Arnold Schwarzenegger Workout Tips (5 THINGS I LEARNED!)

Make Arnold proud and start changing your body here…

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. COM. Very few people are recognizable by their first names only, but if I say the name Arnold, you and I pretty much know exactly who I’m talking about. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I got a gift for Christmas the other day, and I didn’t recognize it at first, but I should have just by how heavy this thing was. I didn’t recognize it because of the black and gray cover, but this is a reprint, an update of the modern Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ‘Bible of Bodybuilding,’ pretty much. A 796-page book that I actually already own 2 copies of. Now I own the one that you guys probably many of you watch and would relate to, that yellowish color, right.

You could probably see it. I have 2 copies already on my shelves. One that my brother had and one that I had that when my brother moved I took it from him. So I have 3 copies now officially of this book, but it brought to mind, sort of brought me back to my day of, why I was so inspired by him in the first place. Arnold was the action hero of the day along with Sylvester Stallone, both of which inspired me to take what was a hobby at that time into a lifelong passion and now a career.

And I wanted to sort of pay homage to him in the form of a video where I showcase 5 of the things I specifically learned from Arnold that I now apply even in our ATHLEANX Training. 3 THINGS I DIDN’T LEARN That being said, I think it’s fair to start off with the fact that Arnold and I obviously don’t agree on everything. During his pursuit of his Mr. Olympia titles, it’s been well documented that he himself has admitted he used anabolic steroids in that pursuit. Now, it was a time when people didn’t know as much about the dangers of anabolic steroids as they do now.

So I think having channels like this, we can actually educate you towards what those are and steer you down alternative paths that will allow you to still make impressive gains and really change your physique but to do so in a much healthier way. Secondly, there are obviously exercises in this bodybuilding bible encyclopedia that I don’t necessarily think are the best exercises you can do. I’ve gone on record and made videos about 5 of the worst exercises I think you can do, which I’ll link for you up here, that yeah they appear in that encyclopedia. Does that mean that they’re bad exercises, or that they’re not effective exercises? No.

But guys, my responsibility as a professional athlete and strength coach and physical therapist is to choose exercises based on a risk/reward ratio that help you to get the results. We can’t compromise the results they’ll get you, but we have to make sure that we get them by staying safe and healthy at the same time because the athletes’ careers depend upon those decisions. And again, lots of you guys out there have experienced injuries from those same 5 exercises that I show you in that video. And Arnold himself with his very favorite Fly’s exercise did an interview in 1977 where he talked about tearing his pec twice while doing Fly’s. So, we have to take all that in consideration and finally, his training workouts were legendary, 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours at a time.

He could go and do that a day and then come back the next day and come back the next day. But again, you’ve got to look back at the first point when training with anabolic steroid usage, you’re going to be able to do some crazy and amazing things like that because your recovery is going to be greatly enhanced. But that’s not what we’re doing here, guys. We’ve got to make sure that if we’re going to train, we’re going to train with intensity, and we’re going to get the job done quickly. With that being said, there’s 5 things that Arnold and I do agree on, and it starts right there with his training intensity.

TRAINING INTENSITY Very few people train with the intensity of Arnold Schwarzenegger. All you have to do is look at just a few of his training footage or clips or still photos, and I guarantee you that every single one of them and if he is mid-set, has got him gritting his teeth because this guy pushed it every single time. Matter of fact, it was legendary, his back and forth that he would have with his training partners to push for just a single additional repetition. Now why did he do that? Because he knew that you don’t just show up to the gym hoping to get results.

You have to force change. You have to force results. And I’ve got to tell you guys, if you show up to the gym thinking that you’re going to get results just because you get there, that’s the wrong mindset. And it’s certainly not what Arnold would condone and it’s certainly not what we condone here at ATHLEANX. I tell you all the time.

If you’re going to be there, put the effort in to get the change that you need to get out of your workouts. And I’ll tell you, anybody can show up to the gym if they got a few bucks worth of gas and have a gym membership. But that doesn’t mean that everybody looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you bring the intensity that you need to your workouts, you will start to change your body. I guarantee you.

And if you have to look to somebody for inspiration, see if you can dig up some old clips of this guy training, and that should be more than enough incentive to change how hard you’re training. THE ONE DAY CURE The second thing related to the first one which was Intensity, is a technique that Arnold used that was certainly intense, The One Day Cure. He would head up into the mountains with his buddies, take along one piece of equipment, select one exercise, and do that thing over and over and over again. And that would be his entire workout. Why do I believe in this?

I believe that you can absolutely do that. You can take a single exercise and make it into a workout. How do you do it? With intensity. Again, maybe you’ve got to adjust those hours that Arnold had because we don’t train under the same influence he did.

However, however, if you have the intent and the intensity in your workout, then you can take an exercise and make it into a workout. So much so, in one of our entire phases of NXT, we have our Slash and Burn training. We devote a single exercise as the only exercise to that workout. You can get the results, guys. You can always get results if you choose an exercise, concentrate on getting that movement from point A to point B using the muscles that you’re supposed to be using in the movement.

Don’t just try to move a bar or try to get from point A to point B thinking that that’s the goal. It’s only the goal if you get there using the muscles that you were intending to use in the first place. Arnold knew this. He practiced this. He lived this, and we do, too.

SHOCK THE MUSCLES Number 3, showcasing the actual Yin and Yang of Arnold Schwarzenegger and just how complete he was when he approached his training was the fact that he also believed in shocking the muscle and not doing the same thing over and over again, and applying a variety of high intensity techniques from Running the Rack to Drop Sets to Negative Only Sets to Forced Reps, so many different techniques. Why? Because he truly realized that in order to change your body, you have to challenge yourself atall aspects. And you have to do so in a way that your body is not comfortable. Guys, if there’s one thing you learn from this principle is that your workouts should never feel comfortable, if you want to at least garner a change from them.

If you want to garner a change, you have to challenge yourself. Your workouts should be very inefficient. I know there’s certain training methodologists today who believe that the goal is to become very efficient in what you do, but not if you’re looking to force size gains, not if you’re looking to become a bigger, better version of yourself, a stronger version of yourself. You have to