“In the past, before the physiology of abdominal training was well understood, bodybuilders used to do a lot of “conventional” abdominal exercises such as Sit-Ups and Leg Raises. Unfortunately, those are not primary abdominal exercises but instead work the iliopsoas muscles—the hip flexors.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“If you want to turn a vision into reality, you have to give 100% and never stop believing in your dream.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“The competition physique should be as much pure lean mass as possible, with any excess body fat stripped away. As the saying goes, “You can’t flex fat.” But fat on your body makes you feel bigger than you actually are, and this sense of being bigger is psychologically satisfying to most bodybuilders.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“He had a voice you couldn't miss: strong and penetrating with strange vowels that sounded different from the accents of other English speakers even to me. I later discovered that he was Canadian.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Being busy helping customers meant that I had no time to train the way I was used to, with an intense four-or five-hour workout each day. So I adopted the idea of training twice a day, two hours before work and two hours from seven to nine in the evening, when business slacked off and only the serious lifters were left. Split workouts seemed like an annoyance at first, but I realized I was onto something when I saw the results: I was concentrating better and recovering faster while grinding out longer and harder sets. On many days I would add a third training session at lunchtime. I'd isolate a body part that I thought was weak and give it thirty or forty minutes of my full attention, blasting twenty sets of calf raises, say, or one hundred triceps extensions. I did the same thing some nights after dinner, coming back to train for an hour at eleven o'clock. As I went to sleep in my snug little room, I'd often feel one or another muscle that I'd traumatized that day jumping and twitching-just a side effect of a successful workout and every pleasing, because I knew those fibers would now recover and grow.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Forget plan B. To test yourself and grow, you have to operate without a safety net.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Every morning you have two options. Continue to sleep with your dreams or wake up and chase them.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Positive thinking can be contagious. Being surrounded by winners helps you develop into a winner.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“The average man,” explained the late Dr. Ernst Jokl, “loses fifty percent of his muscle mass between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger