- ISBN13: 9780671531638
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
The complete program for building and maintaining a well-conditioned, excellently proportioned body — for a lifetime of fitness and health. In Arnold’s Bodybuilding for Men, legendary athlete Arnold Schwarzenegger sho… More >>
This is a good book to start boybuilding.But the book’s doesn’t provide good pictures and photos to show the results of bodybuilding.The pictures all show pretty normal developed people except JON JON PARK who is more musucular than the average man.Last of all,the chapter on competition bodybuilding is too short and brief.The training and excerises are all condensed in a few poor pages where those are the photos people really want for an ARNOLD book.
Rating: 3 / 5
A great bodybuilder yet a lousy and lazy author and communicator, Arnold could have shrunk this book into one forth of its length and hired a well-educated editor to present more compelling and accurate information. In this book, Arnold sounds more submissive to the cynicism of wealthy, lazy, and late starters from Santa Monica. He is pictured with his trainees in-person in the simplest and most ridiculous exercises that a mature adult could contemplate doing. Thus, the entire book is geared for those late starters that are hard to motivate who need the simplest routines, in a nutshell.
Though the book was first published in 1981, it was then well known that endurance training and strength training affect muscles in different ways. Arnold contends, on page 11, that Bodybuilders and Weightlifters were found to have less healthy hearts and lungs compared to runners. That is one of many of his erroneous interpretation of physiological issues related to exercise. Based on that false conclusion, he proposes adding an aerobic component to strength training. The fact is that aerobics enhances the cellular respiratory mechanism and has no impact on making healthier hearts or lungs.
His effort to explain how strength training benefits rehabilitation is limited to the versatility of applying resistance to the desired region of the body and at the desired rate. He does not delve into the desired enhancement of metabolism by activity that is beneficial to cell growth and repair. His dumbest interpretation of the effect of weight lifting on high blood pressure is claiming that pulsating blood massages the walls of arteries and prevents their hardening and that strength training strengthens the heart and keeps arteries flexible. That is not true unless the person’s entire lifestyle is conducive to healthy living, the heart was not already diseased, and that there were no other causes of essential hypertension that are not preventable by exercise.
The rest of the book deals with progressive strength training, from Series I thru III and ending with competitive bodybuilding. I doubt that any late starter would be able to advance through the three levels unless completely committed, wealthy, and jobless. The three series has a common feature. They entail: (1) stretching with 5 exercises, (2) warm-up with 5 exercises, (3) warm-down with 5 to 7 exercises, (4) weight training of 5 regions of the body with 2 to 4 exercises each, and (5) abdominal training with 5 to 7 exercises.
The choice of exercises for each body region shows the depth of experience of the author. This is the positive aspect of this book. He assigns the Clean and Press and dumbbell lateral raises to the shoulders, bench press and dumbbell press to the chest, chin-up and bend-over rows to the back, arms curls and triceps press to the arms, and squat, lunges, and calf raises to the legs. As you go through the transitions from Series I through III, he suggests adding more weight, more exercises, and accomplishing the workout in lesser time intervals. This is another positive contribution by an experienced athlete.
The pictures are outdated, too large, unnecessarily fill whole pages, and there are a lot of blank tables to fill next to each picture. I never understood why this book was written for men only. May be that was the trend in 1981.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book illustrates basic exercises with very little real information. Arnold shows his bodybuilding routine which consists of training each bodypart three times per week twice a day, which would be extreme overtraining for anyone who is not taking steroids. His dietary recommendations are outdated and primitive. This book is satisfactory for learning basic exercises so long as you disregard the training advice.
Rating: 1 / 5
The information in this book will get you into shape. The basics of exercise are what works and those basics are timeless.
This book provides the information in a concise and easy to understand manner.
However, if you already know that you will be sticking with the weight training and Arnold is your guru of choice, then I would just spring for “The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding” right off the bat.
It is way more thorough.
As for the dumb comments about Arnold’s gains all coming from steroids…
Yes, we all know he took them, and no they are not the reason he was big.
Extremely hard work and persistance are the reasons he was big.
Anyone who thinks that steroids are all it takes has obviously never trained seriously. I know because I am the same size and a natural.
If you want to succeed at this then you have to train hard and smart, and you have to do that consistently for a long time.
That’s probably where Arnold’s best, he really inspires you to want to get your butt in the gym and move some weight.
Rating: 5 / 5
I really enjoyed this book. Even thought the book is almost 30 years old, fitness and how to get there is timeless.
Rating: 4 / 5