From Arnold
Do You Have A Real Roadmap?
Tomorrow is the first Monday of the year, and before you start another diet or program, I want to show you something.
We know New Year’s resolutions get a bad rap. You’ve all heard the news: most last a week, 80% of them fail by February.
So it might be a surprise to you that we won’t join the ranks of fitness influencers telling you to stop making resolutions.
We believe in the power of vision (having one is my first rule for life), and what else are New Year’s resolutions but a vision of the coming year?
The problem isn’t the resolution: the problem is that people set the vision without also drawing the sustainable roadmap to get there.
They force themselves to think constantly, and our brains don’t have that much battery. We run out when we have to figure out each day at a time.
That’s why resolutions often fail so early. They last for the first week or two when your motivation is high, and then, when the excitement is over, they fall apart.
Or it’s why their successes are always followed by failure: they lose the 30 pounds, and a few years later, they’re making a resolution to lose that same 30 pounds again. Over and over.
It’s not a failure of motivation; it’s a failure of not having a roadmap that allows your brain to just do what’s next in the plan.
When you don’t have a plan and you rely on waking up every day and figuring out what to do that morning, you are destined to fail.
When you have an extreme plan that goes against everything we know about psychology, you are never going to follow it forever, because you’re going to have to keep your thinking cap on at all times.
That doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you; whatever fitness influencers make you think, nobody succeeds long-term by just winging it every day, and nobody sane does extreme diets or workouts long-term.
The way off the rollercoaster of motivation and failure is simple, but not easy: you need a roadmap every day that doesn’t force you to think, that doesn’t just try to destroy you with soreness, that doesn’t require you to eliminate all joy from food.
When I started training, I had a roadmap. First, I had my own foundation workout program that my weightlifting team coach gave me, and then I had Reg Park’s program.
Every day, I didn’t think; I just did what was in the plan and marked it off on the chalkboard in the gym. When every tally was marked, I was done for the day.
You need the systems in place to make it possible to keep working toward your goal on the days when you just don’t have any mental bandwidth.
This year, make your resolutions and make them bold.
During my writer’s room meeting with Adam and Ketch, I told the boys I want to share some of the research about why people who do the most popular plans in the world are on that rollercoaster that always starts with the joy of motivation and ends in a feeling of failure.
I want you to know there is nothing wrong with you.
Because once you accept that you aren’t broken, you’ve just been using broken maps, we can finally get you off that rollercoaster and turn you into a locomotive that just moves forward relentlessly.
I will be here with you every day, and I’ve built the Pump Club app to help you become that unstoppable train.
Let’s start drawing your map.
The Diet Book Formula (And What It’s Hiding)
One researcher at Cornell, named Adrienne Rose Bitar, spent years studying more than 400 diet books.
She wanted to understand a simple question: why do these health books feel so convincing, but so rarely work?
What she found was shocking.
With millions of people reading diet books, you might be surprised to know that — on average — only about 20% of the diet books analyzed contained practical advice, tips, or tools.
The other 80% of those books? They contain stories. Philosophies about food. Sweeping narratives about health and history and what's wrong with the modern world. There’s guilt. Deception. And a lot of poor science.
Another study found that the South Beach Diet — one of the bestselling diet books ever — was almost all made up. Only 33% of its nutrition claims were supported by peer-reviewed research. Seventeen percent had no support at all. And many claims contradicted existing evidence.
Look at the numbers.
80% stories
70% lacking full scientific support
20% substance.
If a picture is worth a thousand words. Then these stats might be worth millions of misguided resolutions and plans.
Don’t Get Angry. Get Even.
It's not that people lack effort.
It's that effort you’re pouring into effort into systems that were never built to work.
The most fascinating part of the study on 400 books is that almost every popular diet follows the same narrative formula. The scientist calls it a modern "Fall of Man" story.
It goes like this:
Step 1: Once, humans were healthy.
Step 2: Then something corrupted us — modern food, processed ingredients, industrial agriculture, seed oils, something.
Step 3: But if you follow these rules, you can return to that pure, uncorrupted state.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Paleo tells this story about our caveman ancestors.
Clean eating tells it about a time before chemicals.
Keto tells it about breaking free from carb addiction.
Carnivore diets tell it about reclaiming primal strength.
Different rules. Same narrative structure. Same promise of redemption.
That’s not to say there are no valuable lessons from these books. We’ve even shared how too many ultra-processed foods can be a problem.
But it’s also a bait-and-switch that is leading you away from what you really need — away from a solid map forward and back to the rollercoaster.
These stories are powerful. They give you a villain, a path, and a transformation. They make you feel like you finally understand what went wrong.
But they are lies.
All you need to do is look at the stories about carbs. Most people believe that carbs make you fat because you’ve read that carbs are evil. That’s bogus.
Carbs are your body’s preferred energy source. That’s not an opinion. It’s biology. And some of the healthiest populations in the world live on diets that are primarily carbohydrates.
If you've ever felt confused about what to eat, this is why. The people selling you diets are not offering a system that lasts. They don’t care about you never needing to make a weight loss resolution again. They care about selling a story.
We are not saying these authors are bad people. Most of them believe in what they're teaching. They found something that worked for them, built a philosophy around it, and wanted to share it.
But there's a difference between something working for one person and something working reliably, consistently, and in the long run for most people.
And there's a big difference between a good story and a good system.
When you buy a narrative instead of a system, you're setting yourself up for a specific kind of failure. The kind where you do everything right — you follow the rules, you put in the effort, you stay disciplined — and it still doesn't work.
That's the worst kind of failure.
Because you blame yourself.
You think: I had the answer. I just couldn't stick with it. Something must be wrong with me.
But nothing is wrong with you.
You were putting effort into a system that was 80% story and 20% substance. The math was never going to work.
The system that lacks substance requires you to turn your brain on, over and over, until you inevitably run out of energy and quit.
Let’s Make A Deal (And Why You Should Take From Us)
We’ve told you to stick to the basics from the day we started this operation.
Lift weights that challenge you. Add a little more weight over time.
Eat enough protein to build muscle. Add fiber. Eat real food most of the time.
Make space for foods you love. Whether it’s pizza, burgers, or (Arnold’s favorite) kaiserschmarrn.
Show up consistently. Not perfectly. Consistently.
Get feedback from people who know what they're looking at.
Train with other people so you have a reason to show up on the days you don't feel like it.
That's it.
The most effective fundamentals are simple. They're just not as marketable as a story.
Here's what we want you to take from this.
The next time you see a diet or program that makes you feel like you finally understand — that gives you a clear villain and a clear path and a promise of transformation — pause.
Ask yourself: Is this a system or a story?
Does it give you practical guidance you can follow week after week? Or does it spend most of its time convincing you of a philosophy?
Is it selling you something that is designed to last for 4 weeks or something that you will be able to follow for years?
Does it progress over time, building on itself? Or does it just give you rules and leave you on your own?
Does it have built-in support — real people who will help you when you get stuck? Or does it sell you something and disappear?
The difference between people who succeed and people who struggle isn't discipline. It's not willpower. It's not motivation. It's whether they found a system that actually works or kept buying stories that just felt like they would.
So here’s our deal.
We will keep showing up with these newsletters every weekday to give you the tips you need. We’ll have lots of new ways to help you get better, with prizes, giveaways, and incentives for everyone.
We built this newsletter to help you all become better every day, to provide information that isn’t built on hype or the best stories, to get you off that rollercoaster.
This year, we want you to let the Pump Club app be your system.
No figuring out which workout to do today — just click start workout and stick to your plan. No weighing or calculating your calories; just follow your nutritional plan and mark off each serving.
The reviews we are most proud of aren’t the ones that talk about losing 100 pounds, terminating pre-diabetes, or hitting new PRs, although we love those.
They’re the reviews that say, “it takes the thinking out of fitness and nutrition,” or “after years of trying, I finally made fitness a habit,” or “I’ve tried everything, this was the first thing that worked.”
They show that the systems we have spent so much time, money, and effort building are working for people in a way that nothing else did, and that means we are on the right track for our own vision of terminating the terrible trend of people quitting on themselves.
We are finally helping people off the rollercoaster.
Come and try it.
Even if you never spend a cent — and we mean this — we want you to go into the app and take something with you during your free trial.
Because today is the day you stop falling for another misleading trend that makes you feel like you’re a failure.
We’ve made the app incredibly affordable; one year is the price of 5 or 6 fitness classes, and we bet on you. Find a fitness class willing to give you half your money back if you keep showing up. Find a gym that offers you a break and lets you in for free when you get laid off.
We do things other businesses don’t, because this is what we see every day in the app:
What do we mean when we say take something with you?
You have a free 7-day trial. No funny business. We won’t charge you. Go into the app and raid it for the information that has already helped tens of thousands of people transform.
That means going to the community section and checking out the articles. There is a recommended section for a reason. If nothing else, read them and quit.
They are written by the same team that gives you this newsletter every day. You’ll learn about fat loss, muscle gain, the myths about different diet trends (like fasting), how to avoid back and knee injuries, and you can watch masterclass videos to improve your form.
You can even join a Zoom call with one of our amazing coaches.
At the very least, you’ll get substance.
And then we hope you check out the workouts and nutrition tracker, the simplest system you’ve ever seen.
What kind of business tells you to use it without paying a cent, offers free membership to people who lose their jobs, and pays you back for using it?
We might be the only one.
We aren’t different to get attention.
We are different because all of the normal ways weren’t working for you.
The fitness industry is broken. It keeps making promises, and people keep getting less healthy.
Someone had to try to shake it up. It needs a revolution.
If you stick with the workouts and stay in the program, we want to show you how much we believe in our system.
The Foundation is our 12-week program. Everyone starts there. It’s customized to your needs, fitness level, and equipment.
Each week builds on the last. You don't have to figure out what to do. You follow the progression.
If you sign up for the annual membership and complete the Foundation program — any time within 6 months — we will send you $50 back. That’s half of the yearly cost.
Not because it's a gimmick. Because we believe in aligned incentives. We want to benefit when you benefit. That's how trust gets built.
You've put real effort into things that didn't work.
That effort wasn't wasted; it taught you what doesn't work.
We won’t leave you when times get tough. We won’t sell you a gimmick.
All we’re offering is honest about what to look for: A system. Not a story.
Train tracks. Not a rollercoaster.
Ready to give it a try?
Join us and see the difference.
P.S. — Eighty percent story. Twenty percent substance. That's what the research found in most diet books. We built The Pump Club to be the opposite. Come see for yourself.
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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell
