hell, diet like hell, eat well, and win more major titles the following fall. Weider had promised me a year, and I knew that if I did those things, I’d be on a roll.
Winning a couple of Mr. Universe contests in London didn’t make me anywhere near the best bodybuilder in the world. There were too many overlapping titles, and not everyone was competing in the same place. Being the best would really come down to beating champions like the guys whose pictures I had hanging all over the walls of my room: Reg Park, Dave Draper, Frank Zane, Bill Pearl, Larry Scott, Chuck Sipes, Serge Nubret. They had inspired me, and I said to myself, “These are the kinds of people I have to go through eventually.” My victories had put me in their league, but I was the newcomer with a lot left to prove.
At the very top of the pedestal was Sergio Oliva, the 230-pound, twenty-seven-year-old Cuban emigre. By now the muscle magazines simply called him the Myth. He’d taken his most recent Mr. Olympia title that fall in New York
Oliva’s background was even more unusual than mine. His father was a sugarcane laborer in pre-Castro Cuba, and during the revolution in the 1950s, Sergio enlisted in General Fulgencio Batista’s army alongside his dad. After Fidel Castro and his rebel forces prevailed, Sergio established himself as an athlete. He was an Olympic weight lifter of much higher caliber than me, ending up on the Cuban team in the 1962 Central American and Caribbean Games. He would have led the team in the 1964 Olympics if he had not hated Castro’s regime so much that he defected to the United States along with many of his teammates. He was also a terrific baseball player. That’s what had helped him refine his waist: tens of thousands of reps twisting to swing a bat.
I’d met Sergio at the 1968 Mr. Universe contest in Miami, where he gave a posing demonstration that drove the audience wild. As one of the muscle magazines put it, his posing split the concrete. There was no question that Sergio was still way out of my reach. He was really ripped and pound for pound thicker, with more muscle intensity than I had. He had the rare ability among bodybuilders to look fantastic just standing relaxed. His silhouette was the best I’d ever seen: a perfect V-shape tapering from very wide shoulders to a naturally narrow, tubular waist and hips. The “victory pose,” Sergio’s trademark, was a move that very few bodybuilders in competition would even attempt. It involved simply facing the audience with the legs together and the arms extended straight overhead. It exposed the body completely: the huge, sweeping thighs built up from Olympic lifting, the tiny waist, and the near- perfect abdominals, triceps, and serratus. (The serrati are muscles on the sides of the rib cage.)
I was determined to beat this man eventually, but I was still far from having the kind of body I would need. I’d come to America like a hundred-carat diamond that everyone was looking at and saying, “Holy shit.” But the diamond was only rough cut. It was not ready for display, at least not by American standards. Building a totally world-class body typically takes ten years at least, and I’d been training for only six. But I came on strong, and people were saying, “Look at the size of this young kid. What the hell? This guy, to me, has the most potential.” So I’d won my victories in Europe as much on promise and courage as on the fine points of my physique. A huge amount work still remained to be done.
The ideal of bodybuilding is visual perfection, like an ancient Greek statue come to life. You sculpt your body the way an artist chisels stone. Say you need to add bulk and definition to your rear deltoid. You have to choose from an inventory of exercises for that muscle. The weight, the bench, or the machine becomes your chisel, and the sculpting could take a year.
This means you have to be able to see your body honestly and analyze its flaws. The judges in the top competitions scrutinize every detail: muscle size, definition, proportion, and symmetry. They even look at veins, which indicate an absence of fat under the skin.
In the mirror I could see plenty of strong points and plenty of weaknesses. I’d succeeded in building a foundation of power and mass. By combining Olympic lifting, power lifting, and bodybuilding, I’d developed a very thick and wide back, close to perfect. My biceps were extraordinary in size, height, and muscle peak. I had ripped pectoral muscles, and the best side-chest pose of anybody. I had a real bodybuilder’s frame, with wide shoulders and narrow hips, which helped me achieve that ideal V shape that is one element of perfection.
But I also had some shortcomings. Relative to my torso, my limbs were too long. So I was always having to build the arms and legs to make the proportions seem right. Even with massive twenty-nine-inch thighs, my legs still looked on the thin side. My calves fell short compared to my thighs, and my triceps fell short compared to the biceps.
The challenge was to take the curse off all those weak points. It’s human nature to work on the things that we are good at. If you have big biceps, you want to do an endless number of curls because it’s so satisfying to see this major bicep flex. To be successful, however, you must be brutal with yourself and focus on the flaws. That’s when your eye, your honesty, and your ability to listen to others come in. Bodybuilders who are blind to themselves or deaf to others usually fall behind.
Even more challenging is the biological fact that, in every individual, some body parts develop more readily than others. So when you start working out, you might find yourself saying after two years, “Gee, isn’t it interesting that my forearms never got really as muscular as the upper arms,” or “Isn’t it interesting that my calves somehow aren’t growing so much.” That was my particular bugaboo—the calves. I started out training them ten sets three times a week just like the other body parts, but they did not respond the same way. Other muscle groups were way ahead.
Reg Park gave me the wake-up call on that. He had perfect twenty-one-inch calves, so fully developed that each one looked like an upside-down valentine heart under the skin. When I trained with him in South Africa, I saw what he did to achieve that. He trained his calves every day, not just three times a week, and with a mind-blowing amount of weight. I was proud that I’d worked up to calf raises with three hundred pounds, but Reg had a cable system that let him apply one thousand. I said to myself, “This is what I need to do. I have to train my calves totally differently and not give them even a chance of not growing.” When I got to California, I made a point of cutting off all my sweatpants at the knees. I would keep my strongpoints covered—my biceps, my chest, my back, my thighs—but I made sure that my calves were exposed so everyone could see. I was relentless and did fifteen sets, sometimes twenty sets, of calf raises every single day.
I knew all the muscles I needed to focus on systematically. In general, I had better muscles for pulling motions (biceps, lats, and back muscles) than for pressing motions (front deltoids and triceps). It was one of those hereditary things that meant I had to push those muscles much harder and do more sets. I’d built the big back, but now I had to think about creating the ideal definition and separation between the lats and the pecs and the serratus. I had to do exercises for the serratus, so that meant more closed-grip chin-ups. I had to lower the lats a little, which meant more cable raises and one-arm raises. I had to get the rear deltoids, which meant more lateral raises, in which you hold a dumbbell in each hand while standing and lift them straight out to the sides.
I had a whole list of muscles to attack: the rear deltoid and the lower latissimus and the intercostals and the abdominals and the calves, and blah, blah, blah! These all had to be built and chiseled and separated and brought into proper proportion to one another. Each morning, I’d get breakfast with one or two training buddies, usually at a deli called Zucky’s on the corner of Fifth Street and Wilshire Boulevard. They had tuna, they had eggs, they had salmon, all the things I liked. Or we would go to one of those family breakfast places like Denny’s.
Unless I had English class, I would go straight to Gold’s and work out. Afterward, we might hit the beach, where there would be more exercises on the open-air weight-lifting platform, plus swimming and jogging and lying on the sand to perfect our tans. Or I’d go over to Joe Weider’s building and work with the guys cooking up stories for the magazine.
I always split my routine into two training sessions. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, I would focus on, say, chest and back. At night I would come back and work on my thighs and calves, and then practice posing and do other exercises. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, it was shoulders, arms, and forearms. Of course, calves every day, abs every day except Sunday, which was a rest day.
Often for lunch or dinner we’d hit one of the local smorgasbords. Growing up in Europe, I’d never even heard of a smorgasbord. The idea of a restaurant where you could eat all you wanted would have been incomprehensible. The bodybuilders would start with five, six, or seven eggs, after which we’d go to the next station and eat all the tomatoes and vegetables. Then we would have the steak, and then the fish. Muscle magazines in those days were always warning that you had to have your amino acids, and that you had to be careful because the amino acids in certain foods weren’t complete. “Hey,” we said, “let’s not even think about it; let’s just eat all the proteins. We have the egg, the fish, the beef, the turkey, the cheese—let’s just have it all!” You would think the owners of the smorgasbord would have charged us more at least. But they treated us no different from any other customer. It
