The Ultimate Arnold Schwarzenegger Training Guide

Chest

Trying to describe Arnold’s chest and back routines separately can get a little tricky; he supersetted the two exclusively for most of his bodybuilding career. (For the sake of organization in this article, however, we’ll focus on each body part separately, as each routine can also stand on its own.) Arnold had simple reasons for employing supersets: One, they saved time and allowed him to train chest and back combined in roughly one hour. Two, he felt he could handle more weight this way, and so develop greater muscle density (the same logic behind training opposing muscle groups together). And, of course, three, because he relished the experience.

As he once put it, “When the chest and the upper back”—essentially, his entire upper body—“are pumped simultaneously, there is an indescribable feeling of growth stimulation and massiveness.” But Arnold also warned beginners about this style of training, recommending they work into it slowly because of the demands it places on endurance and stamina. Even seasoned lifters can struggle. Arnold once told a story about introducing his chest/back workout to several experienced bodybuilders while visiting South Africa. According to the Oak, two of his training partners “passed out cold, and a third became so ill he lost his breakfast!”

Training tips

• Despite relatively high rep ranges, Arnold went as heavy as he could when training chest to elicit maximal growth. He typically used the pyramid principle, increasing weight and decreasing reps on each set of a given exercise.
• He also regularly used straight-arm pullovers in his training, employing either a dumbbell or barbell (despite their exclusion from this routine). Arnold felt that pullovers expanded the thorax and enlarged the rib cage, though this was never proven to be fact.
• In addition to supersets, Arnold often performed forced reps, Iso-Tension (holding poses between sets and after workouts), and peak contractions (squeezing the muscles at the top of each rep) in his training. He did whatever it took to increase intensity.

Arnold’s chest workout

*Performed as a warmup
**Arnold pyramided up in weight (and down in reps) every set

Chest/Back

When Arnold was in pre-contest mode, he would amp up the intensity of his training by pairing his chest and back workouts, creating a mega workout of searing intensity. Here’s what it looked like:

Arnold’s chest/back superset

*Performed as a warmup
**Pyramid up the weight and lower your reps set to set
***Performed standing on a block or bench for better ROM
****Performed as a finishing exercise 

Back

Building a wide, thick, detailed back isn’t a new idea revealed exclusively to modern-day bodybuilders like Ronnie Coleman, Jay Cutler, and Phil Heath. Arnold, Franco Columbu, and others they trained with also knew the importance of the back double-biceps and lat spread poses for winning major competitions. When Arnold trained back, he didn’t just concentrate on lifting the weight to a desired position as other bodybuilders did. After all, he would never be the best at training the way everyone else did. On lat pulldowns, for instance, he attempted to pull the sky down on top of him as opposed to simply moving the bar to his upper chest. When deadlifting, those weren’t weight plates on the ends of the barbell, they were massive planets. The thinking was abstract, sure, but effective nonetheless.

There was one potentially effective visualization technique Arnold didn’t know to use at the time. “Had I been aware of Conan [the Barbarian] during my competition years,” he said in the time leading up to that film, “I probably would have imagined I was him during my workouts.” He was intent on developing his back for the movie because he knew it would be easily visible from many camera angles—and the last thing he wanted was less-than-stellar lats if he was to be a proper barbarian. “I’ll want my back muscles to bristle with power,” he said. “If my back is writhing and rippling during fight scenes, the public will know that I am a rugged fighter.”

Training tips

• Arnold felt it was best to train all areas of the back—outer, upper, lower, middle—then finish the workout with a power movement like deadlifts or cleans, which would work all the back muscles.
• After each back exercise, Arnold stretched his lats by pulling hard on a stationary object with one or both arms fully extended. This, he believed, helped him achieve great overall lat development and remain flexible and limber in the upper body.
• When he wanted to hit the lower lats, Arnold always used a narrow grip on chinups, pulldowns, and any type of row. Lower lat development helped complement the immense width of his upper body.

Arnold’s back workout

*Pyramid up the weight and lower your reps set to set 

Shoulders

“A man who has developed wide, broader shoulders feels superior and has a greater sense of security and confidence about him,” Arnold once told a magazine. Not surprisingly, he scoffed at the large number of bodybuilders he knew whose training regimens were absent any sort of shoulder work. No wonder the one exercise named after him, the Arnold Press, is a delt movement.

Early in his bodybuilding career, Arnold’s deltoids were the weakest aspect of his upper body. So he worked them tirelessly, and after winning the 1967 Mr. Universe contest in London, he attributed the victory in large part to his improved shoulder development. Three years later, at the 1970 Universe, he beat his idol Reg Park, and again wrote that he was thankful he’d trained his shoulders so hard.

