Video: 300 Pound Arnold Schwarzenegger!

Transcript

Focusing on a back view, this before image is from the 1974 Mr Olympia contest, where many say Arnold Schwarzenegger was at his biggest. If Arnold were competing in his twenties today, the first area he’d fill out would be shoulders and traps because, with what people are taking today, in addition to specific heavy androgens not used by bodybuilders in the 70s, everyone and their brother’s shoulder girdle muscles fill out like they’re wearing prosthetic shoulders. With additional trapezius, Arnold’s sloped, hanging-shoulders appearance would be more accentuated, but he’d also have added shoulder width to compensate.

In these shots, Arnold’s triceps, seen from the back, never had the wide, three dimensional look that bodybuilders like Mike Mentzer, Sergio Oliva, Ronnie Coleman, and a few others had. Arnold had great untapped triceps potential, some of the best side triceps photos ever taken, but unlike his pecs, biceps, calves, and a few other stellar aspects, his triceps, seen from behind, wouldn’t be a standout in current bodybuilding competitions. This is not due to today’s bodybuilders having better genetics, because Schwarzenegger, if taking the same supplementation, would still dominate the best of the best today, it’s mostly due to what bodybuilders are now taking that they weren’t taking 40 plus years ago. In the morph, you can see how much the added triceps width adds to his overall mass. Mass was also added to the forearms.

A little mass was added to the lats as well as the outer quads, but not as much proportionately as was added to his shoulders, traps, triceps, and calves. Clownish inner thighs and an awkward outer bow to Arnolds quads wouldn’t be an improvement. Arnold’s calves, especially from the back, would still stand out today, but the morph capitalizes on what made Arnold, Arnold, and two thousand twenties Arnold calves would have to stand out as much now as they did back then. Bodybuilder’s calves today are probably bigger than bodybuilder’s calves in the 70s but they look tiny in proportion to their thighs. Around 1974, you could see Arnold’s inner gastrocnemius peak was really starting to stick out, like a peak on a peak, so we expanded on that. Arnold had a great combination of calf muscle size along with long tibial length. His impressive calf size looked all the more impressive on his longer calf bones. Superhero characters always had long legs. Here, you can see how big Arnold’s calves were in proportion to Franco’s entire body. Due to his proportions, especially relative to other bodybuilders, calves were an extremely important muscle group for Arnold.

A decade ago, chemically enhanced bodybuilders ended up putting an unwanted 10 inches onto their waists when they added a few dozen additional pounds of muscle, an unaesthetic tradeoff for additional size, but a few bodybuilders today, for whatever reason, seem to have been able to keep their twenty first century size without the addition of a bubble gut. Arnold’s only impediment, if it were an impediment at all, in today’s classic division would be having to deal with weight limits but, with the sky’s the limit absence of weight restrictions in the open division, who can say that, Arnold, wouldn’t be just as dominant now as he was 50 years ago.