“Arnold Schwarzenegger Education of a Bodybuilder by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Douglas Kent Hall
I asked myself, what else can you do, Arnold, to be the best? In the end I discovered that the best way to build muscle is shock therapy. If you do ten sets of the same exercise, or any other exercise, consistently and over a long period, your muscles eventually get used to it, it becomes routine and progress stops. So from then on, 1x a week I took my training partner along, brought some of the equipment and drove out of town. Each time we focused on just one specific exercise, one muscle group. I remember that on the first day we hauled a 113 kg barbell into the woods and then did squats for 3 hours straight. I started with the 113 kg barbell and did 20 repetitions. Then my partner did as many as they could manage. Then it was my turn again. We finished when each of us had done 55 sets of squats. The last hour felt endless, but it worked. Our thighs were bulging like balloons. The first time, we shocked our legs so badly that neither of us could walk for almost the whole following week. Our legs had never before felt what a 55-set workout is like, and now they had no choice but to recover and grow.
These trips became a regular thing. We also brought the girls along to cook for us. We built a fire and tried to turn the whole workout into a little competition between ourselves. Even though our workouts were very hard, we had a good time and plenty of fun. Once we had finished shocking our muscles, we drank wine and beer and sometimes got quite drunk. We wanted to be, and act like, real strongmen from the end of the last century. Other times our antics went as far as outright silliness. We would grab our barbells again, but the wine and beer had made us weaker, and the weights we tried to heave up came crashing back down before they got anywhere. Those were beautiful times! In the evenings we cooked, sat by the fire and canoodled with the girls.
It is very important that you enjoy what you do. We loved to train. We trained under the open sky, competed with each other and felt the pain in our muscles. While squatting, our leg muscles would often cramp up, and we would throw ourselves onto the grass and try to ease the pain by massaging our legs. That was the first time I felt how pain can turn into pleasure. The pain was good for us. We trained at the edge of pain to shock our muscles. We saw pain as something necessary and positive, because we knew that thanks to it we would grow and develop.
Quite unexpectedly, pain had become a pleasure for me. I could never have explained that to others, because I knew what they would say. They would have said I was a weirdo and a masochist. But that wasn’t true. I simply turned pain into pleasure for myself, not for the pain’s sake, not because I particularly enjoyed torturing myself, but because pain meant progress. Among ourselves, self-torment was a matter of honor, and we even boasted about how much pain any one of us was able to endure.
Every weekend still belonged to these trips, where we tried to give our muscles what they didn’t get in our everyday workouts. The principle was simple: surprise your body. Don’t always do what it expects, what it is used to. This was a completely new approach to developing the muscles. I could see on myself what amazing results it produced, and from then on I promoted it as a new, independent bodybuilding method.
To be continued …
Author: joker
Come and train! ArtGym
