Today’s Perspective
As seen on social (we’ve noticed it too)
A video from Arnold
The investor problem
How to notice what programs work
Free events? With Arnold? (Yep, it’s true)
A moment of honesty: Are you willing to bet on yourself?
The Pump Club App: The Best Sale We’ve Ever Offered
When you commit to the annual plan and complete the Foundation within 6 months, you get 50% back. Who else will return your money to help you get in shape? And, the offer includes a risk-free 7-day trial.
Letter From The Editors
What If This Year, The Best Gift To Yourself Was Your Health?
Every day, we work on this email. We read countless studies, offer thousands of tips, and receive incredible feedback from the more than 1 million people who read APC each morning.
When people ask us for the best piece of health advice, our answer is always the same: join The Pump Club app.
It’s not meant as a hard sell. The first 7 days are free, so you can explore everything we have to offer, from the custom workouts, nutrition tracker, and live coaching calls, to Arnold AI, real-time Arnold Q&A, the community meetups, and so much more.
We might be biased, but we write these emails and invest in app improvements because we also know you’re probably tired of it. You’ve been bombarded with different apps and online fitness programs that promise you the world.
If you spend a little bit of time on Instagram, TikTok, X, or any place where people post on social media, there is a new program every month.
Trust us: we notice. And we know it’s hard to figure out what will work for you.
Some of you have tried the competitors and failed, so you assume online fitness doesn’t work.
Some of you see so much of it, you assume it’s all a cash grab not worth your time.
Some of you think these apps couldn’t possibly be for people like you — whether you are just getting ready to start exercising, or you’re hitting 5-plate deadlifts.
All of you are right.
The fact is, most of these programs don’t work because they’re AI slop pumped out by a machine without any real knowledge of how humans progress through training. Most of them aren’t for the true beginners or true advanced users, because those are the hardest people to program for, and the least likely to become paying members.
And yes, they mostly want your money.
It’s a numbers game to them. If you don’t get results and churn in 4 months, they don’t mind because two other people have replaced you.
That’s why we thought it might be a good idea to tell you what makes the Pump Club app different.
A New Video From Arnold
We recently asked Arnold to share why he took a different approach to building the Pump Club app. Here’s what he shared:
If you’ve ever thought about joining the app, have been in the past and left, or didn’t even know we had an app, we’re betting on you this holiday season.
You can get 20% back right now, or you can invest just $8 per month and get 50% back (the equivalent of $4/month) when you complete Arnold’s 90-day Foundation.
You have a lot of great options on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but we’re confident that The Pump App is the only one that will back you back — both in your bank account and in all the ways your life will improve. Here’s what you can expect when you join.
The Ultimate Differentiator: Real Results
Here are some of The Pump Club app’s success stories:
Members who have lost 10, 40, 80, and even 150 pounds (over 2 years)
Members who joined the 1,000 pound club (lifting more than 1,000 pounds on squat, bench press, and deadlift) after years of training without many strength gains
Members whose doctors have said, “Just keep doing your Arnold thing” after they’ve reversed pre-diabetes, hypertension, or high cholesterol
Members who have successfully built a fitness habit after years of failing
Members who decided to take it to the next level and compete in strongman, powerlifting, or bodybuilding competitions (that they say they never would have imagined before)
And our favorite, thousands of members who say that learning the lessons of the app about not overthinking, prioritizing progress over perfection, and celebrating small wins have transformed their lives and made them better husbands, wives, parents, grandparents.
No Investors
This is the big one, because it gives us the freedom to make the app different in every way we want.
We have all worked in businesses with big boards, private equity, and consultants. We knew from the very beginning that it would not work for a fitness app the way Arnold envisioned it.
There are too many cooks in the kitchen. Most of them don’t know a thing about fitness. The knowledge they all share is about how to wring every cent out of a customer, not how to wring every last bit of effort out of someone training for the first time.
The Pump Club app is a small team. That means we can respond to our members quickly. It means we don’t get stuck in endless debates around a boardroom table.
And it means we can do things investors think are crazy: like giving people 50% off just for finishing a program in the app. Ask yourself: why don’t other apps do discounts based on you actually using their programs?
Because they don’t care if you do. They just care that your payments go through.
We care about your success. That’s what fires us up
So we do something a consultant with an MBA would never permit: give people half of their money back just for finishing one program. Because we believe in what we have built so much that we know if you finish that program, you are going to want to stick with us.
Humans Run the Show, Not AI
We aren’t dinosaurs. We know we need to embrace the power of technology. It’s why we have Arnold AI in app — trained on every answer he’s ever given to a member in his 50 Q and As, trained on all of his fitness knowledge and life advice.
But we don’t think, as many of our competitors do, that the machines should run the show.
