The Best Arnold Schwarzenegger Workout Routine

However, despite the fact that it has been more than four decades since Arnold Schwarzenegger won the last of his seven Mr. Olympia championships in 1980, the routines that helped him become probably the greatest bodybuilder of all time are as relevant now as they were then.

Everything Arnold did, from the moment he moved from Munich to Southern California in 1969 until the time he announced his first retirement from professional bodybuilding in 1975 (except for a short competitive return in 1980), centered on training.

He would train twice a day at Gold’s Gym in Venice, where he would be joined by all of his closest friends, including bodybuilding legends such as the late Franco Columbu, Frank Zane, and Dave Draper, who would also be there. His workouts lasted hours and consisted of an almost interminable amount of exercises and sets.

It was the ultimate of high-volume training, a type of working out that is now widely condemned by most fitness professionals for not allowing enough muscle recovery after each session. Arnold, on the other hand, had a method to his craziness.

In the next slides, you’ll see—body part by body part—the real exercises that the Austrian Oak undertook at the peak of his career, when he was the undisputed king of bodybuilding, as seen in the photos below.

Keep in mind, that it is important to get as much sleep as possible followed by good nutrition to be able to follow this workout plan. Adequate rest in combination with the right routine look is the most significant thing at the end of the spectrum.

Disclaimer: following principles in Arnold’s training regimens is not easy. If your body feels ill or if you are not ready to work out with competition weight (a lot of weight) don’t follow this plan fully.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Diet

The Arnold Schwarzenegger diet breakdown consists of a lot of calories. We have broken it up into Supplement and Foods categories, for an easier overview.

Supplements

• The Arnold Schwarzenegger Series Iron Pack – Schwarzenegger used this vitamin and mineral infusion to round off his morning meal before heading to the gym.
• Before beginning his training, Schwarzenegger had one dose of this energy-inducing muscle supplement from the Arnold Schwarzenegger Series.
• Iron CRE3 from the Arnold Schwarzenegger Series — The exercise is over, and it is now time to take this creatine pill.
• Following the completion of the creatine supplement, combine two scoops of this ultra-microfiltered whey protein with 6-8 ounces of milk, drink, and enjoy. Enough grams of protein in the Arnold Schwarzenegger workout routine is beneficial.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger Series Iron Mass – After his third meal of the day, Schwarzenegger took another of these pills to round up his day.
• Iron Dream from the Arnold Schwarzenegger Series – It’s nearly time to retire for the night, but not before indulging in this overnight recovery solution that helps you sleep better.

Foods

• Veggies – Everyone, even Arnold Schwarzenegger, has to consume his or her vegetables on a regular basis. Salads were also on the menu for him.
• Nuts – Schwarzenegger is a huge fan of nuts in general and almonds, cashews, and walnuts especially.
• Dessert: Sweet potatoes, which include high levels of iron, fiber, B vitamins and vitamin C, as well as an antioxidant known as beta-carotene, among other nutrients. Sweet potatoes are also a good source of potassium.
• Cooked brown rice — This popular whole grain source is not only healthy and high in fiber, but it may also lower the chance of developing type 2 diabetes. What’s not to like about this?
• Cottage cheese with all the fat — Cottage cheese, in addition to providing a variety of vitamins and minerals, is also high in protein and calcium. It makes perfect sense that it’s a component of the Arnold Schwarzenegger diet plan, doesn’t it?
• Eggs in their whole – Eggs are a fantastic source of protein and amino acids. It should come as no surprise that Schwarzenegger ate three to four eggs every morning, yolks and all, before going to work. Egg yolks are just OK!
• Bacon or sausage – Although bacon and sausage aren’t often associated with lean mass, these items will surely contribute to your calorie intake if you consume them regularly. In addition, they’re really delicious.
• Ezekiel Bread – According to most nutritionists, Ezekiel bread (also known as sprouted whole grain bread) is the healthiest kind of bread you can consume. Given the fact that it includes a variety of cereal grains, two kinds of legumes, no added sugars, and no refined wheat, we’re inclined to agree with you on this one.
• Avocados are a kind of fruit that grows in the United States. Avocado is a true wonder food, providing over 20 vitamins and minerals, as well as beneficial monounsaturated fat. It also happens to be tasty, which is why it is considered a miracle.
• Oats – Whole grain oats are high in both soluble and insoluble fibers, and they have been shown to lower cholesterol levels as well as blood glucose levels in certain studies. Schwarzenegger had his with a spoonful of honey.
• Red meat – Yes, it contains saturated fat, but a lean steak also has a significant amount of protein, natural creatine, and all the necessary amino acids.
• Grilled lean meat – Grilled lean meat, such as chicken breast, continues to be popular among bodybuilders now as it was decades ago.

