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Today’s Health Upgrade

• Arnold’s Corner: Monday Motivation

• Better with age

• Bouncing back from a bad day or week? Do this.

• Workout of the week

Arnold’s Corner
Monday Motivation: Just Keep Attacking

I’ve been loving the World Cup, and it’s disappointing that the US and Austria both lost, but I can’t stop watching. There is something about a big tournament that pulls you in even when your own team is already sitting at home.

This week I got my team together, and we all just sat at my house, watched the Belgium vs Spain game, and did no work.

Nobody even pretended to be sorry about it.

Watching soccer reminds me so much of all of the lessons we share here.

I saw the same guy for Spain take shot after shot. Some sailed high. Some went just to the right. He kept getting the ball back and firing again. You knew he would eventually make it because he didn’t stop. And when it finally went in, the whole stadium lost its mind.

That’s every soccer game. It’s why my fellow Americans have a hard time with it. All of that effort, for maybe 2 or 3 goals. They try, and they fail, and they try, and they fail until they succeed.

They definitely fail more than they succeed.

But they just keep attacking.

The attacking is what got me thinking.

If you only watch the highlights, you just see the big plays. The goal. The celebration. The perfect strike into the top corner.

You miss that 90% of the game is failure. The shots that sailed high. The passes that got cut off. The runs that went nowhere.

But that failure is the whole point. That is what gives the game its suspense. Will he score? Will they come back? You don’t know.

And not knowing is the joy of the whole thing.

Take away the failure, and there is no drama. There is no game. There is just a highlight, and a highlight is boring after about ten seconds.

Imagine a movie where the hero faces no challenges, no worthy opponents, no setbacks, and just cruises to victory. You’d be bored in 10 minutes. When I read scripts, I always pay attention to the stakes. If the stakes aren’t high, the movie won’t work. There’s no drama with low-stakes.

So many people want high stakes in their movies and no stakes in their lives — it doesn’t make any sense.

The stakes are the joy, not the highlights.

Now think about your phone.

Social media is just a highlight reel. Nobody shows you the whole game. They show you the ball hitting the net, and they cut everything else out.

You see the finished body. You don’t see the years of bad workouts and missed alarms.

You see the new business. You don’t see the four businesses that failed before it.

You see the wedding photo. You don’t see the arguments and the work it took to get there.

Everybody is posting their goals and hiding their misses. And then some of you sit there feeling like you are the only ones who ever miss.

Imagine if everyone started the process of changing their lives with a soccer mentality instead.

In life, unlike soccer, failure seems to freeze people.

They try, and they fail, and they stop.

They think that the people who succeed are different. Better genetics. Better connections. Better something.

They only see the success. They don’t see that the people who succeeded failed over and over, too, and all that set them apart was that they just kept attacking.

I know this because I lived it. When I came to America, I immediately lost my first contest and cried all night. 

Then, when I had established myself in bodybuilding and moved on, people told me my body was too big for the movies. My accent was too thick. My name was too long, and nobody could pronounce Schwarzenegger anyway. 

It seemed like every door was closed on me. I heard no more times than I can count. If I had stopped at the first no, or the tenth, or the hundredth, you would have never heard of me. I just kept attacking.

Michael Jordan understood this, too. He loved to point out how he missed more than 9,000 shots in his career. He lost almost 300 games. And 26 times his team trusted him to take the shot that would win it, and he missed.

Most people would bury those numbers.

Jordan put them in a commercial for the whole world to see. And at the end of listing every failure, he said, “That’s why I succeed.”

Not despite the misses. Because of them. Every miss taught him something a make never could. He kept attacking.

Here is what I love most about a soccer player. When he misses, he doesn’t hang his head and walk off the field. He resets for the next play. The miss is already behind him. His eyes are already back on the goal.

That is the mentality. Not never missing.

Missing, and lining up the next shot anyway.

All of you are going to run into challenges or hardships or disasters.

All of you are going to fail. Hopefully, many times, because it means you are trying enough to really succeed.

