Scorching success: Tarek Elsetouhi, the 2008 Arnold Amateur champion, is in a hot streak, in more ways than one. Here's his story and the training regimen that keeps him firing on all cylinders

Flex, Sept, 2008 by Julian Schmidt

THERE'S SOMETHING TO BE SAID for those who bodybuild for the pure hell of it. The innocence of their pursuit transcends the egoisms of victory and lifts them somehow to a higher plane where the energy invested is not effort, at all, but simply a source of euphoria.

Take Tarek Elsetouhi. Training--failure training, torture training, 100-rep training, emetic training--becomes for him an ecstatic indulgence in the fantasy of his transfiguration. "I don't even notice training," he muses, "because I know it's going to give me a physique like Arnold Schwarzenegger's."

Add Elsetouhi to the myriad of other gobsmacked bodybuilders who stumbled, stupefied, out of theaters into daylight, eyes glazed, jaws a gape as if body-snatched, their brains a blackened, smoldering briquette from their first sighting of Arnold as Conan, the Barbarian. Sixteen at the time, in 1993, Elsetouhi was with his father, whom he would not let forget the experience. "I pestered him endlessly to take me to the gym," Elsetouhi says. "I told him I had to look like that; I need to look like that," and, with that, the boy was out the door, heading downtown to scour newsstands for every bodybuilding magazine he could find.

It was the natural order of things. The elder Elsetouhi was himself an athlete who weight trained, and Tarek, exhibiting those genes, had excelled in track, the long jump, martial arts and rugby in his hometown of EI Mansura, Egypt. So, entering a gym for the first time was like a warm and joyous homecoming. "I wanted so much to look like Arnold that it did not register in my mind as hardwork," he rhapsodizes, "nor was it a 'lifestyle,' as they call it, nor 'training.' I just loved it, and the more results I saw, the more real it became as a means to that Arnoldend, and the more I loved it."

That passion bore immediate fruits. A mere four months later, friends who had watched him train persuaded him to enter a bodybuilding contest. He won. Elsetouhi relates the incident: "They tried to give me the prize money of $50, but I refused it. I told them, 'No, sir, I don't want the money. I'm doing this because I like it."'

Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman I philosopher, claimed that pleasure has no fellowship with virtue, but they were kindred souls in Elsetouhi: | his noble sacrifice out of love for bodybuilding begat a manifest destiny of rewards that show no sign of diminishing. At age 17, he won the Mr. Egypt title and competed in the IFBB World Amateur Championships in Turkey. He made his way to Germany and then the United States, and this year, the 31-year-old, weighing 235 at 5'9", swept the super-I heavyweight and overall titles at the 2008 Arnold Amateur Championships and afterward found himself the recipient of a pro card.

Elsetouhi credits the "basic" nature of his gym with stoking his motivation. Devoid of any mechanical contrivance, it offered only free weights that had to be lifted from the floor by the human musculoskeletal system and pressed, curled, thrown about and dominated by his strength, alone, with no part of his body braced or stabilized by a pad or apparatus. To him, slinging a barbell through the air hypostatized him as the invincible Arnold wielding his mighty sword against all adversities with an ease and speed that made its glistening steel sing. Once the reps began, Elsetouhi could not stop. On and on he went--30, 50, 100 reps--each one counting out a new burst of muscle growth, "until I collapse," he happily announces.

In every set of every exercise, Elsetouhi describes the nature of that joy as "a severe burn," and if he cannot generate it, failure would weigh heavily on his mind. He'd be dejected, and his burnin' love of training would fade. That, he cannot have, so he repeats the set, two, three, four times, as often as necessary to enkindle the burn and rekindle his passion. "I torture myself," he grins. "I will beat my body to a pulp if I have to. I want to feel lots of lactic acid in my body after training, and if I don't, I will repeat the entire workout until I do."

How does he ensure that sets repeated--or workouts--don't also repeat that inefficacy? "I bring back the fun of performing a perfect set," he answers. "Namely, one into which I have been able to focus the most extreme intensity within my power."

How does he reach that mindset? "The psychology I use," he continues, "is to imagine that every workout is the last and most important session I have before stepping onstage for a competition. It's the only workout that will make a difference, so I put 200% into it. If it's offseason, I try to lift more weight than ever, every workout, until I die; and if it's precontest, I try to do more reps than ever, every workout, until I die. For squats yesterday during my leg workout, all six sets were for 50 reps. When I finished, I didn't die, but I threw up."

Maybe next workout, he will, because maybe he'll do 100 reps, or maybe 80, or maybe 45 with heavier weight. To maintain his alacrity and avoid the complacency of consistency, Elsetouhi sees to it that the unexpected will always confront him. "My workouts change all the time," he says, "even if it's something almost imperceptible to the onlooker. Sometimes my repetitions will be slower, sometimes explosive, sometimes slow up and fast down, sometimes fast up and slow down. Each time, I want to hit all of the fibers in my muscles. Sometimes my body hints to me that it would feel the exercise if I did it at a slightly different angle, or with different weight, or whatever; so I'll change it. And it's all to produce the burn that tells me the muscle is filling with lactic acid.