Workout Plan

We have broken up the workout plan into distinct sections. Every section is for a muscle group, so enjoy!

Chest

Arnold Schwarzenegger chest workout was one of the typical workouts where he with full power targeted this major muscle group. Big lifts and hard work are needed to reach the Arnold Level. Arnold was blessed with a large rib cage, so he was able to really feel his chest workouts.

To discuss Arnold’s chest and back routines individually may be difficult, since he superseded the two for much of his bodybuilding career, making it difficult to distinguish between the two. There was the famous Arnold Schwarzenegger workout variation, which combined two groups of muscle workouts in one workout.

The famous Arnold Split with the dumbbell curls must be mentioned. However, for the purpose of structure in this post, we’ll concentrate on each body component individually, since each program may be performed on its own. Arnold’s motivations for using supersets were straightforward: For starters, they saved him time by allowing him to work out his chest and back in around one hour.

Two, he believed he would be able to carry more weight in this manner, resulting in increased muscular density, the same logic behind training opposing muscle groups together. And, of course, three, since he really enjoyed himself throughout the event.

The sense of growth stimulation and massiveness, he said, is “indescribable when the chest and upper back”—basically, his whole upper body—”are pumped at the same time.”

This form of training, on the other hand, comes with a warning from Arnold, who recommends that newcomers ease into it gradually because of the demands placed on endurance and stamina. Even the most experienced lifters sometimes have difficulties.

In one of his many stories, Arnold related how he introduced his chest/back exercise to many seasoned bodybuilders while on a trip to South Africa. In the words of the Oak, two of his training companions “fell out cold,” while a third “got so unwell that he missed breakfast!”

Back

Arnold’s back workout was beneficial for a lot of positive Arnold stats in the competitions. More reps more muscle is not true. Bodybuilders like Ronnie Coleman, Jay Cutler, and Phil Heath are not the first to have come up with the concept of a broad, thick, and detailed back, but it is a relatively recent one.

For winning big contests, Arnold, Franco Columbu, and the other athletes with whom they trained were well aware of the significance of the back double-biceps and lat spread positions. Other bodybuilders focused on raising the weight to the desired position while Arnold trained back.

Arnold, on the other hand, focused on lifting the weight to the desired position. After all, he would never be the greatest at training if he followed the same routine as everyone else. As an example, while doing lat pulldowns, he sought to pull the sky down on top of him rather than merely shifting the bar to his upper chest position.

When deadlifting, the weight plates on the ends of the barbell were not weighted plates at all; they were huge planets. The reasoning was abstract, to be true, but it was effective all the same. Arnold was unaware of a potentially helpful visualization method that he may have used at the time of the incident.

When asked whether he would have pictured himself as Conan [the Barbarian] during his competitive years, he said, “I definitely would have,” in the period leading up to the release of the film, “if I had known about him.”

He was particularly concerned about building his back for the film, since he knew it would be seen from many camera angles—and the last thing he wanted was less-than-stellar lats if he was to portray a true barbarian in the role.

“I’m going to want my back muscles to be bursting with strength,” he stated. “If my back is writhing and rippling during combat scenes, the general audience will realize that I am a tough fighter,” says the actor.

Triceps

Even while Arnold’s Alpine-peaked biceps might be credited with a lot of his 22-inch arms, he wasn’t a slouch in the triceps department, boasting magnificent horseshoes.

After initially concentrating on bi’s early in his career, he realized he needed to branch out and focus on building hulking triceps by incorporating multi-joint movements such as the close-grip bench press and weighted dip into his routine, in addition to his old-school favorites such as pressdowns (on a lat-pulldown machine) and French presses.

Arnold supplemented his biceps and triceps from time to time, albeit he did so mostly during pre-contest training. In doing so, he exhibited his strong confidence in the advantages of exercising opposing muscles simultaneously, a principle that had been identified by Joe Weider before him and is still widely accepted by many bodybuilders today.

Five excruciating bi/tri supersets were performed four times each, followed by five supersets for the forearms, which were performed four times each. It was recommended that he do this twice per week for growth in size, and three times per week for definition gains.

He advised inexperienced lifters against following his regimen, “This system…is a harsh sort of advanced training that is not suggested for novices,” he once said), although he did advocate for it in a feature piece titled “How I Built My 2212-inch Arms” that appeared in Muscle & Fitness magazine.

When he stated, “If you’re an accomplished trainer looking to shock your arms into development,” he recommended that people undertake his twice-weekly arm-growth program. You should see what it can do for you!” It helped me grow my arms to their current gigantic size.

