Product Description

From elite bodybuilding competitors to gymnasts, from golfers to fitness gurus, anyone who works out with weights must own this book -- a book that only Arnold Schwarzenegger could write, a book that has earned its reputation as "the bible of bodybuilding."

Inside, Arnold covers the very latest advances in both weight training and bodybuilding competition, with new sections on diet and nutrition, sports psychology, the treatment and prevention of injuries, and methods of training, each illustrated with detailed photos of some of bodybuilding's newest stars.

Plus, all the features that have made this book a classic are here:

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1556 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 800 pages

Amazon.com Review
Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn't competed as a bodybuilder since he won the Mr. Olympia title in 1980, but he remains the sport's No. 1 icon. He hosts an annual bodybuilding contest in Columbus, Ohio, and allows a column to be ghost-written under his name in a muscle magazine. Today's bodybuilders may have bigger muscles than Arnold ever did, but everyone inside and outside the iron game gives him credit for exponentially broadening the popularity of physique training.

With this updated Encyclopedia (it was originally published in 1985), Schwarzenegger wraps his huge arms around the entire sport. He hits the history of bodybuilding, the champions (he's quite generous in his praise of predecessors, contemporaries, and successors alike), the training systems. Some of the information is more bodybuilding lore than science; for example, exercises are said to "expand the rib cage" or develop the "inner" or "outer" chest, all physiological impossibilities. But they're still good exercises, and the book includes every movement imaginable for every muscle group.

If you love the sport of bodybuilding, you'll want this book in your library, if for no other reason than to feast your eyes on the hundreds of photos of the best physiques in the history of the sport. And, in a pinch, the 800-page encyclopedia can fill in nicely for a missing dumbbell. --Lou Schuler

About the Author
Arnold Schwarzenegger has won more bodybuilding titles than anyone else in the world, including seven Mr. Olympia titles and three Mr. Universe titles. He has also won international fame as a movie superstar. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Maria Shriver, and their four children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Foreword to the Second Edition

Who would have thought that anyone could compile an encyclopedia on bodybuilding and resistance training, let alone one more than six hundred pages long? After all, how much is there to say about hoisting heavy metal plates? Bodybuilding isn't, as they say, rocket science.

Well, many people take exactly that approach when they begin a bodybuilding program; I know because they're easy to spot at the gym. Such individuals generally load excessively heavy weights on a bar, heave the iron with whatever form it takes to get the weight up (with an extra thrust from the lower back for good measure), and then let the bar come crashing down. That's not bodybuilding! Strong on desire but short on smarts, these folks are either sidelined by an injury or often will give up quickly because they aren't seeing any significant results from all the work they're doing.

The truth is, it doesn't take a Ph.D. to learn the complexities of bodybuilding, but neither does it come as naturally as, say, riding a bike. Heck, the bodybuilding vocabulary is like a foreign language: pyramid training, gastrocnemius, negatives, periodization, instinctive training, spotting. Learning the many distinct elements of resistance training, from the hundreds of unique exercises and variations to understanding how to put together a results-producing workout, all take time and practice. To make progress at the fastest rate possible, you've simply got to know what you're doing.

If you're rich enough to afford $50 (or more) an hour for a personal trainer you might be able to get away with being a bodybuilding dumbbell. Or, for about the price of a single session, you can invest in this encyclopedia and reap a lifetime of gains that'll start with your very next workout.

Many people forget that I, like you, was once a beginner, and started building my body and my career standing in exactly the same position you are right now. If you find that difficult to believe, there's a selection of photos from my teenage years that will show how far I had to come, how much work I had to do. What made me stand apart from my peers, though, was a deep, deep desire to build muscle and the intense commitment to let nothing stop me. Along the way I made countless mistakes because the only guidebooks I had were a couple of Joe Weider's English-language muscle magazines, and I didn't even speak the language! The magazines inspired me to learn English so I could follow my early idol Reg Park's routine. Still, the magazine could teach me only some rudimentary concepts; everything else was done by trial and error.

Experience, however, is the best teacher as long as you learn from your mistakes. When I began, I trained biceps far more intently than I did triceps, a larger muscle group. I pretty much skipped ab training altogether because that era's conventional wisdom dictated that the abdominals received enough stimulation during many heavy compound movements. I put so little effort into calf training in those early years that when I finally came to America, I was forced to redouble my efforts. I even went so far as to cut off the pant legs on my training sweats so that my calves were constantly visible and under scrutiny -- a constant reminder to me that my weaknesses deserved greater attention. Nor did we have many machines available; I never used a leg curl or leg extension during my first years as a bodybuilder. Most of all, though, I was handicapped by my lack of knowledge; my catalog of exercises to shape the total body consisted of just a few movements. Fortunately, with this book, you don't have to make the same mistakes I did.

