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Turn a Weakness Into a Strength

“To Turn my calves from a weakness to a strength, I copied the calf routine of [1965 Mr Universe] Reg Park, making a few adjustments to suit my own individual body. The idea was to train my calves at least five times a week, if not seven, using the heaviest possible weights. Soon I was using twice my previous resistance but not worrying at all about the number of repetitions. The program called for a minimum of 10 sets per day, which gave me a deep burn. I stuck mostly to donkey calf raises and the standing calf machine, and I always worked calves first, when I was freshest. Probably the biggest secret to improving my lower legs was that I paid special attention to them for years.”

Partial Reps

“I like partials as a way of keeping a set going. This is a great technique for barbell curls. Try doing half reps after you’ve done 10 full reps. Instead of putting the weight down, do, say, five or six half reps, letting the weight descend to about halfway before curling it up to the shoulders again.”

Self Hypnosis

“When people see me doing concentration curls with my eyes closed, they think I’m focused on doing the exercise. Actually, I’m really thinking about a mountain of muscle – a giant, unreal biceps, more than 30 inches around. At times like that, I function in another dimension, far above the mundane business of doing simple reps. It’s a kind of self hypnosis, a way of making the muscle function beyond it’s own rational ‘thinking’. The muscle obeys under hypnosis. It becomes very suggestible, and it tries to give substance to illusion.”

Supersets

“Supersetting has long been part of my workouts. I’ll superset a chest exercise with a back exercise or a biceps exercise with a triceps exercise or a quadriceps exercise with a hamstrings exercise. That way I’m working both sides of an area, stretching and contracting in opposite exercises, and one pumps up the other to keep the blood in the area. Juxtaposing exercises has always been a key to my muscle growth.”

Get a Gym Partner

“From my earliest days of training in Austria, I always had a training partner. Usually, I trained with two partners. That way there was always at least one person there to encourage me and spot me and watch my form. It’s important to have partners who can keep up with you and push you. I liked training with Franco, because he was strong, and the camaraderie kept the workouts fun.”

Get Enough Rest

“You don’t grow in the gym. In fact, it’s the only time you’re not growing. You break down your muscles when you train and the remainder of the day you build them back up. The key to this is getting plenty of quality rest. When I trained twice a day, I used to go home or to the beach and nap between workouts. I’d also always make sure I got at least eight hours of sleep each night and often more like nine or ten. I thought of sleep or even just rest as growing time, and, as the name suggests, that time is crucial to bodybuilding success.”

Save Your Energy

“I see guys in the gym all the time who put on an act about going to war against the weights. They stalk all about or they shout or make a big commotion to get ready for every lift. I’ve never wasted any of my valuable energy on that stuff. I’m the opposite. I’m very nonchalant the whole time I’m in the gym. Between sets, I’m probably joking with Franco [Columbu]. During the set, I’m always focused, but before and after the set I’m not trying to increase stress. Instead, I want to keep stress as low as possible so I can save energy for the next set.”

Knowledge

“If I had to name just one component for workout success, it would be knowledge. Never think you know everything. As soon as you get complacent, your muscles also get complacent and that means they have no reason to grow. I am constantly trying to learn more from expert trainers, from other bodybuilders, from books, and from my own body. Everything I learn contributes to my growth – whether I discover something that works for me or I try something that doesn’t work and I can therefore move my workouts in a more effective direction.”

[admin1]

Stretching
“Stretching is one of the most neglected areas of the workout. If you watch a lion as he wakes from a nap and gets to his feet, you will see he immediately stretches his whole body to its full length, readying every muscle, tendon, and ligament for instant and brutal action. The lion knows instinctively that stretching primes his strength. Muscle, tendon, ligament, and joint structures are flexible. They can stiffen, limiting your range of motion, or they can stretch, giving you a longer range of motion and the ability to contract additional muscle fiber. That’s why stretching before you train allows you to train harder. Stretching also makes your training safer. As you extend your muscles fully under the pull of a weight, they can easily be pulled too far if your range of motion is limited. Overextension of a tendon or ligament can result in a strain or sprain and seriously interfere with your workout schedule. But if you stretch the areas involved first, the body will adjust as heavy resistance pulls on the structures involved.”

Mental Concentration
“While you’re doing an exercise, if you concentrate and visualize your muscles growing while commanding and demanding them to grow, the results will come much faster. The mental picture you form of what you want to be and what you want accomplish can greatly aid your progress towards attaining those goals. I focused all of my mental concentration on accomplishing my goal whenever I was at the gym. Every repetition of every set was done with intense concentration. I visualized each exercise, completed each repetition and set as bringing me closer to my goal.”


Volume
“I trained body parts three times per week, and I’d do 25-30 sets for big body parts like the back and 15-20 sets for smaller body parts like triceps. I’m sure there are bodybuilders who do too much work. Remember, I was very advanced then, at the Mr Olympia level, and very genetically gifted, so most people should not do as much work as I did. But I’m also sure there are bodybuilders who don’t do enough work. They quit too soon or they don’t work out enough. You have to find out what works for your body, because there are a lot of different ways to grow.”

Flexing
“On heavy days especially, I always include a great deal of posing and flexing along with heavy weight training. Hitting a lot of side chest shots and most-muscular poses along with intense training is the best way I know to bring out pectoral striations. I’ve seen a lot of bodybuilders try to create these striations by artificial means-dehydrating themselves with diuretics, for example – but it just never looks as good as the results you get from hard training, posing, and flexing.
Learning to pose the chest properly takes a lot of practice. When you do a side chest shot, a front double-biceps, a most-muscular, or a front lat shot, in each shot the chest is posed differently and you need to practice each of these poses separately to get the effect you want. For a front double-biceps, you need to pose with your shoulders forward to create that sweeping line of the chest from sternum to deltoid; in the side chest shot, you need to keep the shoulder down and lift the chest to make it look high and full. Flexing the chest as you train it is the only way to create maximum pectoral definition-and endless hours of posing practice is the only method that will give you total control of your physique for presentation.”

[13uie67]

i love it.. awesome read... i really enjoy reading what arnold has to say on bb.. he was a very big great in what he did... and with passion.. when i first started bb i read so much of the pioneer pointer,articals,advice... till this day im a firm believer in the pioneer way of bb..