I didn’t see Dennis Tinnerino until a few days later. He was known to be a playboy. He always had girls around him. That seemed to be one of his main concerns—being there, having a good time, and being crazy. A week after the Mr. Universe contest we did an exhibition together for Wag Bennett. I tried to talk to him then. My English was much better than it had been the previous year, but I still found it hard to have a conversation with him. He was very friendly to me. He must have been disappointed. The press had built him up as a sure winner. But he didn’t show any signs that he thought the judging had been unfair. He came to me before the exhibition, said I looked fantastic, that I had deserved to win. I asked Tinnerino what I should do to improve. “Keep working on your calves, Arnold,” he said. He turned his right leg and flexed. He had really gorgeous calves which popped out like small melons.
One disappointing note was struck when I called my parents and told them I was Mr. Universe. They seemed excited to hear from me, but I felt that if it had been through the local Graz paper saying I had just completed my college degree, it would have meant more to them. After I hung up the phone I felt depressed. I told myself it was because they couldn’t relate to a world championship in bodybuilding. Because they had never seen anything like it.
In a way I cared that they didn’t understand it. I felt they ought to have at least realized what it meant to me. They knew how hard I had worked for it. I tried to put it out of my mind, but it wasn’t easy. I think you’re always doing things for the approval of your parents. I think I understood them, their shortcomings, better than they understood me. I convinced myself I should forget it. I was away from home anyway, so I started looking for the approval of the other people.
A few weeks after the Mr. Universe contest I did an exhibition in Stuttgart and my father came to watch me. He was excited about the fact that I got a lot of applause. That hit home for him. I don’t think it occurred to him that they cheered and applauded because I was Mr. Universe, that they liked my body, which was one of the best-developed bodies in the world—even then. He knew there were 2,000 people who had come to see me pose. But that’s as much as he understood of it. And my mother even less—until much later, when she saw me win the Mr. Olympia contest in 1972.
A short time after the contest I received an invitation from Reg Park asking me to come to South Africa, stay at his house, and do the exhibition he had promised. I was in my glory. My friends were astounded. I trained as vigorously in preparation for this exhibition as I had for any contest I had ever participated in. I don’t know how many years I’d dreamed about being like Reg Park; then, all of a sudden, I was really almost like him. People remarked on it. They said we shared that rugged, heroic quality.
I stayed with Reg in Johannesburg. He had a beautiful sprawling single-story house with an Olympic-size pool in front, the whole thing surrounded by a rose garden and acres of flowers and trees. The house itself was filled with antiques from all over the world. It had an aura about it: it was the house of a star. That quality was unmistakable. In the dining room, for instance, you pressed a button and servants appeared.
At first I felt out of place, but before long my discomfort disappeared. Reg and his wife, Maryanne, treated me as if I were their son. They included me in everything they did; they took me to parties, films, dinners. Being with them opened my mind to what was possible for me aside from endless days taken up totally with training. I could have a gorgeous house, businesses, a family, a good life. Being with them, I felt fulfilled. It was a unique experience for me to see Reg at home, to be with him that long, and to get so much attention from him.
It wasn’t all praise. I asked him for criticism and I got it. He, too, singled out my calves. He said he’d had the same problem, but he had overcome it. I soon learned why. I watched him do his calf workouts and he put me to shame. I was putting small weights on the machine. He stepped over, ran it up to 800 pounds, and did twelve reps. I knew then that as relentlessly as I’d trained, I needed to work even harder if I wanted to reach the plateau he was on.
With Reg Park at his home in South Africa
When I arrived back in Munich, more people enrolled in my gymnasium. Membership increased to about 400. Money started coming in. Money meant freedom; that in turn meant time to train. So everything began going well.
I had discovered that winning the Mr. Universe contest doesn’t make you the best bodybuilder in the world. There were still bodybuilders in America I probably couldn’t beat. This was a big blow. There were some guys who had won the Mr. Universe contest two and three times. I figured I had to compete two or three more times before I would have finally conquered everybody.
