Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

I read everything I could find about the training methods of the East Germans and the Soviets. Increasingly, there were rumors that they were using performance-enhancing drugs to get superior results from their weight lifters, shot-putters, and swimmers. As soon as I figured out that steroids were the drugs in question, I went to the doctor to try them myself. There were no rules against using anabolic steroids then, and you could get them by prescription, yet already people seemed to feel two ways about their use. Bodybuilders didn’t talk about steroids as freely as they talked about weight routines and nutritional supplements, and there was an argument about whether the bodybuilding magazines should educate people about the drugs or ignore the trend.

All I needed to know was that the top international champions were taking steroids, something I confirmed by asking the guys in London. I would not go into a competition with a disadvantage. “Leave no stone unturned” was my rule. And while there wasn’t any evidence of danger—research into steroids’ side effects was only getting under way—even if there had been, I’m not sure I would have cared. Downhill ski champions and Formula One race drivers know they can get killed, but they compete anyway. Because if you don’t get killed, you win. Besides, I was twenty years old, and I thought I would never die.

To get the drugs, I simply went to see a local general practitioner. “I heard this will help muscle growth,” I said.

“It’s supposed to, but I wouldn’t oversell it,” he replied. “It’s meant for people in rehab after surgery.”

“Can you let me try it?” I asked, and he said sure. He prescribed an injection every two weeks and pills to take in between. He told me, “Take these for three months and stop the day the competition is over.”

Steroids made me hungrier and thirstier and helped me gain weight, though it was mostly water weight, which was not ideal because it interfered with definition. I learned to use the drugs in the final six or eight weeks leading up to a major competition. They could help you win, but the advantage they gave was about the same as having a good suntan.

Later on, after I retired from bodybuilding, drug use became a major problem in the sport. Guys were taking doses of steroids twenty times the amount of anything we took, and when human growth hormone came on the scene, things really got out of hand. There were instances where bodybuilders died. I’ve worked hard since then with the International Federation of Bodybuilding and other organizations to get drugs banned from the sport.

The total effect of all these training refinements was that by September 1967, when I got on the plane again for London, I was packing another ten pounds of muscle.

That second Mr. Universe competition was every bit as good as I imagined. I went up against bodybuilders from South Africa, India, England, Jamaica, Scotland, Trinidad, Mexico, the United States, and dozens of other countries. For the first time, I heard people chanting “Arnold! Arnold!” I’d never experienced anything like that before. As I stood on the pedestal, holding my trophy, just the way I’d envisioned, I actually was able to deliver the right words in English to show some class and share the fun. I said into the microphone, “It is my lifetime ambition realized. I am very happy to be Mr. Universe. I say it again, it sounds so good. I am very happy to be Mr. Universe. My thanks to everyone in England who have helped me. They have been very kind to me. Thank you all.”

Being Mr. Universe brought me a lifestyle beyond a young man’s wildest dreams. In warm weather, the bodybuilders would pile into our old cars and head for the countryside and do the gladiator thing—grill fresh meat and drink wine and occupy ourselves with girls. At night I was hanging out with an international crowd of bar owners, musicians, bar girls—one of my girlfriends was a stripper and one was a gypsy. But I was wild only when I was wild. When it was time to train, I never missed a session.

Reg Park had promised that if I won Mr. Universe, he would invite me to South Africa for exhibitions and promotions. So the morning after the competition, I sent him a telegram saying, “I won. When am I coming?” Reg was as good as his word. He sent a plane ticket, and over the holiday season of 1967, I spent three weeks in Johannesburg with him, his wife Mareon, and their kids Jon Jon and Jeunesse. Reg and I traveled all over South Africa, including Pretoria and Cape Town, giving exhibitions.

Up until then, I had only the dimmest idea of what success in bodybuilding and movies and business really meant. Seeing Reg’s happy family and prosperous life inspired me as much as seeing him play Hercules. Reg had started as a working-class kid in Leeds and was a bodybuilding star in America by the time he fell in love with Mareon in the 1950s. He took her to England and married her, but Leeds depressed her, so they moved back to South Africa, where he started his gymnasium chain. The business had done very well. Their house, which he called Mount Olympus, overlooked the city and had a swimming pool and gardens. The interior was roomy, beautiful, comfortable, and filled with art. As much as I was loving my hard-training, fun-loving, brawling, girl-chasing lifestyle in Munich, living with the Parks reminded me to keep my sights set higher than that.

Reg would wake me up at five o’clock each morning; by five thirty we’d be at his gym at 42 Kirk Street working out. I never even got up at that hour, but now I learned the advantage of training early, before the day starts, when there are no other responsibilities and nobody else is asking anything of you. Reg also taught me a key lesson about psychological limits. I’d worked my way up to three hundred pounds of weight in calf raises, beyond any other bodybuilder I knew. I thought I must be near the limit of human achievement. So I was amazed to see Reg doing calf raises with one thousand pounds.

“The limit is in your mind,” he said. “Think about it: three hundred pounds is less than walking. You weigh two hundred fifty, so you are lifting two hundred fifty pounds with each calf every time you take a step. To really train, you have to go beyond that.” And he was right. The limit I thought existed was purely psychological. Now that I’d seen someone doing a thousand pounds, I started making leaps in my training.

It showed the power of mind over body. In weight lifting, for many years there was a 500-pound barrier in the clean and jerk—kind of like the four-minute barrier in the mile, which wasn’t broken until Roger Bannister did it in 1954. But as soon as the great Russian weight lifter Vasily Alekseyev set a new world record of 501 in 1970, three other guys lifted more than 500 pounds within a year.

I saw the same thing with my training partner Franco Columbu. One afternoon years later we were taking turns doing squats at Gold’s Gym in California. I did six reps with 500 pounds. Even though Franco was stronger than me in the squat, he did only four reps and put the bar back. “I’m so tired,” he said. Just then I saw a couple of girls from the beach come into the gym and went over to say hello. Then I came back and told Franco, “They don’t believe you can squat five hundred pounds.” I knew how much he loved showing off, especially when there were girls around. Sure enough, he said, “I’m gonna show them. Watch this.” He picked up the 500 pounds and did ten reps. He made it look easy. This was the same body that had been too tired ten minutes before. His thighs were probably screaming “What the fuck?” So what had changed? The mind. Sports are so physical that it’s easy to overlook the mind’s power, but I’ve seen it demonstrated again and again.