The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding

A Glass of Water on a Bodybuilder's Chest

Arnold Schwarzenegger could stand a full glass of water on his upper chest in a side-chest pose. He could not do that when he started. Nobody can. The upper pecs were a weakness he hunted for years, and the way he solved that problem turns out to be the way he solved every other problem in his career — including the problems that had nothing to do with weights.

That is the quiet secret of The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. On the surface it is a six-hundred-page reference manual stuffed with exercises, set schemes, rep ranges, rest periods, body-fat calipers, dumbbell racks, Roman chairs, and posed photographs of men in trunks. Read it closely and it becomes something else: a treatise on attention, on willpower, on the daily craft of becoming the person you have already pictured in your head.

Arnold wrote it with Bill Dobbins, first in 1985 and then in a heavily revised edition in 1998 after weight training had become the single most popular fitness activity in America. The book sold half a million copies, earned the nickname "the Bible of Bodybuilding," and has remained in print without a gap for more than three decades. Its closest cousin is probably Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength, but Starting Strength is about a barbell. This book is about a person.

The throughline is simple, and Arnold repeats it in different shapes from the first page to the last. Success in the gym is not a question of genetics, and it is not a question of effort either. Genetics set the ceiling. Effort decides how close you get to it. What sits in between is method — a usable, teachable, repeatable method that touches three things at once: how you train, how you eat, and how you think.