Joe Weider once asked Arnold what role he thought bone structure played in shoulder development—in other words, were some people born with more potential than others? The future California governor acknowledged that certain individuals possess a genetic advantage (among them, Steve Reeves and Frank Zane), but that doesn’t mean others not so blessed can’t improve greatly in the area. He maintained that anyone could widen his shoulders by at least two inches via “direct and specialized training.”

Training tips

• Arnold kept barbell work to a minimum when training shoulders. He reasoned that all the bench and incline presses he did, which also hit the delts to some degree, would suffice.
• For a good while, he trained delts first in workouts that also included arms, explaining that his delts were naturally weak and needed to be worked when fresh. You would have been hard-pressed to find Arnold training shoulders in the same workout as chest, as many people do.
• Despite the fact that they weren’t often mentioned, the trapezius muscles were never neglected in Arnold’s training. He often worked traps after delts in the same workout.

Arnold’s shoulder workout 

*Lying sideways on an incline board 

Legs

In Arnold’s early days, his leg-training protocol suffered from two critical weaknesses: disuse and, as Joe Weider called it, primitivism. The former was pretty straightforward: The young Austrian didn’t train legs at all in his first year of bodybuilding. After finally catching on to the needs of his lower body, he went overboard, even going so far as to train legs every day for a year with 10 sets of squats and 10 sets of leg curls. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t satisfied with the results.

His “primitive” ways were most obvious in the lifting “retreats” he and his buddies would go on in the Austrian countryside. They’d load up several cars with weights (and admiring girls) and drive to a remote area in the trees where they could train. They’d squat from morning till afternoon, rest, party, drink beer, then go right back to squatting again.

When Weider came into the picture, the antiquated training methods went by the wayside, as did the beer-drinking. He felt Arnold’s legs had become bulky and lacked definition. “[Your legs] suffer by comparison [to your upper body] and it is of the most urgent necessity that you completely alter your leg-training program,” Weider told young Arnold. “I rather imagine, too, that others may have noticed this odd effect and are puzzled by it.” Arnold agreed. The result of this rethinking was the type of workout you see here—not to mention the well-proportioned legs that helped him win seven Mr. Olympia titles.

Training tips

• Arnold often split his quad workouts into two sessions, doing the first three thigh exercises in the morning and the last one or two in the evening. This assured that every exercise was performed at utmost intensity.
• Despite the intensity of his leg training, Arnold usually kept his rest periods between sets short—no more than one minute. This created a “flushing” effect, keeping maximum blood in the muscles for the entire session.
• Sometimes he would do leg curls in the middle of his quad workout (after front squats and before leg presses) to give the front of his thighs a short break. Then he’d do more sets of hamstrings at the end of the workout.

Arnold’s legs workout

Triceps

Though his Alpine-peaked biceps could take much of the credit for his 22″ arms, Arnold was no slouch in the triceps department, either, sporting impressive horseshoes. After initially focusing on bi’s early in his career, he wised up and sought to build hulking triceps by employing multi-joint movements like the close-grip bench press and weighted dip to go along with his old-standbys, pressdowns (on a lat-pulldown machine) and French presses.

Arnold occasionally supersetted biceps and triceps, though usually only during pre-contest training. This further demonstrated his firm belief in the benefits of training opposing muscles together, an idea recognized by Joe Weider before him and many bodybuilders still today. The pre-contest routine typically consisted of five torturous bi/tri supersets repeated four times each, followed by five supersets for forearms. For gains in size, he’d do this twice a week; for definition, three times weekly.

Although he cautioned novice lifters against doing his routine (“This system…is a severe form of advanced training that is not recommended for beginners,” he once said), he did advocate the program to non-beginners in a feature article titled, “How I Built My 22½ -inch Arms.” “If you’re an advanced trainer and want to shock your arms into growth,” he wrote, “why not give my twice-a-week arm-growth program a try? It brought my arms up to their present massive size…see what it can do for you!”

Training tips

• Arnold believed that to increase arm size, you had to gain weight. He estimated that it takes a weight gain of about 10lbs to add an inch to the arms. To accomplish this, he would increase his calorie intake by 1,500–2,000 calories a day over his typical diet.
• A typical rep for Arnold entailed lowering the weight slowly on the negative and exploding it up on the positive. This gave him a “double benefit on each rep” and promoted maximum growth.
• During most of his career, Arnold trained arms two to three days per week with very high volume. He was even known to devote one to two hours to his triceps alone. Of course, conventional training wisdom doesn’t condone this.

