating the stretch wherever it is needed. (See photograph).

  This is my personal routine, which I developed according to what I sensed to be my body’s needs. You will discover that your own body has its own particular requirements and will find it easy to work out your own routine of stretches to meet them. Just remember: the purpose of stretching is not to continue the workout but to provide a kind of a wind-down.

  Chapter Four: Developing the Muscle Groups

  Introduction

  You ought to be at a point now where you can look at yourself and see incredible changes. You will have trimmed off excess fat, firmed up your muscles, and added a new dimension and symmetry to your body. You should now be able to envision further possibilities for your development.

  I find there are two types of people in bodybuilding. One is more interested in doing the exercises properly and in the proper form. He concentrates on handling the weight in full, smooth repetitions. As a result, he builds a symmetrical body. The other kind of guy has his mind geared not so much toward the feeling of the exercise as toward ego satisfaction. He wants to lift a lot of weight. In many cases this person will handle more weight than the person who does the exercises in strict form, but he won’t achieve the same results. So remember this: It isn’t how much weight you handle but rather how much weight you handle in the correct form that will give you the best body.

  Ed Corney and Frank Zane, both former Mr. Universes, and myself are examples of bodybuilders who are more concerned with form than weight. We handle only enough weight to make the exercise challenging, but we do it in strict form. I wasn’t always into form over weight. But when I came to America I was forced to go through a lot of changes. Frank Zane beat me in Florida, which taught me I wasn’t as perfect as I thought.

  I had been beaten before by Chet Yorton, in 1966. But then I felt there was nothing wrong, because he’d been bigger. With Frank Zane it was more disturbing. I came over having won Mr. Universe twice and he had never won anything except Mr. America. He weighed 185, which was 60 pounds less than I weighed. I couldn’t figure out why he had won. My first thought was that if a big guy lost to a little guy the contest was fixed. It was one of the very few times in my life I ever cried. I cried the whole night after the contest. But I kept thinking about it—what does Zane have that I don’t have? I studied photographs of him and came to the conclusion that his muscles were better developed, he had more detail, more quality, more separation, and more muscularity than I did. So I knew what areas I had to work on. I realized that the biggest guy doesn’t always win. I started changing my ideas about bigness and started to think about perfection. I had to stop struggling with huge poundages to build mass. What I needed were more repetitions, full repetitions. The more attention I paid to strict form, the closer I brought myself to the perfect body I wanted.

  Positive Mental Attitude and Muscle Awareness

  Before you begin your workouts sit down for a few moments and think about your body. Let your mind get in touch with your muscles. During the day you probably think about everything except training your body. You shouldn’t just hurry to the gym from a business deal and start doing a bench press. Not only will the exercise do you no good, it may actually injure you. The mind doesn’t work like that. You should allow it a few minutes to adjust to the idea of training. It is especially valuable now to be aware of your body, mind and muscles, separately and as a single unit. Start with your calves. Feel them, flex them. Work up from there. Flex your thighs, your abdominals; feel the control you have, get in touch mentally with all those body parts—the biceps, the triceps; flex your deltoids, try to flex your latissimus. Get a sense of each body part. Let it register in your mind that your body needs to be trained. Look into the mirror, see how your muscles look, ask yourself how they are coming along. Be honest with yourself. What do you need? And as you do this your mind will change and get tuned in to your body.

  The Value of Alternate-Day Training

  Building and Healing

  The reason we split up the exercises is to give 48 hours of rest to the muscles, to allow them to recuperate from injury or soreness. At first we don’t want to train the same muscles every day (there are exceptions—abdominals, calves and forearms, which we use every day and must therefore train in a different way. The muscles in the abdomen are vital to almost every body function, the forearms are needed to grip, the calves to
walk). In this program we will divide up the week so that we work on three major muscle groups one day and three minor muscle groups the next day.

  Your Training Partner

  A training partner now becomes a critical matter. He is a person you have to rely on 100%. The further you get into bodybuilding, the more important your partner becomes. For me, he’s as important as a business partner—it becomes a marriage. You commit yourself. You don’t just train together. You help each other. The times when you don’t feel good, the other person lifts up your spirits and your energy level.

  The problem with training alone is that you sometimes don’t feel strong. You’re down physically. For instance, you want to do a bench press with 300 pounds, 8 repetitions, but you’re worried that you may not be able to handle the last rep, and this huge weight on your chest could actually kill you. If you have a training partner, he can stand behind you, count out the repetitions, and help you if anything goes wrong. Sometimes the last repetition seems so hard you don’t think you can make it. He takes off the pressure by just putting a single finger under the bar and pressing up a little bit. These are called forced reps. They can really count for the pump and muscle growth. Your partner is also there to compliment you continuously. You live off each other’s compliments and ego boosting.