Three nights a week I went to the gym in town. I either had to walk or ride my bike eight miles home after ten o’clock. I didn’t really mind the eight miles. I knew it was helping my body, increasing the strength of my legs and lungs.
The only real problem I had with training at home was to get someone to work out with me. Already, since my experiences at the lake, I was a strong believer in training partners. I needed someone not only to teach me but to inspire me. I trained better, harder, if I was around someone whose enthusiasm was as strong as mine and who would be impressed by my enthusiasm. That first winter, I trained with Karl Gerstl, the doctor who had helped me with my initial program. Aside from his usefulness as a translator, it was especially helpful to be around Karl. He knew everything about the body. He was serious and worked hard. We trained the same way, except our goals and our diets were different: I wanted to gain weight, to bulk up; Karl wanted to lose it. But Karl gave me the boost I needed.
There were certain days when something held me back and I didn’t train as hard as on other days. That was inexplicable to me. Some days nothing could hold me back. Other days I’d be down. On the down days I couldn’t handle anywhere near my normal amount of weight. It puzzled me. Karl and I discussed it. He had read a great deal of psychology (at fifteen I barely knew the word, though his argument made good sense and in fact helped lay the foundation for my later thinking). “It’s not your body, Arnold. Your body can’t change that much from one day to the next. It’s in your mind. On some days your goals are just clearer. On the bad days you need someone to help get you going. It’s like when you ride a bicycle behind a bus and get caught up in the slipstream. The wind sucks you along with it. You just need some prodding, some challenge.”
A rear view of me at sixteen
Karl was right. Every month, I had at least a week when I didn’t really want to train and I questioned myself: Why should I train hard if I don’t feel like it? These were the days Karl pulled me out of it. He’d say, “Man, I feel great today! I want to do bench presses. Let’s do twenty-five instead of twenty. How about a contest? Ten shillings to the one who does the most bench presses.”
It worked perfectly. He forced me to get off my butt, to get my sluggish body moving. It became extremely important to have somebody standing behind me saying, “Let’s do more, Arnold. Come on—another set, one more rep.” And it was just as important for me to help somebody else. Watching him work out, encouraging him, somehow drove me on to do an even tougher set.
I discovered that the secret of successful workouts had to do with competition. For me there was never any monkey business. I wanted to compete in bodybuilding. The small competitions with Karl took me from day to day. But my first goal was to win Mr. Austria (in the end, I never even entered the contest—by then circumstances had already taken me beyond it). This initial goal inspired me to increase my program and steadily work harder. My training sessions stretched out to two hours a day. I kept adding weight, increasing the number of reps, bombing my muscles furiously.
From the beginning, I was a believer in the basic movements, because that was Reg Park’s preference. At the times Reg hadn’t accelerated his workouts for some major competition, he would stay with the basic exercises—bench presses, chin-ups, squats, rowing, barbell curls, wrist curls, pullovers, leg extensions, calf raises. These were the movements that worked most directly on all the body parts. I was following his example to the letter. And as it turned out, I could hardly have chosen more wisely. The basic exercises were creating for me a rugged foundation, a core of muscle I could later build upon for a winning body. Reg Park’s theory was that first you have to build the mass and then chisel it down to get the quality; you work on your body the way a sculptor would work on a piece of clay or wood or steel. You rough it out—the more carefully, the more thoroughly, the better—then you start to cut and define. You work it down gradually until it’s ready to be rubbed and polished. And that’s when you really know about the foundation. Then all the faults of poor early training stand out as hopeless, almost irreparable flaws.
I was building up, bulking, going after the mass, which to me meant 250 pounds of sheer body weight. At that time, I didn’t care about my waist or anything else that would give me a symmetrical look. I just wanted to build a gigantic 250-pound body by handling a lot of weight and blasting my muscles. My mind was into looking huge, into being awesome and powerful. I saw it working. My muscles began bursting out all over. And I knew I was on my way.
Chapter Two
Before long, people began looking at me as a special person. Partly this was the result of my own changing attitude about myself. I was growing, getting bigger, gaining confidence. I was given consideration I had never received before; it was as though I were the son of a millionaire. I’d walk into a room at school and my classmates would offer me food or ask if they could help me with my homework. Even my teachers treated me differently. Especially after I started winning trophies in the weight-lifting contests I entered.
This strange new attitude toward me had an incredible effect on my ego. It supplied me with something I had been craving. I’m not sure why I had this need for special attention. Perhaps it was because I had an older brother who’d received more than his share of attention from our father. Whatever the reason, I had a strong desire to be noticed, to be praised. I basked in this new flood of attention. I turned even negative responses to my own satisfaction.
