Also, just to archive it here, this is Arnold's 1977 interview with OUI porn mag (it might be an interesting read for some) -
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oui: You've spent most of your life turning your body into a model of excellence. Why? What does having the world's greatest body mean to you?
SCHWARZENEGGER: It means that I'm somebody special. What drove me to become the world's greatest bodybuilder is no different from what drives other athletes to become great tennis players or boxers or jockeys. I didn't get into body building until I was 15, and, at the time, my parents thought I was crazy to get deeply involved with something for which there was so little precedent in Austria. They even thought of sending me to a psychiatrist. They couldn't see any future in the sport; but there I was, lifting weights two or three hours every day.
oui: Did you have any idea then that body building would eventually bring you fame and fortune?
SCHWARZENEGGER: No, not really. I was just locked into the idea of winning the world championship in body building. As time passed, I began to see it as a way out of Austria, an escape from the everyday life around me. I'd look out my parents' window and see people talking over a cup of coffee for two hours or more, and I knew it wasn't for me. My father was the local police chief and he led a very regular life. I became determined to make it without working from nine to five. Sports, I thought, was the only way to act out.
oui: But, at the time, were there really any bodybuilders who were making a living from the sport?
SCHWARZENEGGER: There was a guy named Reg Park. He's an Englishman who now lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, and he was my idol. He was publicized in the muscle magazines as a businessman and movie star, and the combination of the two so impressed me that all I could think of was winning the Mr. Universe title the fastest way possible. The basic problem, though, was that the Americans had an enormous advantage. Every Mr. Universe had come from America and, as it later turned out, I was the first one to break that pattern.
oui: Why were the Americans so successful? Was it a question of having more money?
SCHWARZENEGGER: No, it was because the Americans had all the confidence. Theirs was a mental superiority, the feeling that they owned the title. But in Austria, the mentality was the reverse; winning against the Americans was unthinkable. By the time I was 15, though, I had a vision of absolutely wiping everybody off the stage. I had no idea, really, of what a stage even looked like, but I saw myself standing there, posing and winning.
oui: An epiphany, a dream?
SCHWARZENEGGER: A dream, yes, though not at night. It was just like having a vision—you know, like when you hear a person say, "I saw Jesus and he talked to me, and now I'm so happy with life because I know I'm going to be taken care of," and all of a sudden he's relaxed, he's not haunted anymore—well, it was like that.
oui: When was this visionary sense of yourself confirmed?
SCHWARZENEGGER: When I was 18 and still in the army, I entered the European body-building championship and won. It was my first competition and, even though it was the junior division, I instantly felt like King Kong, as if I'd already won the Mr. Universe title—which, in fact, I did win a year later. The title itself wasn't so important to me as the lifestyle it brought with it. I was living in Munich at the time, hanging out with night people—entertainers, hookers and bar owners—and I had a girlfriend who was a stripper. I was an innocent boy from a farm town, but I grew up fast in Munich. Then an American promoter wired me to come and compete in the States.
oui: Was your training affected by the drinking and screwing around?
SCHWARZENEGGER: No, because having a good time is not nearly so damaging as people think. I'm constantly amazed when people ask me about discipline. Discipline is what you use when you don't want to do something, when you have to force yourself.
oui: You lift five and six tons daily because you enjoy it?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Yes, because I want to. Do you have to discipline yourself to have breakfast, lunch or dinner? Of course not; and so discipline—the usual concept of it—doesn't apply here. I had to discipline myself to learn English, but never to train.
oui: You never had to push yourself?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Absolutely not; at least, not the way most people think. I love body building. I positively get off on it. When you lift weights, there's a certain point in the repetitions at which it really starts aching—where you can't go on any further, and the body starts shaking, and you know you have to press one more time. That's where the satisfaction is: in going that one step further. That's why it gets painful. It's also what makes a champion. If you can't go through that pain period, that dead point, then competitively you won't make it.
oui: How do you deal with the pain?
SCHWARZENEGGER: I look forward to it, and when it starts, I tell myself that I have to go through this because damn few people can. It's like any other sport: You have to do what nobody else can do, and the only way is to push yourself past the limit.
oui: Do you have a training partner?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Yes. He helps push you through the pain periods. The relationship between the two of you is very close—closer than most marriages, in fact—and he has to understand when you're trying to chicken out, as well as when you really have to put the weights down, when you absolutely can't go on. He's looking after your body as if it were his own. Sometimes your body really gets bombed out: You try to go through this pain thing, but your body won't push the weight, and your partner will help you with his fingers just enough so that you can handle it. He'll stand behind you and lift with his fingers and make it possible—but just barely possible—for you to make the lift, and then on the next repetition, maybe he'll help a little bit more.
oui: With just his fingers on the bar?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Just with the fingers, yes. Maybe he's lifting five pounds, maybe only a single pound, but it can make all the difference. What it means is that somebody is helping, paying attention and really giving you his energy. It's all vibes: The two of you are out to conquer, to win. The two of you become a unit. You're working and nobody can get into your territory—it's that type of thing.
oui: It sounds as if your relationship with your training partner is so close that you wouldn't have much energy left for other relationships.