Arnold’s triceps workout

Biceps

Inspired by photos of his boyhood idol Reg Park in the German magazine Der Muskelbilder, Arnold made his first visit to a gym as a teenager. The young Oak watched gym-goers lifting weights, and did his best to commit the exercises to memory so he and his friends could do them at home. Four in particular stood out, all arms exercises: the cheating barbell and Zottman curls for biceps, and the pushdown and close-grip bench press for triceps. At the time, having big arms interested him the most, so this served as his starting point.

Surprisingly, when Arnold arrived in America he’d never even seen a preacher bench—an apparatus he’d soon come to use religiously (no pun intended) to build biceps that would surpass those of predecessors Larry Scott and Sergio Oliva. He also discovered that American bodybuilders trained more methodically and had a firmer understanding of anatomy and physiology than he did.

Despite already having a Mr. Universe title and two of the biggest arms in the world, he felt he could do better. “I wasn’t reaching my fullest potential,” he said years later. “The deep fibers of my muscles were untouched. It was as if I had built a large building on top of a foundation of sand.” He recalled watching Scott train and being “particularly fascinated watching him bomb his biceps on a curling machine. His arms looked deep and thick from training.” Despite the freakishly mountainous biceps peak Arnold developed, we can safely say it’s not a tumor.

Training tips

• Arnold wasn’t afraid to cheat on arms exercises, especially standing curls. He felt that going very heavy was the best way to gain size, and if a little body English was required to get the weight up, so be it.
• To achieve full development, Arnold always included in his routine at least one exercise (such as a dumbbell curl) in which his palm rotated up (supinated) as he lifted the weight.
• Even though biceps are a relatively small muscle group, Arnold typically trained them at about the same volume as bigger body parts, and with the heaviest weights he could possibly manage.

Arnold’s biceps/forearms workout

Abs

Arnold’s midsection wasn’t his strong suit. He didn’t have a naturally small waist, nor did he possess the deeply etched six-pack of a Frank Zane or a Serge Nubret. But his abs weren’t a glaring weakness, either. Perhaps that was because he was a master of deception. Look at shots of him posing and you’ll notice that he would often twist his upper body in such a way that he’d end up facing the camera or the judges regardless of the pose. This gave him the appearance of having a smaller waist, and was an important strategy for him in competition.

He also defied any genetic shortcomings by adopting an extremely high-volume routine consisting of many exercises and lots of reps. He also acknowledged that eating clean played a major role in minimizing fat in his waist area, which allowed his abs to show through. That his vacuum pose wasn’t quite Zane-like wasn’t for lack of effort or passion. Arnold considered the midsection one of the most critical parts of the male physique, citing the sculpted abdominals of Greek gods as his inspiration. “In physique competitions, if your abdominal region has a slight layer of fatty tissue on it,” he once said, “you might as well forget about taking home a trophy.”

Training tips

• Arnold felt that abdominal work should be done every day. He was even known to train abs twice a day when he wanted to make a noticeable difference in a short time.
• Arnold’s oblique training consisted primarily of controlled twisting motions while holding a bar across his shoulders. He was careful to avoid weighted oblique crunches, for fear they would build up muscle in that area and make his waistline bigger.
• He usually trained abs at the end of his workout, after calves—the other body part he felt needed more frequent training to spur the necessary development.

Arnold’s abs workout

Calves

Arnold’s self-consciousness about his calves has been well-publicized over the years. They used to be small, so he’d cut the bottoms off his sweatpants while he trained to expose them. This motivated him to improve the area, which he ultimately did by building massive gastroc and soleus muscles. Extreme high-volume and high-training frequency were his keys to bringing up this weak point; but it was even more than that. Arnold seemed to be a bit more cerebral when it came to calf training. Here’s what he had to say in a past issue of Muscle Builder:

“The calves are like no other muscle, and every day they seem to have a different mood. Sometimes I can do calf raises with shoes on and it feels better, then other times the shoes get in the way and I have to do this exercise with bare feet…It’s strange, kind of supernatural.

“A secret I learned is to test the calves’ personality or attitude with two or three sets, then I know which way they want to go that particular day. The calves will let you know—just give them a chance to ‘talk’ to you. [It’s] almost like they have a mind of their own—a brain that the other muscles don’t have.”

Training tips

• Arnold loved variety when it came to calf training. Anything that would shock the stubborn calves was fair game: high reps, low reps, super short rest periods (15–30 seconds), supersets, you name it.
• For the most part, his calves exercises took the calves through a full range of motion—down for a full stretch, then up till they nearly cramped. But at times he also did full sets of partial reps, which allowed him to go much heavier; or he’d finish off full-range-of-motion sets with a few partials to burn the calves out.
• It wasn’t uncommon for Arnold to train calves six days a week in his famous double split training scheme. Calves were typically trained with abs in an afternoon workout, either with quads or on their own.

Arnold’s calves workout