I’m convinced most of the people I knew didn’t really understand what I was doing at all. They looked at me as a novelty, a freak. My actual acceptance was limited. There were certain social groups in which the people were intimidated by bodybuilding and felt they should talk down to me. They tried to point out weaknesses in the sport and argued why a person shouldn’t do it. I’ve been through these trips all my life. There’s a certain kind of person who always says, “My doctor tells me lifting weights is bad for your health. . . .” In the beginning, it was kind of hard for me to handle. I was young and impressionable. I knew I wanted to do it so badly nobody could stop me, least of all people I wouldn’t even bother to count as friends, but many times I did question it. I wondered why I was so different, why I wanted to do something a lot of people didn’t like and even made fun of. If you played soccer, everybody loved you; you were a hero. And they gave you anything.
People recognized my athletic talents; but my choice of a sport confused them. They shook their heads. “Why did you have to pick the least-favorite sport in Austria?” they always asked. It was true. We had only twenty or thirty bodybuilders in the entire country.
I couldn’t come up with an answer. I didn’t know. It had been instinctive. I had just fallen in love with it. I loved the feeling of the gym, of working out, of having muscles all over.
Studio poses at sixteen
Now, looking back, I can analyze it more clearly. My total involvement had a lot to do with the discipline, the individualism, and the utter integrity of bodybuilding. But at the time it was a mystery even to me. Bodybuilding did have its rewards, but they were relatively small. I wasn’t competing yet, so my gratification had to come from other areas. In the summer at the lake I could surprise everyone by showing up with a different body. They’d say, “Jesus, Arnold, you grew again. When are you going to stop?”
“Never,” I’d tell them. We’d all laugh. They thought it amusing. But I meant it.
It wasn’t only my friends at school and the lake who were impressed. The neighbors, too, began giving me special attention. “If you need fresh milk, just tell us,” a neighbor would say. “I know for lifting weights you need milk.” Or eggs, or vegetables. Suddenly everyone around began regarding me as different. No matter whether they liked it or not—they couldn’t overlook it.
The strangest thing was how my new body struck girls. There were a certain number of girls who were knocked out by it and a certain number who found it repulsive. There was absolutely no in-between. It seemed cut and dried. I’
d hear their comments in the hallway at lunchtime, on the street, or at the lake. “I don’t like it. He’s weird—all those muscles give me the creeps.” Or, “I love the way Arnold looks—so big and powerful. It’s like sculpture. That’s how a man should look.”
These reactions gave me added motivation to continue building my body. I wanted to get bigger so I could really impress the girls who liked it and upset the others even more. Not that girls were my main reason for training. Far from it. But they added incentive and I figured as long as I was getting this attention from them I might as well use it. I had fun. I could tell if a girl was repelled by my size. And when I’d catch her looking at me in disbelief, I would casually raise my arm, flex my bicep, and watch her cringe. It was always good for a laugh.
I remember there was one of these negative girls I wanted to date. Her name was Herta and I knew she claimed she wasn’t turned on by my body. I wanted to try and change her mind. I pursued her and gradually we became friends. Finally one day I got up the nerve to ask her on a date. “I wouldn’t go out with you in a million years,” she said. “You’re in love with yourself. You’re in love with your own body. You look at yourself all the time. You pose in front of the mirror.”
Her statement came like a slap in the face. At first I was angry. Why did she refuse to understand it? Why did she have to turn on me? But it was predictable. And I got over it. (I don’t think she ever did, though. The last time I was in Graz for a visit, she called me a number of times to say she was divorced now and how nice it would be if we could get together.)
Nobody seemed to understand what was involved in bodybuilding. You do look at your body in a mirror, not because you are narcissistic, but because you are trying to check your progress. It has nothing to do with being in love with yourself. Herta would never have told one of the track stars he was in love with himself because he had someone check his speed with a stopwatch. It just happens that the mirror, the scales and the tape measure are the only tools a bodybuilder has for determining his progress.
Herta was hardly typical. I had no difficulty getting girls. I’d been introduced to sex with almost no hangups. The older bodybuilders at the gym had started including me in their parties. It was easy for me. These guys always saw to it that I had a girl. “Here, Arnold, this one’s for you.”
Girls became sex objects. I saw the other bodybuilders using them in this way and I thought it was all right. We talked about the pitfalls of romantic situations, serious ones, how it could take away from your training. Naturally, I agreed with them. They were my idols.
My attitude about all that has changed radically. I used to feel that women were here for one reason. Sex was simply another kind of exercise, another body function. I was convinced a girl and I couldn’t communicate on equal footing because she wouldn’t understand what I was doing. I didn’t have time to take one girl out regularly and go through a normal high-school romance with all its phone calls and notes and squabbles. That took too much time. I needed to be in the gym. For me it was a simple matter of picking them up at the lake, and then never seeing them again. In fact it wasn’t until four years after I started training that I had any meaningful communication with a girl.
I couldn’t be bothered with girls as companions. My mind was totally locked into working out, and I was annoyed if anything took me away from it. Without making a conscious decision to do so, I closed a door on that aspect of growing up, that vulnerability, and became very protective of my emotions. I didn’t allow myself to get involved—period. It wasn’t a reasoned choice; it just happened out of necessity.
