Becoming a Legend: Frank Zane’s Top 10 Training Tips

Skip the Flat Bench

Early on, the flat bench press is good for building pec, delt, and triceps mass, but its usefulness doesn’t last. Currently, I train my pecs only once a week, and I start each workout with the incline bench press—and using dumbbells with a neutral grip allows for a better stretch. Then I move on to the pec deck. If you don’t have access to a good pec deck, then dumbbells on a slight decline are your best option. For the pec deck, I keep the reps in the six-to-12 range, working up in weight and down in reps. Parallel dips on a dip machine are also great. I do higher reps for this exercise, about 15, 12, 10 reps as I increase weight.

Dumbbell Incline Press
Lie down on a bench adjusted to 45 degrees, with a dumbbell in each hand, palms in. Press dumbbells up until over chest, twisting palms out, then lowering them back down.

Chase the Pump

Follow the pump. I remind myself to do this whenever I train my triceps. It’s also my reasoning for working tri’s right after chest—to take full advantage of the ample blood flow already in that area. The triceps make up two-thirds of your arm mass, which is why they deserve more time and focus than their counterparts, the biceps. Three of my favorite exercises for tri’s include close-grip bench presses, pushdowns, and overhead dumbbell extensions. I suggest performing these three moves twice per week. Go with reps in the 12-to-15 range so that you can really focus on getting ample blood flow to the muscle.

Annihilate Your Abs

I always did a lot of ab work—as I neared a show, I would perform 1,000 reps of various ab moves, for a total of 30 minutes. I liked to superset crunches with leg raises—which I did in the now hard-to-find Roman chair—performing 50 reps of each. Then I would do hanging knee raises and seated twists.

Hanging Knee Raise
Hang from a pullup bar with a shoulder-width grip, legs and arms fully extended. Bend your knees so they’re 90 degrees. Then brace your core and raise your bent legs up toward your chest.

Stretch Out

Optimal blood flow is a key to growth, as it floods the muscle with more nutrients for better recovery. To help this process, I performed a stretch for the body part I was working between each set. After a set of cable rows, for example, I’d perform a two-arm lat stretch. [Grab on to a sturdy object with arms fully extended and lean into it.] This also enhances your flexibility, which will help keep you injury-free.

Seated Twist
You’ll be hard-pressed to find it nowadays, but Zane credits his ab development to the Roman chair. To mimic one, sit on a bench, perpendicularly, with your feet wedged under heavy dumbbells. Then lean back.

Don’t Program Hop

This whole concept of changing your training regimen every month never appealed to me—the reason being that you never get good at anything. If you want to improve at something, you have to do it a lot—after all, the basis of learning is repetition. And that’s what you do in the gym; we’re educating the muscles by doing a lot of sets and a lot of reps.

Hamstring Curl
Zane trained his legs only once per week, but when he did, he attacked them with ferocity. This intense training style, applied to all body parts, helped him achieve perfect balance.

Focus Up

When I’m in the gym, I’m not thinking about anything other than getting a damn good workout. I never wanted to talk to anyone during a workout, especially if I was training for something, because that’s a distraction. I went as far as to always try to go to the gym when there was hardly anybody there. Or, if there were people around, they were other serious gymgoers. At Gold’s Gym in Venice, CA, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, if you went to the gym at 6:30 or 7 in the morning, the people there were serious about their workouts. There was no talking, no noise, and no distractions. By 9 a.m., all the loudmouths wandered in. Fortunately, I was on my way out by then.

Maintain to Gain

The idea of maintenance is to prevent regression while improving weak points. Therefore, you shouldn’t focus too much on your strong points—working these areas once a week is enough, just to get a good pump. So I recommend hitting your lagging body part three days in a row, followed by three full days of rest. Since this type of training is extremely taxing, you shouldn’t do it for more than three consecutive weeks. 

It’s also important to gauge your intensity accordingly, so don’t do as many sets to start. Doing four to five sets of the specialization exercise you choose works well in the beginning.

Diet Smart

Throughout my career, I was never a big carbohydrate freak. There were always fewer carbohydrates in my diet than there was protein. I kept protein at one gram per pound of body weight, usually between 190 and 200 grams per day. My carbs stayed between 70 and 150 grams, and fat made up around 25% of my total calories. I never went above 3,000 calories. I’d just get fat doing that. The way I did it was a seasonal approach. I would train hard in the summer and peak in the fall. I would go into maintenance mode in the winter and build back up in the spring. I wasn’t peaked all the time, but I always stayed on top of my nutrition and supplementation.

Master Motivation

Motivation is based on two things. When you start out, it’s a different kind of motivation. Most people begin to work out in the gym because they don’t like where they’re at and they want to improve. That’s called deficiency motivation. That’s good motivation to start with. Then, after you do it for a while and you’ve made improvement, you’re motivated to keep going because you want even more improvement. That’s the best kind of motivation to have if you’re going to keep doing this—to get rewarded for what you’re doing. Give yourself a reward, and I don’t mean eating junk food or doing something that’s contrary to your goals. Reward yourself in a positive way.

One-Arm Cable Curl
Standing perpendicular to the cable pulley allows you to better isolate your biceps.

Set Reasonable Goals

To make consistent progress, you should set sensible goals. If you’re just starting out, then aiming to compete on the Olympia stage—let alone win the contest—is probably too lofty. Adding an inch to your arms in three months is doable and also gives you focus in your training. But don’t sacrifice yourself to your goals to the point where you can’t be happy in the moment. Because if you’re always striving for something you don’t have, what does that say about right now? Try to have both.