You'll find, as I did, that building muscle builds you up in every part of your life. What you learn here will affect everything else that you do in your life. As you witness the fruits of your labor, your self-worth and self-confidence improve, and these traits will color your work and interpersonal relationships long past your competitive days. I credit bodybuilding with giving me not just physical attributes but also with laying the foundation for everything else I've accomplished -- in business, acting, even family. I know I can succeed in anything I choose, and I know this because I understand what it takes to sacrifice, struggle, persist, and eventually overcome an obstacle.

Even today, many of the people I work with comment upon my commitment; when I'm making a movie, I'm ready to do a difficult scene over and over again until we get it right. Why? It all comes back to discipline. If you make a commitment to better your physical health, you'll find the same self-discipline, focus, and drive for success carries through into the rest of your life's activities. Though you may not realize it now, you'll eventually recognize it when you take the same disciplined approach in tackling a particular challenge. That's another reason I'm so enthusiastic about what bodybuilding can do.

This book is not a biography, not the story of my life as a seven-time Mr. Olympia winner or even a history of my life as an actor. (If you're interested, you can find all that elsewhere.) Though I'm known mainly as a bodybuilder-turned-actor and businessman, on various occasions I've been able to take on another role, one that brings me the greatest amount of personal pride, and that's the role of teacher. That's why I published the original encyclopedia in 1985 and have continued my close association with the sport. In the years since that first publication I've been collecting, studying, and revising information for this expanded and updated reference. That I can say I was able to inspire a generation of men and women of all ages to take charge of their health and fitness is truly gratifying. From the couple of dozen students of bodybuilding who heard me give a seminar in the mid-1970s at a Santa Monica gym, to the elementary and high schoolers I tried to empower to exercise when I traveled to all fifty states as chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, to the less fortunate who compete in the Inner City Games throughout the year and the developmentally challenged who participate in the Special Olympics, to the readers of my weekly syndicated newspaper column and the ones I write in the muscle magazines, to you the reader of this encyclopedia, you are all very much the reason I've undertaken this gargantuan effort. I am indeed grateful that you've chosen me as your teacher.

That I can share with you my greatest passion in the world, which is truly the only real secret to health, longevity, and a better quality of life, has made this book an endeavor of absolute necessity -- and joy! Bodybuilding is my roots, and I will continue to promote the sport and spread the word through my work.

I've accumulated more than thirty-five years of bodybuilding experience, including tens of thousands of hours training with the world's top bodybuilders from yesterday, like Bill Pearl, Reg Park, Dave Draper, Frank Zane, Sergio Oliva, and Franco Columbu, to the champions of today, including Flex Wheeler, Shawn Ray, and eight-time Mr. Olympia, Lee Haney. I've studied the writings of the predecessors to modern-day bodybuilding, some of which date back more than a century, including Eugen Sandow's System of Physical Training (1894), the United States Army's Manual of Physical Training (1914), and Earl Liederman's Muscle Building (1924). I've interrogated the world's pre-eminent exercise scientists, researched questions from students at seminars I've given on all the major continents from Africa to Asia to South America to more recent ones I hold each year in Columbus, Ohio -- and poured every ounce of that knowledge into this encyclopedia. With this reference book, which is designed for students ranging from rank beginners to competition-level bodybuilders to athletes looking to improve their performance to those who simply want to look better and be healthier, readers are free to pick through the expansive knowledge its taken me so many years to accumulate.

In one sense, I feel like a doctor on call who is continually asked for expert advice. A skier in Sun Valley asked me recently how to build quad strength and muscular endurance to improve his performance; at a health convention, several people inquired about the latest on the muscle-building properties of creatine; at Wimbledon, a top tennis champion wanted some advice on building his forearm strength; on vacation in Hawaii, a woman came up to me and asked what she could do to lose a hundred pounds of body fat and keep it off, at seminars, young bodybuilders want to know how to put a peak on their biceps and improve their outer-thigh sweep; when speaking to military personnel, I'm commonly asked how to get more out of training with just very basic equipment. Every day I'm asked questions on topics ranging from vitamins A to zinc, to the need for rest and recuperation, to the false promises of performance-enhancing substances. This is why I decided long ago that if I was going to spread the gospel on the benefits of bodybuilding I'd absolutely have to stay current with the material.