The only real failure is the one where you try once, miss, and freeze. That is the one that ends the game.

So stop watching your own life like it’s a highlight reel. Play it like a soccer match.

Take the shot. Miss. Get the ball back. Take another one. Miss again. Keep your feet moving and keep attacking the goal.

Because the suspense is not the problem.

The suspense is the joy.

Just keep attacking.

Together With Momentous
The Supplement That Gets Better With Age

Most supplements marketed to aging bodies are hope in a jar. Creatine is the rare exception — but only if you know what it actually does. It's not a muscle pill or a brain pill. It's an amplifier. And it only works as hard as you do.

Here's the twist: for some of its benefits, the evidence actually gets stronger as you get older.

In older adults who lift, adding creatine produces greater gains in lean mass and strength than training alone. And it's not one hopeful study; it's a consistent finding across multiple meta-analyses of randomized trials, reinforced by a 2025 systematic review.

But muscle building isn't magic. Nearly all of those benefits occur with resistance training. Creatine helps your muscles do more work and recover between hard efforts. Sitting still with a scoop is not a strategy.

The brain is where the age angle gets interesting. 

A meta-analysis of randomized trials found creatine improved memory. It showed up in some studies of younger people, but the effect was largest in people older than 60. 

A 2025 review focused on older adults also found that it strengthened overall cognition. And creatine may also help keep you sharp when you're short on sleep, though that research leaned on much larger doses than a daily scoop. And some early studies link creatine to slower cognitive decline. It’s promising, but still preliminary.

The payoff may be biggest for people under stress, or coming up short on meat and fish, since that's where the body's own creatine tends to run low.

The dose needed for performance is small, and the safety record for all doses is long. 

Three to five grams a day provide the muscle benefits, and decades of research show it's well tolerated in healthy adults, including no risk to healthy kidneys. For cognitive benefits, you likely need 5 to 10 grams, and possibly more, depending on your sleep habits and your diet. 

For ideal outcomes, you’ll want to take creatine daily. And that’s when sourcing becomes an issue. Not because creatine is dangerous, but because anything you take daily should receive extra consideration for quality and impurities. 

At a small daily dose, the odd trace of whatever rode along in manufacturing barely registers. Take more of it, every morning, for a decade, and small amounts stop being small.

That's why Momentous is relentless in its pursuit of building the best possible formulas, including the new Creatine Signature Spec.

No matter what brand you purchase, make sure you check the right boxes for a quality product.

If you’re going to use creatine, make sure it’s creatine monohydrate. That’s where the majority of the research lives. 

Be skeptical of exotic-sounding forms like creatine HCl or ethyl ester. One analysis found that about 88% of these alternative creatine products had little to no evidence behind their marketing claims, and they cost approximately 116% more than plain monohydrate.

Then, ensure it’s third-party certified. If not, you might be buying creatine that doesn’t actually contain creatine. 

In one analysis of 175 creatine products sold on Amazon, only 8% were third-party certified, meaning the vast majority had no independent verification of what's actually in the tub

And finally, look for brands that are willing to post exactly what’s in the product, beyond just the creatine, to help assess things like heavy metal exposure. Because you deserve transparency.

The Momentous Signature Spec is made in a pharmaceutical facility and water-washed using reverse osmosis, rather than the chemical rinses most brands use. 

Every batch goes through six verification stages, gets checked by outside labs, and is certified by NSF for Sport and SuppCo's TESTED program, which buys the product off a real shelf and checks it against the label the way you would. It also screens for PFAS and microplastics, which most brands skip entirely.

Put simply, it’s the highest-quality creatine in the world, giving you the peace of mind you deserve.

APC readers get 35% off a subscription or 14% off a one-time order. Just use the code PUMPCLUB at checkout. 

Start Your Week Right
You Just Had a Bad Week. Here’s Your Next Move

Maybe last week didn't go how you planned. A couple of workouts you meant to do and didn't. Meals you wouldn't want to read back to yourself. A few nights where "one more episode" turned into a 1 a.m. bedtime.

