Why Almost All Fitness Advice Comes From Bodybuilding

Walk into almost any gym and you’ll hear the same vocabulary: chest day, leg day, bulking, cutting, chasing the pump. It sounds like the natural language of fitness. It isn’t. It’s the language of one sport, bodybuilding, and the story of how it became everyone’s default is worth knowing.

That story has a hero, and we’re fans. Arnold Schwarzenegger did more than anyone to make strength training part of everyday life. Millions of people picked up a weight because of him. But the methods that came along with that boom were built for a very specific goal. Understanding where they came from makes it easier to decide whether they fit yours.

From strongmen to a stage

Modern bodybuilding is usually traced to Eugen Sandow, a Prussian-born strongman who became a star of the late 19th century’s "physical culture" movement. In September 1901 he staged the "Great Competition" at London’s Royal Albert Hall, which Guinness World Records lists as the first major bodybuilding contest. Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the judges.¹

The idea was new: judge a body not by what it could do, but by how it looked. Over the next century, that idea grew into a sport, an industry and, eventually, a culture.

Arnold, the ambassador

Arnold arrived in America with a set of titles already behind him and an ambition to match. He won the Mr. Olympia seven times. More importantly for the rest of us, he was charismatic. When Pumping Iron came out in 1977, it showed a world that had seemed niche and odd as fun, disciplined and aspirational. It’s widely credited with helping launch the gym boom that followed.²

Then came the films, the magazines and the books. For a generation of men, Arnold was fitness. His training methods, and those of the bodybuilders around him, became the template.

Joe Weider’s magazines spread that template further. Weider gathered and popularised a set of "Weider Training Principles", including the split routine that trains different body parts on different days.³ Bodybuilders didn’t invent all of these ideas, but they packaged them, named them and sold them to the public. Many are still the backbone of gym programmes today.

“When it comes to getting abs, there’s one thing so many people miss entirely. They take this roundabout bodybuilding method when it’s not necessary.”

Ryan Engel · Founder, Executive Abs

The ideal kept getting bigger

As bodybuilding’s influence spread, so did its idea of what a man should look like. Psychiatrists studying male body image measured popular action figures from three decades and scaled them to the size of a real man. The toys had grown steadily more muscular, and many surpassed even the largest real bodybuilders.⁴

That’s not a criticism of anyone who grew up wanting to look like Arnold. It shows how strongly one sport’s standards shaped the picture of a "fit" man, often without anyone noticing.

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A sport with its own costs

Arnold has always been open about his own era. In 2005 he said he had no regrets about using steroids, which were legal at the time, because "it was something new".⁵ More recently he has warned young people away from them and said bodybuilding is no longer safe the way it is practised today.⁶

He has also criticised the sport for drifting towards sheer size at the expense of shape. He has argued that judges reward mass over aesthetics, and he has told competitors to aim for more symmetry and more definition.⁷ In 2023 he launched a free daily newsletter focused on everyday health and fitness for people of all ages, not competition.⁸

That’s the most interesting part of the story. The man who did the most to popularise bodybuilding is now one of its most thoughtful critics, and he’s pointing towards proportion, definition and lifelong health.

The man who popularised bodybuilding now points towards proportion, definition and lifelong health.

Why it still matters for you

Bodybuilding methods weren’t designed to be wrong. They were designed for a goal: maximum muscle, judged on a stage, by people who could devote their lives to it. When those methods became everyone’s default, most people inherited a plan built for a different body and a different life.

• Body-part splits spread training across five or six days to maximise volume for each muscle group.
• Bulking and cutting deliberately adds fat to build size, then strips it off for a show.
• The pump is a short-term swelling prized for how it looks, not for health or strength.

None of these is necessary if your goal is a lean, strong body with visible abs. Research on strength and health suggests the biggest benefits come from a modest amount of strength training, around 30–60 minutes a week, alongside aerobic activity, good sleep and smart eating.⁹

Arnold made strength training mainstream, and we owe him for that. The next step is to keep the parts that serve you and leave the stage-specific parts on the stage.

Read next: How is the abs-first approach different?