Arnold Schwarzenegger has played a lot of icons. Conan. The Terminator. The Governor. (Okay, that one wasn’t a role, but you get it.) 

The man has an entire wing of pop culture named after him. So when he launched a fitness newsletter in January 2023 and it pulled in 50,000 subscribers in the first twenty-four hours, he could have built it around any version of himself, but he didn’t: he built it around Conan.

Arnold’s Pump Club, with 850,000 subscribers, 8 million podcast downloads, a companion app that did over a million dollars on launch day, and a community that has collectively logged more than one billion pounds lifted, runs on the Hyborian Age’s ethos at the architectural level. 

The Positive Corner of the Internet Runs on Crom

Arnold’s most famous character is a machine that is cold, perfect, and unstoppable. And that’s exactly why he’s useless as a fitness avatar. Nobody dragging themselves to the gym at 6 a.m. relates to mechanical perfection. Conan, on the other hand, bleeds, loses people, and ages. He gets strong the ugliest way imaginable: chained to a wheel, pushing, for years. He is a human being who endures.

That’s the archetype the Pump Club chose, and the community built around it reflects it. Members call themselves “The Village,” the whole operation brands itself as a tribe dedicated to cultivating a zero-negativity, zero-trolls fitness space. Conan would recognize the structure immediately (even if the mead is now protein shakes).

The Riddle of Steel, Now With Peer Review

If you’ve seen the 1982 film, you know the riddle. Conan’s father teaches him that steel is the only thing a man can trust. Thulsa Doom offers the counter-argument: “What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?” and then demonstrates by having a follower step off a cliff, because flesh commanded by belief is the real power. Both men are wrong. Steel breaks. Flesh fails. Conan wins the ending with a broken sword, because the actual answer to the riddle is the will of the man behind the blade.

The Club attacks that trap with actual clinical receipts. Its favorite is the Dallas Bed Rest study. Researchers put healthy twenty-year-olds on three weeks of strict bed rest, and their bodies declined the equivalent of two decades of aging. Eight weeks of exercise reversed the damage completely. Then, thirty years later, the same men (now fifty, heavier, with elevated blood pressure) did six months of training and returned to their twenty-year-old aerobic baselines. The point of invoking this study is to prove to its readers that flesh is not a destiny, but a medium to be molded. 

Which leaves the will and, yes, they train that too. The Club’s “Zero Negativity Diet” is a seven-day regimen for the mind: social media capped at three ten-minute blocks a day with an immediate eject rule the moment outrage content appears, followed by forced mapping of a path forward when things go sideways, and making sure to include daily gratitude reps. Arnold anchors it with his own story of waking up in the ICU after heart surgery and tracking microscopic goals on a whiteboard like breathing exercises and steps with a walker. This is like tempering, in the metallurgical sense. You don’t answer the Riddle of Steel by buying a better sword, remember?

The Greatest Conan Story Ever Filmed Was Never Filmed

John Milius wrote a King Conan script that never got produced (well, until now). 

In the original script, an aged Conan sits on his throne, gone soft with peace, his broadsword hanging on the wall as a decoration. Here was a man passively reliving glory instead of forging it. Late one night, the Devil comes to him with an offer: you’re old, you’re tired, your joints ache, so why not lay it down and come rest? This offer wakes the barbarian up. Conan tells the Devil, in exact words, “Fuck you,” rips the sword off the wall, and fights Death itself.

While the scene never made it to a screen, it did, in a way, see the light of day. 

Years later, Milius was in the hospital, battling cancer, and his doctors needed him walking the hallways to recover. He didn’t want to. He wanted the bed. And Arnold, visiting his old director,  weaponized the man’s own screenplay against him: That’s not you who doesn’t want to walk. That’s the devil inside you. He wants you sooner. You have to say “Fuck you!” like Conan. He can have you some day, but not today. By Arnold’s account, the famous Milius fire came back into his eyes, and the man got up and walked laps around the ward.

The Pump Club now tells this story to hundreds of thousands of readers, and uses the frame daily. The couch is the Devil. The skipped workout is the Devil. The voice saying your best days are behind you is the Devil, and he’s very patient. Skipping leg day is now tantamount to losing a fight with a supernatural adversary. That is the most sword-and-sorcery reframing of cardio in human history, and it works precisely because the myth underneath it is strong enough to lift its weight.

The Wheel of Pain Is Real and It Weighs 20,000 Pounds

The mythos has escaped into physical space, too. 

Rogue Fitness built an actual, functional Wheel of Pain for the Arnold Strongman Classic: 20,000 pounds, 21 feet tall, 36 feet in diameter, requiring roughly 500 pounds of sustained force just to keep it moving. The strongest humans alive like Hafthor Bjornsson and Martins Licis  have pushed it. 

It keeps going. The band ArnoCorps released a “Wheel of Pain Push-Ups” app that marches you through ten stages toward 102 consecutive push-ups. Arnold personally designed a “Bar-Barian” t-shirt for the Club featuring Conan hoisting a barbell made of skulls and promoted it by telling the story of Wilt Chamberlain, his co-star on Conan the Destroyer, stealing a 45-pound dumbbell from set and hiding it under his bed. The Club’s flagship training plan is literally called the 4-Day Barbarian Workout Program, and its documentation reads like it was carved into a Cimmerian standing stone: “complacency is where the soul dies.”

The newsletter even contrasts the Wheel of Pain with the modern “hamster wheel” of fad diets and influencer routines, beset by lots of frantic motion and no forward progress. The Wheel of Pain is brutal, but it’s honest: effort in, strength out, no shortcuts. 

Forty-four years after the film and nearly a century after Howard first put the Cimmerian on the page, Conan is anchoring one of the largest fitness communities on the internet. But you know as well as we all do that the barbarian didn’t survive the decades because of nostalgia alone, but because his myth answers something: steel breaks, flesh fails, and the will is the only thing that’s really yours

Want to see the Hyborian ethos in action? The free daily newsletter is at arnoldspumpclub.com, and The Pump app– the workouts, habit tracking, and the Village itself–is at thepump.app.