“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
“The Running Man is a sci-fi action story based on a novel by Stephen King, built around a nightmare vision of America in 2017—thirty years from when we were shooting. The economy is in a depression, and the United States has become a fascist state where the government uses TV and giant screens in the neighborhoods to distract people from the fact that nobody has a job.”
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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
“Training was all I could think about. One Sunday when I found the stadium locked, I broke in and worked out in the freezing cold. Every painful set, every extra rep, was a step toward my goal of winning.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“I knew I was a winner back in the late sixties. I knew I was destined for great things. People will say that kind of thinking is totally immodest. I agree. Modesty is not a word that applies to me in any way. I hope it never will.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Kurt Marnul can win Mr. Austria," I thought, "and he's already told me that I could too if I train hard, so that's what I'm going to do." This thought made the hours of lifting tons of steel and iron actually a joy. Every painful set, every extra rep, was a step toward my goal of winning Mr. Austria and entering the Mr. Europe competition.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Whenever I finished filming a movie, I felt my job was only half done. Every film had to be nurtured in the marketplace. You can have the greatest movie in the world, but if you don’t get it out there, if people don’t know about it, you have nothing.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“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
“The body that isn't used to. maybe the ninth, tenth... eleventh, and twelfth rep with a certain weight. So that makes the body grow, then. Going through this pain barrier. Experiencing pain in your muscles and aching... and just go on and go on. And this last two or three or four repetitions... that's what makes the muscle then grow. And that divides one from a champion and one from not being a champion. lf you can go through this pain barrier, you may get to be a champion. lf you can't go through, forget it. And that's what most people lack, is having the guts. The guts to go in and just say, ''l'll go through and l don't care what happens.'' lt aches, and if l fall down.... l have no fear of fainting in a gym... because l know it could happen. l threw up many times while l was working out. But it doesn't matter, because it's all worth it.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“I was very glad I could afford to say no. With the income from my businesses, I didn’t need money from acting. I never wanted to be in a financially vulnerable position, where I had to take a part I didn’t like.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“I’d closed my ears to my friends’ horror stories about married life. “Ha! Now you get to argue about who should change the diapers.” Or “What kind of food makes a woman stop giving blow jobs? Wedding cake!” Or “Oh boy, wait until she hits menopause.” I paid no attention to any of that. “Just let me stumble into it,” I told them. “I don’t want to be forewarned.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
“I always believed in shooting for the top, and to become an American is like becoming a member of the winning team.”
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