That's been no easy chore. Evolution in bodybuilding has occurred at the speed of light, both at the competitive level and among recreational athletes. Those who simply write that off as due to a greater use of anabolic drugs fail to see what's taken place in the industry. Muscle-building exercise, long scoffed at by coaches who claimed it made you musclebound and inflexible, has come under intense scrutiny by researchers. In fact, the science of resistance training is really becoming a science as exercise scientists verify what we bodybuilders have been working out by trial and error for years. That's not to say we didn't know what we were doing; on the contrary, early physique champions were pioneers in the health and fitness field, planting the seeds of development for each generation that followed. We coined such phrases as "No pain, no gain," words that every bodybuilder today knows and understands.

Though science is showing us how best to manipulate the...

Customer Reviews

Reasons to Buy This Product
1) Comprehensiveness -
There's not a single book that can boast of the same overall coverage of bodybuilding that this one can. Let's say you aim to take several college courses to assist your bodybuilding knowledge; you'd still have to take one introductory one, one in simple nutrition, one in advanced nutrition, one in general kinesiology, one in exercise physiology, one in advanced exercise physiology, and so on and so forth. The same applies to most other books. This encyclopedia, at 800 chocobloc pages, covers beginner-intermediate and mildly advanced ground comfortably and in a handy cross-indexed reference method, with additional tips thrown in from the man who brought the sport out of its shell: Arnold Schwarzennegger.

2) Value for Money -
800 pages at 17 bucks is a steal. I ordered this item, and with ground shipping had the cost add up to about $21 dollars. Still cheap for an 800 page compendium!

3) Above and Beyond -
Aside from all the valuable textbook-style knowledge, you'll also get Arnie's own special inputs (of course updated in 1998), a nice glimpse at bodybuilding history, some tips on basic supplementation and a great section to help you if you're a competitor. The book is stacked with personal tips; chances are they'll help you pack on muscle faster than before.

4) Indirect Value -
The book also has an indirect value. If you're one of those people who buys muscle magazines for your routines and info, you can happily junk that nonsense. First of all, muscle magazines get kind of tiring, with their 'NEW AND HOT OFF THE SHELVES' this-and-that every month, their juiced-up routines and their annoying Muscletech ads, and, Weider-endorsed or not, they have a hell of a lot less credibility. With Arnold's guide in hand, you can say goodbye to dollars wasted on muscle mags for unhelpful information.

Finally, I just want to answer the very few people who've criticized this product on account of the fact that Arnold would severely overtrain back in his days, both on account of limited knowledge at the time and his excessive steroid habits. I've read the book cover-to-cover, referred to it several times, know it pretty much inside-out, and I can't find ONE instance where his preaches this overtraining. Whether this is because of the recent update or not, Arnold actually warns against being 'too enthusiastic' as this can hinder your gains, and devotes a few pages to the overtraining issue. Obviously the few that have criticized the encyclopedia based on Arnold's other work (namely "Bodybuilding for Men", which glosses over nutrition and recommends a highly juiced training schedule), have never actually gone through this book.

So in short, buy the damn book! It's cheap, it's huge, it's handy, and it'll help you get bigger like no amount of supplements can.

The Gospel of Arnold.
I have been weight training for five years and can not stress enough the value of this book. For the first three years I listened to personal trainers and a few friends doing a fairly normal workout routine to change my overweight body. This produced little to no results. I met a bodybuilder two years ago that was a big Arnold fan and unknown to myself he gave me Arnold's beginner workout program. I started seeing results; however, I eventually stopped the program because I had hit stagnation. I did not have access to anything that would show me how to push my limits even further, just what "the trainers" told me again. Basically your average medium sets, medium reps, and circuit training workout programs. Enough to keep my current weight stable with the prospect of shedding a few pounds and to gain small amounts of muscle over the long term. The don't overtrain mentality 3-4 times a week! Great for some!

I wanted more, I'm human. Eventually I called up my then bodybuilding "personal trainer" friend and he reluctantly revealed to me this book; "his secret", that is actually available to everyone. I picked it up and started following Arnold's next program level. More results. I am now into the advanced programs and never felt healthier or happier with my body and can honestly say I have greater control over my physical appearance than I ever imagined possible. People that claim this book will overtrain you I do not believe have looked at the entire book or fully understand Arnold's fundamental arguments. Perhaps unfortunately they are also looking out for their own interests. We can't blame them though, they are human!