So today you're carrying some guilt, and the plan is to make it pay. Get strict. Earn it back. Punish your way into a better week.

But the guilt you're treating as accountability is usually the thing keeping you stuck. The worse you feel about slipping, the less you want to look at it. And not looking is how one bad week quietly becomes two.

Researchers followed a group of students through two rounds of exams. The ones who forgave themselves for putting off studying the first time went on to put it off less the second time. 

Those who stayed angry with themselves didn't improve. It's a small study, and it's students, not a law of nature. But the pattern has been replicated in research and is one most of us have lived. 

The shame doesn't move you forward. It makes starting feel heavier, and creates an impending sense of doom that you’re going to screw it up again.

But here’s the trick: Forgiving the week isn't the same as excusing it. 

You're not deciding the missed workouts didn't count. You're stopping the vicious cycle of replaying what happened, creating a story about what it all says about you, and building a perception of yourself that will only hold you back every time you try to make a change or build a new habit. 

Remember, your self-perception influences your habits and behaviors. 

As you start a new week, call it as you see it: Last week was off; here’s what I did wrong, and here’s how I can improve it. Then you start fresh and follow the plan.

A few days or a week do not determine a month, a quarter, or a year. You don’t need to win every day to win the week. So stop trying to pay off last week. Chalk up the loss. Learn from it. And now get back on track and win this week. 

Workout Of The Week
Advance Your Strength

Last week we built your engine with threshold intervals. This week, we’ll give you the same setup but show you one way to progress the workout. Different rep range. Add a little more weight. Same challenging workout.

This session hits every major muscle with five moves, two to three hard sets each, stopping a rep or two before your form breaks. You chase the hard reps, and you’re in and out. 

How to do it

1. Perform 2-3 work-up sets of each movement, progressing from 50% up to about 75-80% of the weight you’ll use. Keep reps between 3 and 6 to prepare your body without exhausting it.

2. Do each exercise for 2 to 3 sets of 5-7 reps, resting 2-3 minutes between sets. The last 2-3 reps of each set should feel hard, like you had maybe one or two left in you. That's the sweet spot. You don't have to grind all the way to failure to get strong.

3. Pick one option per pattern based on your equipment and what feels good for you

Squat: back squat, goblet squat, or leg press
Hinge: deadlift, Romanian deadlift, or hip thrust
Push: bench press, overhead press, or push-up
Pull: row, lat pulldown, or assisted pull-up
Carry: grab something heavy (dumbbells, a loaded bag) and walk 30 to 40 seconds

Short on time? Do 2-3 work-up sets for each movement, and perform one hard set of each exercise. A single all-out set of five movements still covers your whole body and still builds strength. 

If you want us to take all the thinking out of training, nutrition, and habits, so you just show up — we can help with that. 

Give it a try, and start your week strong.

The Positive Corner of The Internet
About Arnold’s Pump Club Editorial Standards

We do things a bit differently here, starting with transparency.

1. The Content: All APC emails are researched, written, and fact-checked by the APC editors (see bottom of the email), with written contributions from Arnold (noted with “Arnold’s Corner”). Links take you to original studies (not second-hand sources).

2. Does AI play a role? Not for the primary content, but it is used in two ways. The main items are original content written by the APC team. The summaries at the end are AI-generated based on the human-written content above. We also use an AI tool to review our interpretations of the research and ensure scientific accuracy. We don’t assume AI is right, but we use technology to hold ourselves accountable.

3. Yes, we have partners (all clearly noted by “Together With”). Why? Because it allows us to keep the APC emails free. We first test products, and then reach out to potential partners who offer ways to help you improve every day. The bar is set high, and to date, we have turned down millions in ad deals. (Example: we will not partner with any non-certified supplements or those without evidence in human trials). If we won’t buy the product, we won’t recommend it to you. And if there’s no evidence it works, then there’s no place for it here.

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell