How To Train For Mass | Arnold Schwarzenegger's Blueprint Training Program

(film reel rattling) (piano music) - Not all legends are myths. Some are flesh and blood. Some legends walk among us. But they are not born, they are built. Legends are made of iron and sweat, mind and muscle, blood, vision and victory. Legends and champions, they grow, they win, they conquer. There is a legend behind every legacy. There is a model behind every legend. I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is my plan. (piano music) (film reel rattles) - Arnold Schwarzenegger, 28 years old, six foot two, two hundred and 40 pounds. Mr. Olympia for the past five years. He is preparing to defend his title this year for the last time. - All the Mr.

Universe from the last five years come together in a contest and we find out who is the best of all the Mr. Universe. So they created the Mr. Olympia contest, which is then the most important contest, and whoever wins is the best bodybuilder. - And you are the best bodybuilder. - Of course yes. - I think everyone knows when they start

train

ing that you are not going to become a champion overnight. But the question is, how can I speed up the process? (inspirational piano music) And then the important thing is, did you

train

the right way, which is

training

the basics, if it's the squats, if it's both arms bent, if it's the bent-over row, if it's the clean and the press , the bench press, the incline press, the dumbbell press, all those basic exercises, and that's what you should do, especially the last three months before a competition.

You have to shake the muscle, shake the muscle, and shake the muscle with different types of

training

principles. Expose your weak points. You'll go and hit those marks, and then you'll raise the bar. Then you raise the bar and feel that with hard work you can achieve goals and be successful. (inspiring orchestra music) (film reel rattling) - The important thing for people to recognize is that not everyone wants to be a champion. Not everyone has the desire to get up on stage, stay up there on stage and win Mr. Universe or Mr. America or World's Best Built Man and Mr.

Olympia and all those types of titles. No. But the same principles can apply. One thing I can tell you. There are big mistakes being made in bodybuilding today by not covering those basic exercises. Because men go to the gym today, I no longer see kids learning about the clean and the press or the two-arm snatch and doing straight up rows from the floor up, and all those kinds of exercises that are very important to create the trapezius and create the lumbar area. (film rattling) I think I've always done the three chest exercises today. The first year I started training and the last 10 years I've been training, it's bench press, incline press at different levels, then start low, medium and high, and then fly.

I mean, for me the flyes were an exercise that gave me full development of the pectoral muscle, because I went all the way out and almost hit the ground and I was a big believer in expanding the chest as much as possible and giving that stretch. Because remember that with muscles the important thing is always to stretch and flex. And so for me, that thing of coming out with the dumbbells as far as you can to get that stretch, and then coming in and then having the dumbbells touch each other and then flex like you're doing the most muscular thing at the top. , and then go out again, those are the kind of exercises that to me were like you couldn't replace them with any machine.

This was. One of the most important things, of course, is creating muscle size and growth, something that sometimes the body hits a wall with. What that basically means is that the body says, "Look, I know all your tricks, "I know you're going to start with the bench press first," and then I know you're going to walk over to the pull-up bar and do pull-ups," and then I know "I know exactly everything you do and I'm prepared for it." So you have to go and use the shocking principle. (intense orchestral music) The body, and if this chest knows, I'll start with 135 and then I'll go to 225 and do 275, I'll start now with 315, and I'll do 20 reps with 315.

And then I'll have the guys take out plates and then I'll have 225 left, and then I'll do another 10 reps, and then I'll have another 45-pound plate taken off me, and then I'll have 135 left, and then I'll do another 10 reps. , do 15 or 20 repetitions, and let's see if the pectoral muscle gets used to that. Then you will always find that your pectoral muscle trembles after that. He didn't know what to do because he has cramps and is being tortured. It hurts because now you've hit the muscle (film rattling). Bent over barbell rows and T-bar rows. I mean, any type of rowing exercise that uses thickness, those are the exercises I always do. confident, again, from beginning to end.

There are a lot of bodybuilders who have some kind of deficiency when it comes to their lower back and lower back striations, which you only get with stiff-legged deadlifts and regular deadlifts and bent-over rows and all that. . without supporting your chest. You have to let your body release and let your lower back support you as you do the bent over row. We bench balanced up to 315 pounds bent over the row, because that's what gave you that strength in your back and gave you the thickness of your back, because remember when you train your back you need the width and you need the thickness, but you need thickness in your lower back, you need thickness in your upper back and on the outside of your back and in the center of your back, so you have to train and find exercises for all these different things .

Curls, barbell curls. I was up doing 275 reps on the barbell curl. Many times we started with weight, with a lot of weight and did just one repetition. Then I ask them to remove the plates and curl, but enough so that I can now do two reps. Then remove the plates and do the three reps, then remove more plates and do four reps after that. And that's how I went up until, without even lowering the bar, to let the biceps know, "you don't know what's coming," you're not going to get used to "my training method." I'm going to have all kinds of "tricks up my sleeve." I mean, it was absolutely essential to do the barbell curl to build bicep thickness, do the dumbbell curl on the incline bench, and do the concentration curl.

Because the concentration curl isolated the biceps with the heavy weights, not the light weights, but the heavy weights, but to isolate them and really focus and create that peak on the outside of the biceps that they need when you do your backstrokes. . The triceps was a lot of narrow bench press at first, then triceps extensions down and then triceps extension overhead with one arm and with both arms and then also triceps extension off the bar where you let your head go over under the bar and pressed outwards. and use your own body weight. Back. Dumbbell press, front and back barbell press.

I mean, we always did the kind of back presses behind the neck. The military press, the dumbbell press, which is now called the Arnold Press, because there was a certain way of doing it to really create the front deltoid stretch. We come down with the elbow here, not just all the way down here, but come all the way down and then rotate out and come up to get the full flexion. And then the lateral raises, and especially the inclined lateral raises on the bench, it's a 45-degree bench. This is a specialty I learned at Vince Gironda's gym.

He had this cut on his face where you could still breathe, where it wasn't necessary to look to the sides but you could breathe. But it's 45 degrees and rotating your wrist outward like this is a fantastic posterior deltoid exercise. A lot of times we would go to the gym just one day a week, where we would go to 110 pound dumbbells and do dumbbell presses, do six reps. That's all we could do, six reps. So we picked up a hundred and did another six reps. Leave them, I took the 90 and did another six reps. Then we went up to the 80s and down to the 40s and we could barely do six reps with the 40s.

But I can tell you that I didn't know where to put my arm, because my delts were screaming. They were suffering. Because? Because I shocked the muscle. (film rattling) I think squats are the most important exercise for creating thighs, big thighs. Squats, back squats, front squats, leg extensions, lunges, stiff leg deadlifts or stiff leg good morning exercise and lots of leg curls. Then sometimes to shake up the body and the muscle, we would go from squats to leg press, so we just load up the leg press machine and do a lot of leg presses and stuff like that. (film clatter) There will be regular abdominal training that we did for abs, which is just lifting legs.

We did straight legs, bent knee leg raises, crunches, Roman chair crunches, which gives you 500 reps, which was an absolute necessity, and we all believe in it, and then crunches. Everything falls into place now, and all I have to do now is perfect my posing routine, which is almost impossible to do, you know? It's already perfect. Oh yeah. It all comes down to one point. Wait when you see it. (laughs) I think the important thing is that you always do your best in every set and don't really save yourself for the next set, because there's another big mistake that a lot of people make.

They say, okay, I'm going to do 20 sets, so I better take it easy on the third and fourth sets, and then the fifth, and then the tenth set, because I still have 10 sets left. But that is the wrong approach. Each set should do as much as possible. I think the most important thing is that you eat the right way and get the amount of protein your body needs and of course there is always a debate about how much protein the body needs. I always lived by the formula that for every kilo of body weight I want to get one gram of protein.

The challenge, of course, is how do you get these 250 grams into the body and have the body absorb it all, instead of just letting it pass? I felt like it worked best for me when I ate five meals a day. There are some people who can work on three meals. For me, five meals was the answer. And the reason is that I was never a big eater. I was always comfortable with a regular size steak. If you gave me a 10-ounce steak, even in my prime, I was happy. And having a little bit of greens, so put some sliced ​​tomatoes on it and then some salad or something, I'm fine.

In the morning, if you gave me just three scrambled eggs with a little bacon or sausage with a little tomato and onion, I was fine with that. The only thing is that two hours later, after that breakfast, I was hungry. And so when I was sitting at Santa Monica City College, or I was at the workplace doing construction work, or wherever I was, I would pull out of my bag a little plastic container that had a glass in it that you normally use at the bar to drink. mix things up at the bar. And I would have my milk in there and my protein powder in there and all that, and I would just zip it up and then put it in my bag.

And then I would sit in the classroom and just take it out and shake it like that. Everyone would be looking, like, "what the hell is he doing now?" And I was shaking my protein (imitating the shaker), like a bartender doing all the little tricks, and then I would drink it, close it, and put it away. That, for me, was the extra 30 grams of protein I needed at that moment, and then an hour later I'd be hitting the gym. Then we would work out for two and a half hours and then go to lunch. There would be a late lunch, and then I'd go back to having a regular steak and then two hours later I'd have another one of those protein drinks.

So I would drink protein drinks twice a day to get the 250 grams of protein, because like I said, it is absolutely essential to have enough protein so that you can really experience muscle growth. We have to recognize that we would not get all the nutrients, vitamins, minerals and proteins and everything that the body needs just from regular foods. That's why we have supplements. And that's why they're called supplements, because we're supplementing, because we don't get enough from regular foods, no matter how healthy and good you eat. - The three contestants, Lou Ferrigno, Serge Nubret and Arnold Schwarzenegger, pose for the judges' final decision. - So now I've gained a certain amount of

mass

over the year, and I've worked on certain weak spots throughout the year, and now with the combination of diet and high reps and more exercises and more sets, I take that

mass

and chisel it and work on the details.

And that's why I called the pre-competition period the most exciting period, because it's the one where you really have to focus, pay close attention every day, look in the mirror honestly and expose your weak points. That motivates you then. That's what makes you train harder, so you have to expose those weak points. But theThe key is to set the course, train every day, eat the right way, and you will achieve those marks. Then you move the bar higher, then you move the bar higher. It's really exciting to do that and you feel that with hard work you can achieve goals and be successful.

The principles of training and nutrition.principles, the type of protein you need and the vitamins you need and the minerals you need and all these types of supplements, everything remains exactly the same. That's what's important. (applause) - And the winner, the one and only Arnold Schwarzenegger! (crowd applauding) (dramatic music) - Bodybuilding has been a beautiful experience for me and I will continue it for the rest of my life. I just stopped competing, but I didn't stop bodybuilding. It's the best sport (crowd applauding) Thank you. (film rattling)