I set myself a schedule to train straight through the entire year again. I began blasting my body in the gym, going early in the morning, staying late at night, doing some ferocious work. I had no trouble getting training partners. Every bodybuilder in Munich wanted to train with Arnold. They thought I knew some secret. We got into forced reps, real torture routines where we pushed ourselves beyond the point of pain. We ate enormous meals. After each workout we would go to the beer hall and devour a whole chicken each and mugs of beer. That was our dinner. In the actual training routines I was trying to be more creative than I’d ever been, putting my imagination into play in an attempt to figure out how I could go beyond everyone else. If someone could get a 21-inch arm, I would blow mine up to 22 inches.
Arnold, I asked myself over and over, “What can you do to be special and different?”
I finally arrived at the idea of shocking the muscles. If you do ten sets of bench presses or any other exercise regularly for a year, the muscles gradually get used to ten sets of bench presses and the growth slows down. So once a week I took a training partner and drove out into the country with the weights. We limited ourselves to one exercise for a particular body part. I remember for the first day we carried 250 pounds out into the forest and did squats for three hours straight. I began by doing twenty repetitions with 250 pounds; then my partner did whatever he could. Then it was my turn again. We ended up doing something like fifty-five sets of squats each. The last hour seemed endless. But it worked. Our thighs pumped up like balloons. That first day we gave our thigh muscles such a shock that we couldn’t walk right for a week. We barely could crawl. Our legs had never experienced anything as tough as those fifty-five sets. And each of us put something like an eighth or a quarter of an inch on our thighs; they just blew up, they had no chance to survive except to grow.
We made it a regular thing. We brought girls out there to cook. We made a fire outdoors and turned the whole thing into a little contest. We worked hard but we had a good time. After the muscle-shocking sessions we drank wine and beer and got drunk and carried on like the old-time weight lifters back in the 1800s or early 1900s. Sometimes it became pure insanity. We’d grab up the weights again, but we were weaker because of the beer, and the weights would fall back over our heads. Or we’d get them down on our chests and wouldn’t be able to press them on up from there and someone would have to lift them off for us. It was a great time. We cooked shish kebab, sat around the fire, and made love. We got into this trip that we were gladiators, male animals. We swam naked out in nature, had all this food, wine and women; we ate like animals and acted like animals. We got off on it so much it became a weekly routine—eating fresh meat and drinking wine and exercising.
It’s important that you like what you do, and we loved it. We had fun, but we also did astonishing workouts. We did tortuous workouts in the fresh air. We challenged each other. We experienced a lot of pain. We’d be in the middle of a squat and just cramp up. We’d roll on the ground and try to massage it out. That was the first time I knew pain could become pleasure. We were benefiting from pain. We were breaking through the pain barrier and shocking the muscle. We looked at this pain as a positive thing, because we grew.
It was a fantastic feeling to gain size from pain. All of a sudden I was looking forward to it as something ple
asurable. The whole idea of pain became a pleasure trip. I couldn’t tell anybody about it then, because I knew they would say I was a weirdo, a masochist Which wasn’t true, I had just converted the pain into pleasure—not for its own sake but because it meant growing. We bragged to each other about how much it hurt.
Every weekend we would do the same thing, with bench presses, rowing, or flyes, bombing our bodies, giving them something different from the usual everyday routine. The theory was this: surprise the body. Don’t always do what it expects. This was a new way of promoting muscle growth. I saw it having amazing results on me and I started to preach this as a method for bodybuilding.
I learned about things like the split routine, the shock method, breaking through the pain barrier, all for practical reasons: I wanted bigger, better muscles. None of this came from other bodybuilders. They were all my own ideas, completely original methods, designed by me for my body. I believe the same thing has been done by other great bodybuilders, and anyone who ever wanted to go beyond the established limits in any field. Your first concern must be yourself. You have to invent the means to take you over the top. For instance, the first three years I was training, I found that when I was doing a dumbbell curl with my wrist straight I felt it in my biceps. However, when I did the curl and turned my wrist I felt it more intensely; I felt it reaching into a particular area of the elbow that hadn’t been affected before. I asked why I should feel it there, and my doctor friend came up with the answer that the biceps’ job is not only to lift the forearm up to flex but also to turn the wrist. If the biceps’ job is to turn the wrist, I wondered why I shouldn’t make it more difficult to turn the dumbbell. So I made one side of my dumbbells heavier, throwing them out of balance, and instantly I could feel what it did for my biceps. I was sore all the time. These were ideas I never found in books and magazines. I wanted to grow so fast and be so special I just accepted that I would have to invent new ways of working on the muscles.
Life in Munich was as crazy as ever. We worked hard, but we had fun. There was a lot of beer drinking, partying. It was a happy, beautiful time. I was young and becoming famous. In Munich itself I was looked upon as a freak celebrity, Arnold the muscleman. But I was proud of my achievements and I was letting it be known that this was only the beginning. Not many people were willing to argue with me. I saw myself as being able to help bodybuilding transcend its unfortunate reputation as an oddball sport.
Every year, in the spring, a stone-lifting contest is held in Munich. This has been going on for decades and has a lot of prestige in sporting circles. You stand on two footrests that look like chairs and pull the stone up between your legs by a metal handle. The stone weighs approximately 508 German pounds (about 560 English pounds). An electric scale on the wall of the auditorium shows how many centimeters you lift the stone. You do it cold; there’s no warming up. You just lift it up as far as you can. That year I entered the contest, broke the existing record, and won. The press picked it up and wrote that Mr. Universe was the strongest man in Germany—which may or may not have been true, but it was good for bodybuilding. At that time, along with all the other misconceptions about the sport, people still thought bodybuilders had muscles but didn’t have any power, just big useless muscles.
I had met Franco Columbu at one of the weight-lifting contests that fall. For his size, he was one of the strongest men I’d ever seen. We became friends and started working out together. I liked training with Franco because he was so powerful. He was hardly a perfect specimen. When I first met him he seemed about as far from a Mr. Universe candidate as possible. He had a strange split in his chest; he was bowlegged; there were absolutely no visible signs of a champion in him. But I inspired him enough to want to be a muscleman, a champion with a beautiful physique, not just a powerlifting champion. I did it because of something I’d seen in Franco, which was his incredible will power. He’d do squats with 300 pounds or 400 pounds, making as many as eight repetitions. Then one day he couldn’t even get them up once. I had to help him. I couldn’t believe it. Franco was always better at powerlifting than I was. Now I saw my chance to beat him. I said, “I bet you twenty marks I can get more reps than you.”
Stonelifting in Munich, 1967
“All right, Arnold.” He looked at me for a moment. He lifted the bar off the squat rack and did ten smooth, sure repetitions.
His sudden comeback went churning around in my head for days. Why had Franco changed so rapidly? Obviously, in five minutes his body could not have changed. The only thing that had changed was his mind. Franco had set his immediate goal: “I want to beat Arnold. The guys are around. My ego is in jeopardy. I have to beat him now. Twenty marks, that’s a nice meal.” He made up these little goals. And he told himself he had to do ten repetitions. And he did. He went up and down like a piston. He could have done two more repetitions easily.
When I saw this in Franco, I knew he could go all the way. I knew too that he was the training partner who could weather the ferocious workouts necessary in the coming year. There grew up between us a perfect partnership. Franco saw me working and he started growing. I talked him into competing. He won a fourth-place trophy, then third-place and second-place trophies. In 1968 he won his height class in the Mr. Europe contest. That same year, he won second in his height class in the Mr. Universe contest. That gave him enough confidence to be a serious bodybuilder, to dedicate his life to it. Some phenomenal things happened to him because of his positive attitude. He too got obsessed with the idea of being the best.
The point is, I was learning more and more about the mind, about the power it has over the body. It meant having complete communication with the muscles, always feeling what was happening to my muscles the day after a workout. The most important thing is that my mind was always in touch with my body; I felt my muscles continuously; I always took an inventory before working out. I flexed my muscles and got in touch. That not only helped me train; it was like meditating. I locked my mind into my muscle during training, as if I’d transplanted my mind into the tissue itself. By just thinking about it, I could actually send blood into a muscle.
I formalized it by regularly making an inventory. How does my body feel now? I would ask myself. How does my chest feel? What did I get out of this press behind the neck, doing ten repetitions instead of five repetitions? How are my triceps? It doesn’t do any good to go through training like a blind man, to just go through the motions. Motions mean nothing. You have to realize what is happening to you. You have to want results.
Bodybuilders hung on to me like fleas, because they thought if they did the same exercises I did they would get the same kind of muscles. But I watched them fall away with absolutely no results except exhaustion. They weren’t mentally prepared for intensive championship training; they weren’t thinking about it. I knew the secret: Concentrate while you’re training. Do not allow other thoughts to enter your mind.
It became part of my routine that year to start out every day with total concentration. The way I did it was to play out exactly what I was going to use, how I was going to pull my muscles, and how I would feel it. I programmed myself. I saw myself doing it; I imagined how I would feel it. I was thoroughly, totally into it mentally. I did not waver at all.
When I went to the gym I got rid of every alien thought in my mind. I tuned in to my body as though it were a musical instrument I was about to play. In the dressing room I would start thinking about training, about every body part, what I was going to do, how I was going to pump up. I would concentrate on procedure and results until my everyday problems went floating away. I knew that if I went in there concerned about bills or girls and let myself think about those things while doing bench presses, I’d make only marginal progress. I’d seen guys reading the newspaper between sets day after day, and they always looked bad. Some of them had been going through the motions of training for years, and you couldn’t tell that they had ever picked up a weight. It had been nothing more than some heartless pantomime.
During the first three years, in Austria, I had concentrated on my muscles naturally. I knew no other way. I grew up in a town where there were no distractions, and I had no personal problems. But Munich was different. Life there was fast. Opportunities cropped up continuously. I went out on dates and I traveled a great deal. And I soon discovered that if I allowed them to, other things could take my concentration away from bodybuilding. When I caught myself getting too involved thinking about my dates I saw how much it hurt my training. I’d fail to do bench presses with a strong groove, and the weight would seem heavier.
It was then I started seriously analyzing what happens to the body when the mind is tuned in, how important a positive attitude is. I questioned myself: Why you, Arnold? How did you win Mr. Universe after only five years of training? Other people asked me the same question. I began looking at the difference between me and other bodybuilders. The biggest difference was that most bodybuilders did not think I’m going to be a winner. They never allowed themselves to think in those terms. I would hear them complaining while they were training, “Oh, no, not another set!” The negative impulses around a gym can be incredible. Most of the people I observed couldn’t make astonishing advances because they never had faith in themselves. They had a hazy picture of what they wanted to look like someday, but they doubted they could realize it. That destroyed them. It’s always been my belief that if you’re training for nothing, you’re wasting your effort. Ultimately, they didn’t put out the kind of effort I did because they didn’t feel they had a chance to make it. And of course, starting with that premise, they didn’t.
My analysis didn’t stop with bodybuilding. I talked to weight-lifting champions and they told me the same thing: it’s in the mind. I knew from my own experience lifting weights that you stand in front of the bar and talk to it; you have to communicate with the bar: “You son-of-a-bitch, I’m going to rip you off my chest, I’m going to throw you over my head, I don’t care how much you weigh. I’m the man who’s going to take you out. I’m going to be the master of you.” You talk yourself into it. You tell yourself you are going to be the hero. And you picture yourself completing the lift before you even touch the weights. With weight lifters, the psyching-up process can be endless. That’s why the tournament officials introduced the rule that a man is allowed only three minutes’ pause from one lift to the next. Given the chance, some guys would stand there for an hour preparing their minds for some giant press. But that’s the way these lifters master weight. If they have lifted it mentally, they will undoubtedly lift it physically. There’s no two ways about it, because they’ve done all the training, their bodies are ready; now it’s only the mind. The mind must carry through. If a man stands there and thinks for one-tenth of a second, “Maybe I can’t lift it,” it’s gone. He will not make the lift. Proof of my point is that for years weight lifters could not lift more than 500 pounds. Nobody could. They did 4991/2 but never 500. The reason was this supposedly insurmountable mental barrier that had existed for years. They stood in front of the weight thinking, “No one has ever lifted 500 pounds. Why should I be the one?” Then in 1970 Alexiev of Russia lifted 501 pounds. He broke the barrier. A month after that, three or four guys lifted 500 pounds. Why? They believed it was possible. Reddig from Belgium lifted over 500 pounds. An American, Ken Pentera, went over 500. A month later another Russian lifted over 500. Now it’s up to 564 pounds. The body didn’t change. How could the body change that much in ten years? It was the same body. But the mind was different. Mentally it’s possible to break records. Once you understand that, you can do it.
Arnold Page 8