SCHWARZENEGGER: No. My training. belongs to the gym, period. When I walk out, it's an absolutely different thing. I lived with a woman for five years, a very smart lady who teaches English at a college in California. She finally split when I went into the film business, not because of the training.
oui: Still, you talk about the workouts as if they were taking place in a temple.
SCHWARZENEGGER: Yes and no. There's often a point where you say, "It's getting too intense here." Your partner might be a little scared of the next set because you've been pushing him too hard, so you'll crack a joke and go over to somebody else and bullshit a little. Then you talk him into it. The best example I can think of was one day when Franco Columbu walked into the gym, went down into a squat with 500 pounds on his shoulders and couldn't come back up. Someone had to lift the weight off. I reminded Franco that four people from New York were watching the great Franco Columbu, the world's strongest bodybuilder, crashing down under a mere 500 pounds. "Franco," I told him, "this is very embarrassing. There are a lot of people here watching and they think that the muscle magazines are all bullshitting." He looked around and started breathing heavily, so I pushed it further. I bet him $20 in front of everybody that he couldn't do another repetition and then offered an additional $50 if he could go on and do eight reps. "Bullshit!" he screamed. "I did it a few weeks ago and I can do it again." Out of the door he went, took a few deep breaths and came back to do ten repetitions with the same weight—not eight but ten. Do you think his body changed? No; his body was the same, his power was the same, but he was motivated. He ripped the weight out and just started going up and down as if there were no end, as if he were going to do 50 repetitions.
oui: Can you push yourself too far?
SCHWARZENEGGER: I've torn pectoral muscles, fibers in my knee, in my thighs, and once I had to have an operation to repair torn cartilage. Generally you let muscles heal by themselves or get cortisone shots. Injuries happen when your mind is beyond your body, largely when you think you're King Kong and lift weights heavier than the body can handle. At the same time, though, we generally manage to have a good time. Bodybuilders party a lot, and once, in Gold's—the gym in Venice, California, where all the top guys train—there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together.
oui: A gang bang?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Yes, but not everybody, just the guys who can fuck in front of other guys. Not everybody can do that. Some think that they don't have a big-enough cock, so they can't get a hard-on. Having chicks around is the kind of thing that breaks up the intense training. It gives you relief, and then afterward you go back to the serious stuff.
oui: What do you think about when you look at yourself in the mirror? Does your body become something outside yourself, an object?
SCHWARZENEGGER: It's outside of me and also part of me. I don't say, "Arnold, how do you look?" but rather "Let's check out this body in the mirror and see what it looks like today." Professionally, I have to be detached in order to be critical of it. I don't criticize myself; I criticize my body.
oui: With a body as perfect as yours, it seems strange to hear you talk of criticizing it.
SCHWARZENEGGER: From the bodybuilder's point of view, my physique was perfect when I won my last title; yet I felt it could have been better. It's true that I was in perfect proportion, but I weighed 228 pounds and I wanted to be 240, overall just bigger. If you keep the proportions, bigger is always better. The goal is to carry the weight but keep the proportion and symmetry.
oui: Does that mean that 300 pounds would be better than 240?
SCHWARZENEGGER: No, because it wouldn't fit my height. I'm 6'2", and 240 pounds is the perfect weight for me.
oui: Wouldn't your head be out of proportion if you weighed 240 pounds?
SCHWARZENEGGER: No. Visually that can be taken care of very easily. All you have to do is let the hair grow and you have a bigger head. Also, in competition, the judges concentrate only on your physique. More than one Mr. Universe was an ugly son of a bitch.
oui: Is your cock disproportionate to the rest of you?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Well, that depends on what you mean by disproportionate. The cock isn't a muscle, so it doesn't grow in relation to the shoulders, say, or the pectorals. You can't make it bigger through exercise, that's for sure. Besides, I've never even heard of a bodybuilder who's tried to make his bigger.
oui: Really?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Really, though in my case, women have told me they're curious about its size—you know, outgoing chicks who're just trying to be outrageous or horny. I hear all kinds of lines, including "Oh, you're hurting me; you're so big." But it means nothing. Bodybuilders' cocks are the same size as everyone else's.
oui: Many people think that bodybuilders see their physique as an instrument for getting laid. Is that true?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Are you asking if my basic motivation in building my body was to pick up girls? That's ridiculous. There are many easier ways to pick up girls, believe me. Of course, I do use what I have when it comes in handy. If nothing else, my body's a conversation piece.
oui: Are you embarrassed by that?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Not at all. A girl can talk about my nose, my teeth or my accent—anything that gets a conversation going is fine with me. It is weird, though, the way women respond to my body. Maybe 50 percent respond positively right away, while another 25 or 30 percent need a while to adjust to my size and to realize that ordinarily my muscles are soft, just like anyone's, only bigger. A number of women, however, will say, "You're way too big for me; I don't like that."
oui: What kinds of women generally come on to you?
SCHWARZENEGGER: I can't categorize them. I've been approached by waitresses, stewardesses, teachers—come to think of it, there have been a great many teachers, women who are smart. Their trip is such a mental one that they are often attracted to men who are big and muscular.
oui: Do you feel exploited by such women?
SCHWARZENEGGER: No, I'd feel used only if I didn't get something out of it. If a girl comes on strong and says, "I really dig your body and I want to fuck the shit out of you," I just decide whether or not I like her. If I do take her home, I try to make sure I get just as much out of it as she does. The word exploited therefore wouldn't apply.
oui: Do you think that your familiarity with your body gives you a sounder mind sexually?
SCHWARZENEGGER: I don't have any sexual hang-ups, but I'm sure there are bodybuilders who have trouble with sex, and obviously the body building hasn't helped. Still, if you're in touch with your body, you certainly have an enormous sexual advantage. The mind-body connection is the same in sex as it is in training. If I tell myself to train the thighs, then the calves, it's boom, boom, mind-thighs, mind-calves, mind-this, mind-that. And it's the same with fucking—mind-cock. You're in touch. You realize you have a body. Ninety percent of the people, though, don't realize that there is anything below the head. They think that the head is carried around by something very mysterious, and they're not aware that it's the body, something they should be in tune with.
oui: Stirling Moss, the British racing-car champion, claimed that he'd never fuck the night before a race because it would sap his competitive drive. Does anything like that apply to bodybuilders, say, on the eve of the Mr. Olympia contest?
SCHWARZENEGGER: I get laid on purpose. I can't sleep before competition and I'm up all night, anyway, so instead of staring at the ceiling I figure I might as well find somebody and fuck.
oui: Doesn't it take the edge off your performance?
SCHWARZENEGGER: No, why should it? For ten years, I've been building a physique. It's not going to run away after one night. What Moss and others are talking about is a totally mental thing: If you feel that something's going to affect your body, then it definitely will. I've always found that sex gives me a kind of calm, and I'm much more in control because of it. It's the same for friends of mine who are also top bodybuilders. The guys who are working their way up often say they have to sleep ten hours a day and they try not to get laid more than three times a week, but, sooner or later, most of them find out that all this means shit. Whether you sleep two hours or ten, get laid a dozen times a week or not at all, eat three meals or five, at the end of the week you look absolutely the same; there's no difference.
oui: So you believe in writing your own rules?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Exactly. There are bodybuilders who are afraid of indulging in sex or even of playing other sports for fear of harming their bodies. I think that's silly. What's the use of building your body if you don't use it? At the Mr. Olympia contest in 1972, we had girls backstage giving head, then all of us went out and I won. It didn't bother me at all; in fact, I went out there feeling like King Kong.
oui: This business of feeling like King Kong—is it your act to psych everyone out so they know you're King Kong?
SCHWARZENEGGER: In the past five or six years, I haven't had to do that, but I used to do all kinds of numbers in the gym just to make it clear that I was the best. Gold's gym has produced ten or 12 Mr. Americas, and obviously there were guys there who wanted to take the Mr. Universe title away from me. What I do is make them feel great. I tell a guy that he's never looked better, that he looks brilliant, fantastic. "Your deltoids! And how did you get the tan and the proportion? I'm positive that you'll place; you'll beat Frank; I think you'll even beat Corney. You can easily beat this guy and that guy. I'm certain you'll go all the way—to second place."
oui: Is there a code of dos and don'ts in a championship?
SCHWARZENEGGER: Of course; but when you become a star almost anything goes. It's like Ali doing something dirty in the ring—not many people are going to take it too seriously. You're not supposed to talk while you're posing, for example, yet I used to do it all the time and it would blow the other guys' minds. If we were going through the compulsory poses—a double-biceps pose, say—I'd just turn to the guy next to me and say, "What a shame, what a disadvantage for you," or I'd psych him in reverse by aying that the disadvantage was mine, that he was definitely going to be the one to win. Once, I even sent a guy offstage. He was enormous, really fantastic, and the audience was screaming for both of us, so you knew it was going to be close. After about 15 minutes of posing, I told him I thought I'd had enough and that we ought to quit, just walk off. He agreed, turned around and left and I just stayed on. The audience immediately turned against him and I won—my first Mr. Olympia title, in 1970.
oui: What percentage of bodybuilders is gay?
SCHWARZENEGGER: The percentage of gays is the same, probably, as anywhere. Most bodybuilders are straight, regular street guys, though a lot aren't serious. Many in California are punks, beach bums just lying around in the sun and maybe collecting unemployment.