Biceps

Arnold’s first visit to a gym occurred when he was a teenager, spurred on by photographs of his childhood hero Reg Park published in the German magazine Der Muskelbilder. The young Oak saw gym-goers lifting weights and made every effort to put the movements to memory so that he and his buddies might replicate them at their leisure.

Four exercises stood out in particular, all of which targeted the arms: the cheating barbell curls and Zottman curls for the biceps, and the pushdown and barbell presses. At the time, having large arms piqued his curiosity the most, and this served as the foundation for his design.

Incredibly, when Arnold first came to America, he had never even heard of a preacher bench, an instrument that he would soon come to rely on religiously, no pun intended, in order to develop biceps that would outperform those of his predecessors Larry Scott and Sergio Oliva.

He also realized that American bodybuilders were more meticulous in their training and had a more in-depth grasp of anatomy and physiology than he had at the time. Despite the fact that he previously had the Mr. Universe title and has two of the world’s largest arms, he believed he could do better.

Years later, he admitted that he wasn’t living up to his full potential. “The deep fibers of my muscles were unaffected by the injury. It seemed as if I had constructed a substantial structure on top of a sand-filled foundation.”

While watching Scott workout, he recalls being “especially captivated by the way he blasted his biceps on the curling machine.” The muscles in his arms seemed deep and dense from the exercise.” In spite of the abnormally high biceps peak Arnold grew, we can fairly rule out the possibility of it being a malignancy.

Shoulders

He tended to include as much cardio as possible with his shoulder workouts for better results. This was one of the Arnold Workout Variation methods he used. ‘A guy who has grown wide, wider shoulders feels superior to other men and has a stronger feeling of security and confidence about himself,’ Arnold once said in an interview with a magazine.

It should come as no surprise that he sneered at the enormous number of bodybuilders he knew who did not include any kind of shoulder exercise in their training programs. It’s no surprise that the Arnold Press, the only exercise named after him, is a delt action.

Arnold’s deltoid was the weakest part of his upper body throughout the early stages of his bodybuilding career. Thus, he put in the effort to enhance his shoulders, and after winning the 1967 Mr. Universe event in London, he credited his triumph in part to his progress in this area of bodybuilding.

Three years later, at the 1970 Universe, he defeated his hero Reg Park, and he expressed his gratitude for having worked so hard on his shoulders. Joe Weider once inquired of Arnold about the role he believed bone structure played in shoulder growth—in other words, if certain individuals were born with more potential for shoulder development than others.

Future California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted that certain people (like Steve Reeves and Frank Zane) had a hereditary advantage in some areas, but he maintained that others who are not so fortunate may still make significant strides in such areas. Through “direct and specialized training,” he said that everyone could broaden his shoulders by at least two inches.

Legs

The Arnold Schwarzenegger legs workout was a role model for future bodybuilders. Basically, the workout summary is, hit every muscle on the leg. In Arnold’s early days, his leg-training routine suffered from two major flaws: a lack of repetitions and, as Joe Weider described it, “primitivist tendencies.”

Both of these were rather straightforward: in his first year of bodybuilding, the young Austrian did not exercise his legs in any way at all. After finally recognizing the importance of his lower body, he went crazy, even going so far as to exercise his legs every day for a year, doing 10 rounds of squats and 10 sets of leg curls in each session.

He was dissatisfied with the outcome, which was not unexpected given the circumstances. During the lifting “retreats” he and his pals would go on in the Austrian countryside, his “primitive” mannerisms were most evident. They’d load up multiple vehicles with weights (as well as adoring females) and travel to an isolated place in the woods where they could practice their moves.

They’d squat from the morning till the afternoon, then relax, party, and drink beer before returning to their squatted spot. Because of Weider’s involvement, outdated training techniques and beer drinking practices were no longer tolerated on any level. Arnold’s legs, in his opinion, had grown too fat and lacked definition.

“Your legs are suffering in contrast to your upper body, and it is of the utmost importance that you entirely adjust your leg-training routine,” Weider informed young Arnold in his first meeting with him. “I have a sneaking suspicion that others have observed this strange impact as well and are perplexed by it.” Arnold agreed with me.

The end consequence of this rethinking was the sort of exercise you see here, not to mention the well-proportioned legs that helped him win seven Mr. Olympia titles over the course of his professional career.

Don’t forget the famous Arnold Calf Raises, when you are doing your workout. Calf raises were beneficial for developing Arnold’s legs and giving them the full look. Your next work day after the leg workout will not be pleasant.

Read more articles in the Lifestyle Category