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The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding
Arnold Schwarzenegger
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What is The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding about?
From The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, you can learn the little tricks of bodybuilding, guided by Arnold Schwarzenegger. With the help of this book, you can achieve your dream physique and create a workout plan that will help you reach your goals—all thanks to the advice of legendary bodybuilding stars of the past.
Key ideas of The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding
Progressive Overload and Specificity
Muscle grows only when trained with the right intensity, rep range, and rest periods matched to the goal of bodybuilding, not general fitness.
Mind-Muscle Connection
Focused attention on the working muscle during each set produces significantly greater growth than mechanical, distracted lifting.
Naming and Prioritizing Weaknesses
Identifying your weakest body parts, training them first, and adding extra work throughout each session is the core method behind every champion physique.
Read an excerpt from the summary
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.
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who wants a complete, technically grounded strength training system backed by decades of competitive bodybuilding experience.
- Anyone who is stuck at a plateau and needs a structured approach to breaking through with the right volume, intensity, and recovery.
- Anyone who trains other sports and wants to understand how resistance training builds power, reduces injury risk, and improves athletic performance.
- Anyone interested in the mental side of physical training, from visualization and goal-setting to handling fear and pushing past self-imposed limits.
About the author: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger is a seven-time Mr. Olympia champion and one of the most recognized figures in the history of bodybuilding. He began competing in Austria as a teenager, moved to the United States, and won his first Mr. Olympia title in 1970. He held the title through 1975, retired, then returned in 1980 to win a seventh time.
Beyond bodybuilding, Schwarzenegger built a major film career, served as Governor of California from 2003 to 2011, and chaired the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. He co-wrote the first edition of this encyclopedia in 1985 with journalist Bill Dobbins and released a heavily revised edition in 1998.
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