Our programs are all designed by people, not AI. It takes hours per program, and it is worth every second.
Our articles are human-written, and even members who have trained for decades say the ones in the recommended tab changed their lifting.
Our weekly coaching calls are hosted by our incredible, human coaches: Jen Widerstrom, who has been coaching successfully in gyms and on national TV for years; and Nic Myers, who is the current America’s Strongest Man and has trained everyone from professional athletes to adaptive athletes with cerebral palsy.
They’re as human as it gets. Just watch part of one and learn:
We Keep Adding Value, But We Don’t Upcharge
Speaking of those Zoom calls, how many apps give you weekly touch points with a real live coach, where they look at any videos you submit and help you do any exercise with better form, where you can ask a live question and get a human answer?
How many do it for the price of a regular membership?
None.
How many apps have events like this where members meet up together, ask the co-founders questions, hit PRs together with the coaches there to help you beat your best, and don’t charge admission?
That’s right, every community event is free. And that includes when people got to deadlift in Arnold’s childhood backyard with Arnold cheering them on for every rep.
Arnold’s goal was always simple: make the Pump Club affordable ($99 annual membership works out to $8.25 a month, the current BFCM deal is $79, so that’s 6.60 a month, or if you bet on yourself and get the 50% off for finishing the foundation, just over $4 a month — it is definitely affordable), but also make it a one stop shop for self-improvement.
It is a one-stop shop, but as we’ve added features, we have never added cost. We added live meetups. We added habit tracking. We added nutrition plans and tracking. We added weekly coaching calls.
We never added a dime to the cost.
The Village (Is Connected And Uplifting)
It is really impossible to explain the power of the community inside the app. Adam and Jen have been in fitness for decades, and if you combine their experience with Arnold’s, you’re looking at a century of fitness experience.
None of them have seen such a high volume of success stories.
We think the village is why.
When Arnold encourages people to come together every week and celebrate their little weekly wins, it works. People stick with fitness when they can see the small progress, but they also get inspired by the success of others.
It’s called the positive corner of the internet for a reason.
We Have Programs that Actually Work For Tens of Thousands (Because We Customize And Help You See Progress, Not Crush You With Every Rep)
Our programs just work. We know it, because we hear from people who have succeeded. That gets back to having real coaches who have put in thousands of hours coaching people to design program that work, whether you’re a beginner or advanced.
There’s no guessing because the programs you get are programs that are proven to work.
Whether success to you is:
Losing weight
Feeling fewer aches and pains in your life
Lifting more than you did in high school in your 50s
Competing in a strongman competition
We know any of these is possible because we’ve seen thousands of people have this success.
Some of you have asked what a program looks like, especially since anyone who finishes the Foundation program (which is 90 days, and we give you 6 months to finish it) gets 50 dollars back during this weekend’s sale.
Here’s Day 1 of the Starting from Scratch Foundation, which is designed for beginners or those who haven’t been in the gym for years:
Sample Starting From Scratch Workout
That’s much different than Day 1 of the full-body version of the Advanced Foundation for men with full access to the gym, training three days per week
(You’ll notice we consider many variables, and each person gets different programs based on your needs).
Sample Advanced Foundation Workout (Full-Body Version)
We won’t bore you with all of the Foundation programs, but here are some of the other options at the intermediate and advanced levels:
Dumbbell Foundation
4-Day Upper-Lower Split Foundation
Machine Foundation
And because many of you asked, we added a “Short on Time Foundation” that is guaranteed to take just 30-45 minutes (The Starting from Scratch Foundation already takes 30 minutes).
At a minimum, all we ask of you is three days a week, and we’ll hand you 50 dollars back (of your $99 initial payment).
We can do a sale like this because we believe in our app.
We believe in The Pump Club because we know it’s different.
We built it.
This weekend is our biggest sale ever. We want you to bet on yourself and get $50 back, whether your foundation takes you three months or six.
If you started the foundation and didn’t finish and quit the app, guess what? You’re still eligible.
Anyone who hasn’t completed the Foundation can complete it over the next 6 months and get $50 dollars back. That’s one of those crazy things that investors wouldn’t allow.
And anyone else can get our normal newsletter discount: 20% off.
But, listen, you don’t just have to take our word for it. You can take our members’ words.
One other thing that makes us different: we don’t have one of those pop ups in our app that tells people to review it (we know we should, and eventually we will, but right now our development focus is all on improvements that actually help people), and we don’t give discounts for reviews. So all of these are real.
No matter what, we’ll keep showing up every week with tips to make you better every day. But our best tip is to make a small investment in yourself, and we’ll go the extra mile to give you the support you need to achieve your goals.
We will bet on your every time. But will you bet on yourself?
We hope to see you in the app!
-Adam and Ketch
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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell
