Arnold's Motivation Tip: Stop Waiting to Feel Ready and Show Up Ugly

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Today’s Health Upgrade

Arnold’s Corner 
Monday Motivation: The Ugly Side Of Success

I was in an important meeting with my senior team last week, and I was bragging about how many of our Pump Club members were finishing their programs.

The guy who has helped me with investments for 40 years said, "Arnold, you're the only client I have who would rave like this about losing money, but I love it."

It's true. 

In case you haven't heard, we pay our members back for programs they finish: $50 for the first. And $100 for four in a year. As in, actual cash refunded to their credit cards. Not perks. Not rewards. Money that we're sending people right back for putting in the work. (But only when you subscribe directly from our website.)

We might be the only business in history that's ever been happy to see our account sending money out.

And we aren't just happy. We are through the roof.

Every dollar we send means someone got to do a workout they might not have otherwise.

Every $50 refund means someone learned the difference between training with a program and figuring it out as they go. 

Every hit to our finances is a win for you.

That's why we are still doing it, even though every business expert in the world would tell us it is stupid to send our best customers' money back as a policy.

A lot of you have finished your first program since you joined on my birthday.

To all of you, congratulations. I am proud of you.

And I know there are some of you who didn’t think you were ready.

You thought you weren’t ready, or it wasn’t for you, or you’d wait for the perfect time.

There are also some of you who started with the best intentions, fired up to take my money.

Somewhere, you fell off.

You missed a day and didn't show back up.

You got sick and a week became months.

You signed up the way you have for gyms, planning on making it work this time, and then it didn't.

I've got a message for you, too.

You are not a failure. You're normal. It's not too late for any of you. Just pick back up.

You don't have to be a superhero. You don't have to have the best workout every other day. You don't even have to be in shape.

All you have to do is stop giving up on yourself.

Show up, and give each workout what you can. Maybe you only think you can give a 5 out of 10. Maybe you can only give a 1.

To you, that might not feel like enough.

Trust me, it is.

It sure as hell beats a 0.

And let me be very clear: my money doesn't care if you feel like you had the best workout of all time or the shittiest. It only cares that you showed up, day after day, until you finished the program.

Because that's what success really is.

Success is showing up.

You’ve got big, pretty visions of what success looks like, but I have to be honest: sometimes success is as simple as not giving up.

So let's make today the day you reverse that decision to give up.

Let's make today the day you start showing up with what you have instead of what you wish you had.

Because that perfect, ideal version that you have in your mind of what success looks like is never going to happen.

Leave that fake shit for the Instagram influencers.

I need you to stop thinking your success is going to look pretty.

It's going to be ugly. Messy. Sometimes, it will suck.

That's what makes it great.

People respond to this newsletter every single day with the same question: "How do I stay motivated?"

The answer is, you don't.

You won’t.

None of us do.

You just learn how to show up with what you have. No matter what.

Like Teddy Roosevelt said, "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

That's all you can do.

Once you stop waiting for success to look pretty, you will finally find it.

Look around, and you will find that the people who are waiting for things to be pretty or perfect are always waiting.

I don’t want you to be the best at waiting. I want you to be the best at showing up for yourself.

Here’s a fun analogy.

I am not a good golfer. That is actually an understatement. I am a very bad golfer.

But put two balls on tees. One is for me, hacking away with my shitty swing.

The other one is for the person who is going to read a book about swings, watch YouTube videos, and wait for the weather to be perfect.

Which ball is getting into the hole first?

Mine, every time.

The other golfer will still be reading while I am walking to the clubhouse to celebrate.

Ugly action beats pretty waiting. Every time.

It is what all of these people who took our money learned over the past three months.

Showing up is success.

Hit reply and tell me your ugly, small wins. I read them.

Together With LMNT
The Nutrition Reason Your Work Feels Harder Than It Should

Does your work ever feel more complicated than it should? Like it’s not the work itself, but something else is making it harder than usual? 

If so, it might be worth refilling your water bottle and drinking a little more. 

Researchers found that slight dehydration can make it harder to concentrate and affect how your brain typically functions. 

A review of 33 studies found a small overall decline in mental performance with dehydration. Attention was particularly affected, and the decline was greater with more than 2% fluid loss. This can happen from a sweaty workout or a hot day, but it can also occur if you don’t drink enough throughout the day. 

And that’s what makes the research so interesting. Because at this level of “dehydration,” you might not even feel overly thirsty. And as you age, your ability to recognize thirst becomes less reliable. 

Just because you don’t recognize how much your body needs fluids doesn’t mean your brain can’t feel the effects of the drop in hydration. 

The most common place mild dehydration shows up is at work.

In a trial of young women, mild dehydration increased fatigue and perceived difficulty concentrating, even though most test performance held up. A similar trial in young men found more fatigue, attention errors, and slower responses on a working-memory task.

That helps explain why a drink might help in ways that make it feel like water is a focus supplement. In a small experiment after an overnight fast without fluids, water improved reaction time among thirstier adults. 

If you’re not a big water drinker, you don’t need to carry around a gallon bottle. And your coffee counts. A short crossover trial of regular coffee drinkers found no significant differences in hydration between moderate coffee intake and the same amount of water. 

If you ever feel less mentally sharp, your best bet is to keep water readily available so it’s easier to drink throughout the day, not just when you’re thirsty or during meals. 

Just because coffee counts doesn’t make it the ideal hydration beverage. Water gets the job done. But if you don’t typically drink enough, LMNT is a hydration favorite among APC readers. 

One stick in water, and it tastes like something you want to drink. No sugar. No artificial colors. No fillers. Sip it all afternoon instead of your third (fourth…and fifth) cup of coffee, and you’ll get the hydration boost without destroying your sleep. 

LMNT is also valuable during and after training, too. Sweat isn’t just water. It’s salt. In that same beverage research, sodium was one of the factors that helped the body hold onto what you drink, ensuring you rehydrate. 

Each LMNT stick has 1,000mg of sodium, 200mg of potassium, and 60mg of magnesium, enough to refuel what you lose during your hardest, longest, or sweatiest sessions. 

APC readers get a free 8-count Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavors with any drink mix purchase. Click here to claim yours. It’s automatically added to your cart. No code, free U.S. shipping, and a no-questions-asked refund if it’s not for you.

Start Your Week Right 
How To Outsmart Your Sweet Tooth

From our readers: Every time I cut sugar, I white-knuckle it for a few weeks until my cravings finally ease up. People keep telling me to push through — that if I stick with it long enough, sweets will stop appealing to me. Is that actually what happens?

There’s good news and bad news. 

The good news: your cravings really can quiet down. In weight-loss studies lasting three months or longer, cravings for sweets tend to drop, not spike. 

The bad news: your love of sweet taste might not go anywhere. That might sound like you’ll never get a hold of your eating habits, but that’s not the case. 

A six-month randomized controlled trial assigned healthy adults to diets low, regular, or high in sweet-tasting foods. Researchers delivered about half of each person’s daily food, then repeatedly tested how much participants liked different levels of sweetness.

Nothing changed. Six months of fewer sweets didn’t make people like sweetness less, and six months of more sweets didn’t make them like it more. When the study ended, both groups drifted back to their old sweet-food habits on their own, without being told to.

That lines up with an earlier three-month trial that found that, after cutting sugar, foods tasted sweeter to people, but they didn’t come to prefer less sweet foods.

Sweetness seems to be stubborn. But your taste for certain foods is very trainable and open to change.  

When people cut back on salt for several months, many end up preferring less of it, and foods they used to love start tasting too salty. Fat preference can shift a little, too. And one of the most consistent findings in taste research is that the more often you eat a food, especially vegetables, the more you tend to like it. 

That works even better when you pair it with something you already enjoy, and learning to like one new vegetable seems to make the next one easier.

So stop waiting for dessert to lose its appeal. Spend that energy building a menu you genuinely look forward to. 

You’re not erasing your sweet tooth. You’re giving it more competition. Here’s how you can work with your sweet tooth instead of against it. 

Cut how often, not just how much. Cravings fade fastest for foods you eat less often. If you truly struggle, a daily dessert keeps the habit alive more than an occasional great one.

Make sweets inconvenient. Keep fewer options in the house, and keep them out of sight and out of reach. Distance alone cuts how much people eat.

Guard your sleep. We’ve discussed it many times before, but short sleepers who added about an hour a night ate roughly 270 fewer calories a day, without trying to diet.

Walk first, decide later. A brisk 15-minute walk measurably lowered sugar urges, even under stress and with snacks in hand.

Let the urge crest. Cravings rise, peak, and pass. Naming the urge, or vividly picturing something else, can help it pass faster.

Practice new foods like a skill. Eat them more than once, give it a few weeks, and pair them with flavors you already love, like roasted broccoli with parmesan or berries with yogurt. Liking usually follows exposure.

Keep sweet in your life, on purpose. Put sweetness where it brings protein, fiber, or fruit, and save the real dessert for when it’s worth it.

Cutting back on added sugar still matters for your waistline, blood sugar, and teeth. The part that’s dead wrong is the promise that you’re guaranteed to stop wanting it. Maybe yes, maybe no. 

But if not, your sweet tooth isn’t a character flaw. You just need a plan that works with it.

Fitness
Workout of the Week

A Note From Ketch: Today’s “workout of the week” is the first workout from the “Short on Time Foundation” program in the Pump Club app.

My wife and I just had our third child last Tuesday, and Henry completes our crew of 5. (Katie did all the hard work, and is still doing most of it while I change some diapers and convince a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old to go to sleep, so you can save your congratulations for her.)

My job as co-CEO isn’t just strategy and roadmap and paperwork; it has always been leading the way and proving that what we do in the app works. 

I’ve made a lot of progress with “The Conjugate Program,” our most advanced program in the app. In my race against Henry’s birth over the past 13 weeks, I built my deadlift to 500 pounds and my push press to 225.

Now I’m in newborn dad season, and it’s time to prove our more time-friendly programs work.

Members have told me they worry our Short-on-Time Foundation isn’t enough. Part of our mission is terminating the old fitness industry myth that more is always better, so I’m taking on the challenge to prove to everybody that you can get stronger with three well-designed 30-minute sessions a week.

And I’ll do it live, starting tomorrow (Tuesday) at 5 AM Pacific.

I don’t care if three people train with me on Zoom. We will train together and prove to everybody that you can crush yourself in 30 minutes.

Here is the link for the first call if you want to show up, meet some members of the app, and train with me on Zoom.

I’ll be doing this every other day for the next three months, and anyone can join the rest of the calls from the app.

Warmup 

The Workout

Perform work-up sets for each of the main movements. In general, you’ll complete 8 reps at 50% of the weight you’ll use, 5 reps at 60%, and 2-3 reps at 70-80%. The stronger you are, the more work-up sets you might need. The work-ups prepare your body, the movement, and your muscles. But the goal is not to be so fatigued before you start your work sets.

The sets listed are your working sets only. So if you see “2 sets x 8 reps,” that means you’ll complete the work-up sets and then perform 2 sets x 8 reps, where the last 2-3 reps should be extremely challenging. That’s how you know you’re at the correct weight. 

Superset #1

1A. Barbell deadlift: 2 sets x 8 reps
Rest 2 minutes
1B. Barbell (or dumbbell) bench press: 2 sets x 8 reps

Superset #2

2A. Barbell front squat: 2 sets x 12 reps
Rest 1 minute
2B. Chest-supported barbell (or dumbbell) row: 2 sets x 12 reps

3. Cable crunch: 2 sets x 8 reps

Give it a try, and start your week strong!

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell