Arnold Schwarzenegger reflects on his aging body
At 76, action star Arnold Schwarzenegger still struggles with his body image.
In an appearance on The Howard Stern Show, the star of The Terminator franchise said, “I kind of smile because every day I do look in a mirror and I say, 'Yep, you suck. Look at this body. Look at the [pectoral] muscles that used to be firm and perky and really powerful. Now they're just hanging there.' I mean, what the hell is going on here?"
The one-time governor of California added that for most people, it’s “one thing to see yourself get older and more and more out of shape but most of the people have never been in shape.”
“When you’ve been hailed for years as this supreme body, and you have the definition and you see the veins coming down your abs, and you see veins on top of your chest and then cut, you roll the clock 50 years and you’re standing there and you don’t see that anymore,” he explained.
Yet even at the height of his bodybuilding days, Schwarzenegger was not always happy with his physique. In his Netflix documentary series Arnold, he admitted that he was “never really satisfied” with his body, and used to tell himself, “??I don't know how this s*** body could ever win this competition.”
Jason Nagata, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, previously told Yahoo Life that competing in body building competitions, as Schwarzenegger did, are a risk factor for developing a type of body dysmorphia.
"Bodybuilders have higher risk for developing muscle dysmorphia, given the drive for a 'perfect' body, competitiveness, and need for control," he said. "They may perceive themselves to be puny or small, even if they are objectively muscular."
Schwarzengger has long spoken about feeling insecure in his own skin. In a 2016 interview with Cigar Aficionado, he recalled how he “never saw perfection” while looking in the mirror.
“There was always something lacking,” he said at the time. “I could always find a million things wrong with myself and that’s what got me back into the gym — because I started out with that mentality.”
