Arnold Schwarzenegger Autobiography

To my Mother, Charles Gein and George Butler, whose sincere enthusiasm, energy and talent have transformed bodybuilding and whom I am honored to have among my closest friends.

CHAPTER FIRST

"Arnold! Arnold!"

I hear their voices, my lifeguard swimmer friends, bodybuilders, weightlifters. Voices are heard from the lake where training is taking place among the grass and trees.

"Arnold! Let's!" shouts the young doctor Carl, who has become my friend at the gym.

It was summer, I was fifteen years old. It was a magical time of the year for me, because this year I found out exactly what I want to do in my life. It wasn't the boy's dream of a far-off vague future - chaotic thoughts about being a fireman, detective, sailor, test pilot, or reconnaissance officer. I knew that I would be a bodybuilder. But it was not just a choice. I was supposed to be the best bodybuilder in the world, the greatest, the person with the best physique. I cannot say why I chose bodybuilding, I can only say that I immediately fell in love with it. I loved it in the first second when my fingers closed around the neck and I felt a sense of victory and delight as I lifted the heavy steel plates over my head.

I have always been attracted to sports, thanks to the example of my father; tall, strong man. He himself was a master in ice carling. We had a healthy, strong family, where keeping fit, good food, a healthy lifestyle were valued. When I was ten years old, on the advice of my father, I started playing football. The team had its own uniform and regular training three times a week. I have been playing football with passion for almost five years. However, when I was thirteen years old, the team sport no longer satisfied me. I was already turning on the individual path, I didn't like that when we won the game, I wasn't singled out personally. The only time I felt truly rewarded was when I was marked as the best. I decided to try myself in some single sport. I ran, swam, boxed; I participated in competitions, threw a spear, put a shot. But, despite certain successes, I felt that all this was not right - it did not fit. One day our coach decided that weight training would be useful for keeping football players in good shape.

I remember the first time I came to athletic hall. Before that, I had never seen how they train with weights. These guys seemed huge and rough. I remember walking among them, looking at muscles that I had never seen before and did not know what they were called. The athletes shone with sweat; they looked powerful. Before me was just the same thing - my life, the answer to the question of what to strive for. The switch clicked. It seemed that I suddenly found something, that I seemed to be walking along a suspension bridge and finally set foot on solid ground.

I started training with weights only on the legs - it was the most necessary thing for playing football. Bodybuilders immediately noticed how hard I was training. Considering my age, fifteen years old, I squatted with quite good weights. They began to agitate me to do bodybuilding. I was six feet tall (182 cm), thin, weighing only one hundred and fifty pounds (67.5 kg), but my constitution was good - athletic, and the muscles responded surprisingly quickly to training. I think these guys noticed it. My constitution was such that in sports I succeeded more easily than my peers. But I also trained more intensively than my teammates, because I wanted more, demanded more from myself. That summer, bodybuilders took me under their protection, together with them I worked out behind the lake near the city of Graz, where I lived in Austria. It was a training program just to keep fit. We worked without burdens. We pulled up on the branches of trees. Holding each other's legs, we did push-ups from the ground. The workout included exercises such as leg raises, squats, bends. All this was done in order to prepare the body for training in the gym.

Summer was not over yet, and I had already begun to really train with weights. Once I started, the continuation was not long in coming. After two or three months with bodybuilders, I literally became addicted to it like a drug addict. The guys I worked with were much older. Karl Gerstl, doctor, twenty-eight, Kurt Manul, thirty-two, and Helmut Knaur, fifty. Everyone has become a father to me in some way. I even listened to my father less. These people have become my new idols. I really bowed before them, admired their size, their control over their bodies.

I approached my weight training through an intense core training program with these bodybuilders. An hour-long training once a week in the football team did not satisfy me at all. I signed up to go to the gym three times a week. I liked how the cold iron warmed up in my hands, I liked the sounds and smells in the hall. I still love it all. What I like most is to hear the heavy steel pancakes ringing when they are put on or taken off after working with a projectile.

I remember my first real workout as vividly as if it was last night. I arrived at the gym on a bicycle, which was about eight miles from the town where I lived. I trained with barbells, dumbbells, cable machines. The guys warned me that everything would hurt me, but these warnings had no effect on me. I thought it shouldn't matter. But then, after training, when I went home, I fell off the bike. I was so tired that I couldn’t even lean on my hands, I didn’t feel my legs at all: they were stiff, and I myself seemed to be all stiff - my whole body was buzzing.

For a while I led the bike nearby, leaning on it. Half a mile later I tried to ride it again and fell again, so I just drove it home. This was my first workout, but I still liked it.

The next morning, I couldn't even raise my hand to brush my hair. Every time I tried to do this, there was a sharp pain in every muscle of the shoulder and arm. I couldn't bend my elbow. He tried to drink coffee and spilled almost everything on the table. I was absolutely helpless.

"What's wrong with you, Arnold?" my mother asked. She moved away from the stove and looked at me.

"What?" She leaned over to take a closer look as she cleaned up the spilled coffee. I replied: “I just got sick, my muscles hurt.”

"Look at this guy!" she called her father. “Look what he did to himself!” My father came in, tying his tie. He was always very neat: black combed shiny hair, a straight brush mustache. He laughed and said it would pass.

But my mother did not let up: “Why? Arnold, why are you doing this to yourself?"

But I didn't worry about what my mother thought. I saw changes in my body, felt them, and it excited me. For the first time, I felt every one of my muscles. These were new sensations, and they were recorded in my memory. For the first time I felt calves, thighs, forearms, like something more than just limbs. I understood how triceps hurt and for the first time I understood why they are called triceps - because there were three muscles. All this was recorded in my memory, recorded with the help of pain sensations. I realized that pain means progress. Every time my muscles get sore after a workout, I'll know they're growing.

It was difficult to choose a less popular sport. My schoolmates thought I was nuts, but I didn't care. My only concern was moving forward, building muscle and more muscle. I just didn't have time to relax and think about bodybuilding from a different perspective. I remember that some tried to instill negative thoughts in me, tried to convince me to quit this activity, but I found exactly what I wanted to devote all my energy to and it was impossible to stop me. My behavior became unusual, I began to talk differently than my friends; I had the biggest hunger for success, at least of all the people I knew.

I started living just to be in the gym. I have a new language - reps, sets, power reps, bench press. I used to resist being drilled into anatomy at school, now I wanted to study it myself. All around me in the gym, my new friends were talking about biceps, triceps, lats, traps, obliques. I spent hours leafing through the American magazines Muscle Builder and Mr America. Doctor Carl knew English and translated articles from these magazines for me when he was free. I saw the first pictures of Muscle Beach, I saw Larry Scott, Ray Routledge, Serge Nubret. These magazines were full of success stories. The benefits of a person with a well-developed body were incomparable with anything else. Guys like Doug Stroll and Steve Reeves made movies because they trained hard and built great bodies.

In one of the magazines, for the first time in my life, I saw photographs of Reg Park. He was on the page opposite Jack Delinger. I immediately noticed that Reg Park looks massive and impressive. This man was like a beast. I wanted to become so big, in the end, and I.