Joseph Baena explains dad Arnold Schwarzenegger’s key role in his bodybuilding career: ‘He pumps me up’

Key points

• Joseph Baena is opening up about the role his father, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has played in his nascent bodybuilding career.

• “He pushes me. He makes sure that I don’t slack off in the gym,” Baena told GQ. “When the carbs are low and the calories are low and I start getting tired, he pumps me up.”

• Baena entered his first bodybuilding competition on March 28, won three gold medals, and won another at a separate competition on April 4.

The family that lifts together stays together.

Joseph Baena, a rising star in the bodybuilding world, is finally spilling the secret key to success passed to him early on by his dad, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Mere weeks after winning his first bodybuilding competition — Baena earned three gold medals at the NPC Natural Colorado State Championships in March — the prodigy opened up to GQ on Monday about the role the Terminator star has played in his success.

“He’s the best training partner. I don’t know what to say,” Baena gushed. “He pushes me. He makes sure that I don’t slack off in the gym. When the carbs are low and the calories are low and I start getting tired, he pumps me up.”

You don’t have to take Baena’s word for it, either. He’s shared ample photographic evidence of Schwarzenegger’s attentive support.

On March 24, four days before his big string of wins at the NPC competition, Baena shared a set of images to his Instagram depicting him pumping iron at the famed Gold’s Gym in Venice, Calif. In two of them, Schwarzenegger claps and coaches from the sidelines while Baena strains to curl a heavily weighted bar.

“You have to shock the muscles!” he wrote in the caption, referencing one of Schwarzenegger’s key tenets of muscle growth.

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Baena further elaborated on Schwarzenegger’s role in his nascent bodybuilding career in the GQ interview, noting that his influence took hold early on.

“My dad gave me the bodybuilding encyclopedia. I was flipping through that, trying to learn how to grow the biceps, and I fell in love with weightlifting,” he explained. After being “really overweight when I was younger,” Baena said he “fell in love with eating healthy. I fell in love with learning about the body and how it reacts to training, and I became very passionate about it.”

That passion led to years of dedicated training that are finally paying off.

Baena didn’t stop winning at the NPC competition in Colorado. He made it a streak the week after, winning another gold medal in the classic physique section at the 2026 INBA Iron Gladiator competition in Corona, Calif.

He celebrated his spate of wins shortly after the Iron Gladiator victory on Instagram, writing, “Stepping on stage has always been a scary feat for me but creating the goal and actually going for it is one of the best decisions I could have ever made.”

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly