1. Take your own lunch to work. Make sandwiches of roast beef, meat loaf, ground beef, tuna, liverwurst, chicken, turkey, ham, egg, peanut butter or cheese.
2. Use only 100% whole wheat (stone ground is the best), rye, or pumpernickel.
3. If you get hungry between meals, eat cashews. These nuts supply protein, fat and additional calories.
4. Dried fruits are also high in calories and provide extra vitamins and minerals.
5. Use mayonnaise, oil and salad dressings whenever possible with sandwiches, salads and vegetables.
6. Have an extra protein drink on workout days.
7. Plan a definite eating schedule. The body thrives on regularity. Never skip a meal or a snack.
8. Here are three good weight-gaining snacks using cottage cheese:
(A) Cottage cheese (1/2 pint) with can of tuna, avocado.
(B) Cottage cheese, mixed with fresh or canned fruit.
(C) Cottage cheese, mixed with a bag of cashew nuts.
9. To help maintain your water balance while training, squeeze the juice of one or two lemons into a quart of warm water, add three tablespoons of honey, and shake until it is thoroughly mixed. Sip this drink between exercises during your work-out to replace lost water.
10. A good appetite stimulant is two ounces of red wine mixed with an egg yolk, to drink about half an hour before a meal.
11. A terrific muscle-building dish is my own special version of the “muscle-burger”:
1 pound ground sirloin
3 whole eggs
8 Wheat Thin whole wheat crackers (or saltines) chopped green onions
Using a fork, mix the eggs with the meat in a large bowl. Crush the crackers up into small crumbs and add along with the chopped onions. Keep stirring until the mixture becomes semi-thick. Cook as you would a regular hamburger—do not overcook.
Types of Exercises
You will use three general types of exercises in developing your body:
1. Upper-body exercises—to build up the arms, chest, shoulders and back muscles.
2. Lower-body exercises—to build up the thighs and calves and strengthen the legs and hips.
3. Abdominal exercises—to tighten, tone and muscularize the waist and improve the posture.
You should look at your body in a mirror and divide it into these three areas—the upper body, the middle body and the lower body. Each part is as important as the others. A lot of people think they should work only on their chest and arms. This is wrong. Each part needs as much attention as the other two. You need the abdominals to contain the vital organs and tie the body together; you need the lower back for lifting things; you need the legs, the calves, the whole upper body. Each muscle in the body is important. The calves count as much as the biceps. People lose big contests for not having good calves. People have even lost competitions because of weak forearms. So you divide your body into the three areas, be aware of them, and train them with equal enthusiasm.
No matter what your individual development problems may be, you will be doing exercises for all three areas. If you are soft and flabby and need to lose weight, obviously you will have to do more of the abdominal exercises and follow a low-carbohydrate reduced-calorie diet. If you are underweight, you should do mostly upper- and lower-body exercises, and follow a high-protein high-calorie diet. If your weight is about normal, then you can combine all three exercise groups in a unified program while maintaining a normal, balanced diet with special emphasis on protein foods.
Chapter Two: Laying the Foundation
Freehand Exercise
In the beginning it is advisable for you to lay a solid foundation with what we call “freehand exercises.” You can do these exercises without expensive gym equipment. You will need only a few pieces of ordinary furniture and your own body.
I became aware of the value of these non-apparatus exercises the summer before I began seriously working with weights. I was hanging out with bodybuilders and other athletes who went to a lake near Graz and did a one-hour exercise routine, which included 15 to 20 exercises that they just made up as they went along. They would look for a tree where they could hang on to the branches and do reverse-grip chin-ups or regular wide-grip chin-ups; they would do push-ups or handstand push-ups or regular push-ups with elevated feet; they would do leg raises and sit-ups. I started working out with them and discovered after a couple of weeks that my body was toned and in better condition than it had ever been.
Freehand exercises have a tonic effect on the muscles and internal organs. They gently tone up the circulatory system and are beneficial in safeguarding the general health of the body. Advanced freehand exercises shape and muscularize the body in a unique way; all the world’s best-built men include them in their workouts. Freehand exercises help build muscle size, give definition, and create the kind of muscle contour that gives the body the look of a sculptured Greek god.
Most of the top professional bodybuilders I have either observed or talked to during my career have used the freehand exercise program in one way or another. Some of them used it before they started training with weights, others have continued to use it into their professional lives. It is a routine they get into on the days they don’t feel like training with weights or when they are traveling and unable to get to a gym.
Freehand exercises are the perfect way to begin bodybuilding. They will give you the feeling for the first time of having a “pump” in your muscles—as when you do a lot of push-ups and you get a feeling of having blood suddenly rushing into your pectoral muscles. This feeling, called the pump, should be used to tune your body.
I’m going to outline a beginning program that will get you in shape. This is not a sissy program. Let’s say your body weight is 150 pounds: you can use the 150 pounds for resistance training. Certain exercises you can do, such as push-ups, give you the same results you’d get from doing a bench press with 150 pounds of heavy steel plates. Doing a handstand push-up is equivalent to doing a press behind the neck or a standing military press. Or if you put a broomstick across two chairs and do pull-ups with a straight body, the effect is the same as bent-over rowing.
These first exercises can be done at home without any expensive equipment. In the beginning you don’t need it. You should lay a foundation by stimulating the muscles, tuning the whole body in to resistance training using your own body weight. And after you’ve accomplished that and feel good about it—which should take from two to six months, depending on your initial condition and your rate of progress—you can safely go into weight training in the gym.
Starting Your Exercise Program
Most people, because of work or school, find it more convenient to exercise in the late afternoon or evening. Your own schedule may dictate that you exercise at some other time—perhaps in the early morning before you go to work. You can make good progress regardless of when you train. I have discovered that I am not the strongest in the morning, but in the morning my body recuperates best, my mind isn’t preoccupied, and I can pay the most attention to what I’m doing. So I work out first thing in the morning, from nine to eleven, before I do anything else.
There are two simple rules you should observe:
1. The best time to exercise is about one hour before you eat or two hours after you have eaten a full meal.
2. Try to eat something about two hours before exercising so your energy level will be high.
One mistake many people make is trying to throw two things together, namely food intake and training. They think, “It’s lunch break, I’ll go eat and then I’ll train quickly.” But it doesn’t work like that. Immediately after you eat, your stomach needs a lot of blood to digest the food. So your working blood supply goes to the stomach. The result of exercising too soon will be poor digestion of your food. I advise never to train immediately before a meal or right after one. In either case it’s bad. You should have at least a half to three quarters of an hour for letting your body come down from exercise, and at least three quar
ters of an hour to an hour for digestion.
Otherwise, there is no “best” time for training. If you work from nine to five you may find it stimulating to get up at six and put in an hour working out before breakfast. A lot of the top bodybuilders who are in business do that. Two perfect examples are Bill Pearl and Reg Park, guys who work out from five to seven A.M. They even trained for the Mr. Universe contest early in the morning, doing squats with 400 and 500 pounds. These are morning people, and they feel morning training is the best for them. There are other people who work best at night. They have to sit down and meditate a little bit to get everything that happened during the day out of their heads and then they get into weight training. They feel perfectly fine working out from ten to twelve at night. It’s a personal matter. Through experimentation you must find your own ideal time.
Clothing
What you wear to train in depends on weather conditions. You should be comfortable. If the weather is warm, as it is in California, you should wear tank tops and shorts. Even in cold weather, your clothes should be comfortable—always comfortable, always loose. If you wear two sweatshirts, they should be loose enough to allow you to move without feeling restricted. Try to get clothes that absorb sweat. Cotton is best; polyester and artificial fibers don’t absorb as well. A lot of people work out in nylon because they want to look slick. If you start worrying about how your clothes look while you’re in training, then you’re already training for the wrong reason. You only have to look at your face while you’re training and see the sweating and grimacing to realize it’s not appealing anyway and that you might as well forget about fashionable gym clothes.
There are times when you want to really sweat and lose weight. Then, you should wear numerous layers of clothes. If your reason for training is to lose weight, and not to build your biceps, calves, or thighs, you should wear things like a rubber reducing belt around your waist, and heavy sweat clothes.
Personally, I prefer to train in as few clothes as possible so I can see my faults. I try to see the specific areas that have fallen behind or that I’ve neglected. I like to expose them so I have to look at them all the time. For instance, in the beginning my calves were underdeveloped. When I understood how really weak they were, I cut the bottoms off my pants so everybody would see. And that made me eager to train hard and build them up. Most guys in the gym do the opposite. They hide their weak points, which is totally wrong. Before competition I would always walk into the gym to train with no shirt on. Why? Because the instant I sat down I’d see my stomach and say, “Wait a minute, Arnold, you can’t go into a contest with a stomach like that, with so much fat on it you get wrinkles.” So I would train my waist harder and stay on my diet. It’s very important that you expose your weaknesses, that you constantly point them up to yourself. Let the mirror by your reminder.
Breathing
Breathing properly is essential to your health. It’s something you should learn from the first movement of your first exercise. If you breathe incorrectly, it could have a bad effect on your lungs and heart. The correct way to breathe when you train is to exhale each time you have some kind of resistance. Let’s say you’re doing a push-up. When you press your body up from the floor you should breathe out. Remember that one rule: as soon as there is any strain on your body you should breathe out. The time to inhale is when you let yourself down, when your body is under the least amount of pressure.
You should always have plenty of oxygen when you train. This is one reason I prefer to train outdoors whenever possible. Oxygen keeps your energy level up and lets you train longer and harder without exhaustion. If you’re training inside, sometimes you have to help your body get the oxygen by taking a lot of vitamin E. But if you have the opportunity, it’s best to exercise outside and get the oxygen naturally. Even when I spend most of my time in a gym working out, I try to run, swim and do stretching movements outside in the fresh air. In fact, this first set of exercises, the freehand exercises, could be done outdoors anywhere, even on a porch or balcony.
PUSH-UPS—The first freehand exercise is the push-up. This is an excellent exercise for the chest, shoulders and the back of the arms (triceps). Push-ups are familiar to almost everyone, but most people do them wrong. There is something I want to stress in the beginning: Do not let your ego get in the way of your progress. Perhaps somebody told you you should do 20 or 50 push-ups. Put it out of your mind. Just remember this: The important thing is to do the exercise correctly; that counts for everything. That’s why I introduced the basic exercises first, because if you start doing the basic freehand, or non-apparatus, exercises without any problems and without cheating, then you’ll go on into weight training without cheating. Right now is the time to catch and correct yourself. You should train only for yourself. If you can do only one push-up but you do it right, that’s fine. I’m positive that a week later you’ll be able to do three, then six and eventually ten.
Place your hands approximately shoulder width apart. Hold your body perfectly straight and exhale as you push your body up until your arms are straight. Pause. Inhale as you lower your body to the floor, allowing only your chest to touch. Your stomach should still be an inch or two off the floor when you touch with your chest, because your toes lift the body up a bit.
The most important thing is not to touch the floor with your stomach, your head, or your knees, and to press up until your arms are locked straight. You should do it with a steady movement, like a piston, up and down, up and down. And always do full repetitions. The muscle that will get the most from this exercise is the pectoral muscle, the whole pectoral muscle. You will feel blood rushing into this area. But it’s not merely the pectoral muscle that pushes up the body; the triceps and the front deltoid work with it. (I’m talking just about the normal push-up with your fingertips toward the front. Later you can use different hand positions to stimulate different muscle areas. For instance, if you start turning the hands toward the inside it will go more into the triceps and deltoid area, less to the pecs.)
Don’t worry about the sets and repetitions in the beginning. Within a few weeks, you should work up to a total of 50 repetitions. You can do 10 five times, or 5 ten times. Just pick a certain number of repetitions and remember to observe the strict form. If you’re athletically talented and have no problem doing 50, then you should go to 100. The number depends on the person, but you should give yourself a nice workout. Some guys struggle with 10 repetitions. Others who do 50 easily should go further, maybe two or three sets of 50. But basically I would start at 50 push-ups a day and work your way up slowly.
If you can do a lot of repetitions easily and you want to get more resistance, elevate your feet, using a chair at first, then a table.
DIPS BETWEEN CHAIRS—Take two chairs that are strong enough to hold your body weight and place them approximately shoulder width apart, back to back, the backs parallel. Take hold of each chair as shown in photo. Bend your legs at the knees, finding a stable way of holding yourself balanced so you don’t fall forward, and push your body up until your arms are locked straight. Let your body come down as slowly as you can and try to touch your front deltoids on the chair backs. Then slowly press your body weight up again. Keep your legs bent. Exhale as you push up, inhale as you let your body down. Go up and down evenly but slowly. Look directly ahead during the movements and try to keep your body as straight as possible.
This is a triceps and pectoral and deltoid exercise. Some people lean forward too much so it becomes a strict pectoral exercise, which you’ve had with push-ups. It should be fifty percent in the triceps, forty percent in the deltoids and ten percent in the shoulders. You should always give it the full repetition. Go all the way down and all the way up. That’s a must in the beginning of the workout. The more fully you do the repetition, the more fully your muscle is developed. The reason some bodybuilders develop short pectorals, short biceps, short triceps is that they don’t do full movements.
You may find this exercise difficult
in the beginning, but work at it until you can do 50 repetitions. Again, how you arrive at 50 doesn’t matter in the first month. After you get into it and can accomplish a certain number of repetitions easily, you should strive to do five sets of 20. You can’t work too much, that’s for sure. However, it’s very important not to cheat. Don’t get hung up on the number of repetitions; just get hung up on strict form. It would be better for your body to do 5 perfect dips than to do 50 sloppy ones. I’m going to repeat that idea over and over throughout this book: Doing exercises correctly, perfectly, doing full movements, is the most important thing in bodybuilding.
ROWING BETWEEN CHAIRS—This exercise is extremely good for tuning up the back muscles—the upper back, the center back, the outside back and the latissimus. Place two chairs approximately five feet apart and put a broomstick across the backs. Lie on the floor between the chairs and grip the broomstick, as you see me doing in the photograph. Then, keeping your heels on the floor, pull yourself all the way up to the broomstick and let yourself slowly down again. Hold your body absolutely straight, as with push-ups. The only part that should move is your arms. Pull the broomstick in to your chest area, making it touch each time.
Do as many repetitions as you can in the beginning and work up to a total of at least 50.
BENT-LEG SIT-UPS—This is a terrific abdominal conditioner, working mostly to tighten the upper abdomen. Put your feet under a piece of furniture, a bed or a couch, and bend your legs at a 45-degree angle. Sit-ups are more beneficial when done with the legs bent because this puts all of the stress on the front abdominal muscles, thus eliminating any assistance from the hip flexors, which occurs when the legs are straight. Hold your hands in front of your waist with your fingers knit together and go up and down. It is not necessary to lie back fully—only about three-quarters of the way—but the movement should be very smooth and rhythmical. With abdominals all you need is contraction. It’s actually one of the few sets of muscles we don’t give a full movement. We want to flex the muscles, to compress them.
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