I started this practice early in my career and continued it for as long as it served to help me maintain a clear focus and drive myself toward a fixed point. This didn’t mean I had no fun. I was only selfish and protective of that part of myself that people seemed always to want to get at in a relationship. And the more successful I became, the more strict I was in guarding it. I couldn’t afford to have my feelings hurt during heavy training or just before a competition. I needed stable emotions, total discipline. I needed to be there training for two hours in the morning and two hours at night, concentrating on nothing except perfecting my body and bringing it to its peak.
Whatever I thought might hold me back, I avoided. I crossed girls off my list—except as tools for my sexual needs. I eliminated my parents too. It seemed they always wanted to see me, then when I was around they had nothing to say. I grew accustomed to hearing certain questions: “What’s wrong with you, Arnold? Don’t you feel anything? Don’t you have any emotions?”
How can you answer that? I always let it pass with a shrug. I knew that what I was doing was not only justifiable, it was essential. Besides, if I did miss out on the emotional thing because I was so dedicated, I believe I benefited in other ways that finally brought everything into balance. One of these was my self-confidence, which grew as I saw how much control I was gaining over my body. In two or three years I had actually been able to change my body entirely. That told me something. If I had been able to change my body that much, I could also, through the same discipline and determination, change anything else I wanted. I could change my habits, my whole outlook on life.
During the early years I didn’t care how I felt about anything except bodybuilding. It consumed every minute of my days and all my best effort. But now that I train only an hour and a half a day to maintain my physique, I have time to work on the things I neglected. I can bring out those emotions I had to put away years ago and build them back into my life. I can use the information and discipline I learned in bodybuilding for perfecting other aspects of my life. Now if I catch myself holding back an emotion the way I used to, I work on bringing it out; I try to make myself more responsive. When I see that I have certain backward attitudes, I reason them out and work to make my outlook more realistic. I know there are some people who will say that this is not the way to do things. And I imagine they are the same people who always said bodybuilding was bad for your health. I proved that was wrong. I know that if you can change your diet and exercise program to give yourself a different body, you can apply the same principles to anything else.
At seventeen I’m already starting to show more bulk
The secret is contained in a three-part formula I learned in the gym: self-confidence, a positive mental attitude, and honest hard work. Many people are aware of these principles, but very few can put them into practice. Every day I hear someone say, “I’m too fat. I need to lose twenty-five pounds, but I can’t. I never seem to improve.” I’d hate myself if I had that kind of attitude, if I were that weak. I can lose ten to forty pounds rapidly, easily, painlessly, by simply setting my mind to it. By observing the principles of strict discipline that bodybuilding taught me, I can prepare myself for anything. I have developed such absolute control over my body that I can decide what body weight I want for any particular time and take myself up or down to meet it.
Two months before we started shooting Stay Hungry, Bob Rafaelson came to me and said, “I’m afraid of hiring you for this film, Arnold. You’re just too goddamn big. You weigh two forty, and if you’re in a scene with Sally Fields you’ll dwarf her. I’d like you to be much leaner and more normal-looking in street clothes.” I said, “You worry about your film and I’ll worry about my body. Just tell me what day you want me to show up and at what body weight, and I’ll do it.” He thought I was pulling his leg. He wanted me to be down to 210 pounds, but he didn’t think I could ever do it. So I bet him I could. The day the filming began, Rafaelson went with me to the gym to work out and take a sauna. “Step on the scale,” he said. I weighed 209 pounds. One pound less than he wanted me. He couldn’t believe it. I kept the weight for three months, until the shooting stopped. Then I got an offer to do the film Pumping Iron. The only way I could do it was to compete in the Mr. Olympia contest. Within two more months I would have to go back up to 240 pounds, the weight at which I felt I reached the ultimate in size and symmetry, and then cut
down to 235 for maximum definition. I did it easily and won the Mr. Olympia contest.
From the very beginning I knew bodybuilding was the perfect choice for my career. No one else seemed to agree—at least not my family or teachers. To them the only acceptable way of life was being a banker, secretary, doctor, or salesman—being established in the ordinary way, taking the regular kind of job offered through an employment agency—something legitimate. My desire to build my body and be Mr. Universe was totally beyond their comprehension. Because of it, I was put through a lot of changes. I locked up my emotions even further and listened only to my inner voice, my instincts.
My mother, for one, didn’t understand my drive at all. She had no time for sports. She couldn’t even understand why my father kept training to stay in shape. But, strangely enough, she always had the attitude: “Let Arnold do what he wants. As long as he isn’t a criminal, as long as he doesn’t do anything bad, let him go on with his muscle building.”
She changed her outlook as soon as I brought home my first weight-lifting trophy. She took it and ran from house to house in Thal, the little village outside of Graz where we lived, showing the neighbors what I had won. It was a turning point for her. She began to accept what I was doing. Now, all of a sudden, some attention was focused on her. People singled her out: this is the mother of the guy who just won the weight-lifting championship, the mother of the strong man. She too was treated as a champion. She was proud of me. And then (up to a certain point) she encouraged me to do what I wanted.
Arnold Page 2