The beginner programs in this book used with proper weight for your body will show results and should not even come close to overtraining if you are using low weight. Yes, 6 days a week! What about time? If you have a career or have kids Arnold says wake up early. He asks how serious are you about wanting to change and control your body or what are your goals? I can not stress that enough and Arnold makes it clear to push yourself to realistic goals! Do not dive into the deep end. A good section in-directly speaking to overtraining (besides the one devoted to the topic) is the one on bodytypes. For example, Arnold's information tells you; If you have a natural athletic body you can probably start a bit harder. Where as an endomorph (gains fat easily) may want to focus on cardio more and getting up their energy level and fatigue resistance.

I would even argue a beginner could use his low level advanced programs lifting "the appropriate" level of weight and make gains without over-training. For example, let us pretend "joe beginner" can bench 100 pounds over 4 - 8 reps. When Arnold says do 6 sets of Bench presses starting with 15 reps he means start way lower than what you can do, maybe at 25-30 pounds, maybe 40 on a high enegry day and end on the 100. Eventually when fully rested, following that beginner level pyramid, doing 100 pounds for 4-8 reps will be a joke. Realize how many sets and exercises he is telling you to do and adjust accordingly! Don't start at 90 and then try and go to 150, you'll be dead for the next exercise, and will over-train! Lets say someone can bench 30 pounds for 4 - 8 reps, start at 8. For his programs to work, you have to suck up the pride and go as low as is necessary to not overtrain but finish the workout(This is all covered in his beginner section!). I have a secret for you..no one in the gym cares about how much your lifitng and if they do, you shouldn't. Arnold also mentions many other similar mind over body / environment ideas.

Negative reviews also mention Arnold took steroids. I imagine he did but steroids should never be used*. I believe Arnold's program can be used completely without supplements and give results. However, taking protein, glutamine, and some of the other modern supplements may help if you are feeling over-trained. If you are still, despite the supplements, as I said before lower the weight. Some bodies need supplements (sorry did I say supplements? Should have said "a proper diet"!). This is an unavoidable reality if you are burning over 1000 calories a day on training. Like Arnold points out look at safe supplements more like food (because that is where most modern supplements come from). If you are taking CLA, protein, vitamins, and appropriate amino acids you are really only altering your diet. Arnold's book does provide diets that will be giving you all these "supplements". (*Arnold makes it explicit that fat burners are fake enegry and steroids are off limits).

The core idea behind Arnold's message that some reviewers are missing is that to achieve success and change your body takes dedication, alot of hard work, and a long-term plan (a plan from this book, an expensive trainer, or maybe your own probably misinformed ideas). Arnold provides that plan for a minimal price compared to what "the trainers" will offer! Sure he makes some "scientific" mistakes. But if you wanted to learn how to fight would you rather learn from Bruce Lee or an exercise physiologist? Would you tell Bruce his ideas about kicking are wrong because it is impossible to be like a tiger? The same practicality / ideas in practice are needed in bodybuilding; as Arnold suggests look at it like an art. Scientists can tell you what they want but ultimately you have to push your body to the limits to get results. There is no such thing as a "genetic freak", I haven't seen any mutants around the gym lately, just people that know what they are or are not doing. Sure our genes dictate our predispositions but our free egos allow us to influence our own mind and consequently bodies.

Following Arnold's advice, eventually going to the gym 6 days a week will be heaven and not hell. The pain of a heavy workout will be welcome and your body will adapt and recover faster than you ever would believe possible, leaving you with energy you never thought you could have. Arnold's book is a good place to start for any person wishing to change their life and body. Just read it carefully and understand the principles.

The Ultamate bodybuilding reference!
This book has it all. It really is an encyclopedia... It covers the history of bodybuilding, nutrition and diet, posing and competition, and of course...training techniques. It goes over each muscle group in detail. If you want to know which exercises to do in order to build up a certain muscle, it lists several type of movements and explains what effect those movements will have on the muscle (ex. working the upper pecs vs. working the lower pecs). Many pages are devoted to each muscle, not just one or two like in other books. -In addition, topics such as motivation and intensity are discussed, key elements for any serious weight lifter/bodybuilder.

Aside from its content, this book is well organized. You can easily pinpoint your area of interest using the table of contents. This is very helpful if you intend to use this as a reference as I do. I have personally read about ¾ of the book. However, I am often reaching for it when I want a quick answer or am looking for a different twist on something.

In case you are wondering, this book has a ton of pictures of Arnold and other known bodybuilders. Some illustrating exercises, others of guys working out in the gym. I would say about 1/3 of the book is composed of pictures.