THE GREATEST WORK-OUT VIDEO EVER MADE

Apparently in January everyone stops drinking and eating and starts incorporating words like detox into their daily vocabulary. After convincing us to poison our bodies throughout December, Satan cruelly U-turns and tells us we're fat and disgusting. If you're a woman, there are about 663 new keep-fit videos to make you spend more money and hate yourself. Satan doesn't bother producing as many keep-fit videos for men, because men don't need advice from Gwyneth Paltrow's trainer - they just need to drink less and jog more.

Still, I want guidance. And so to the best fitness DVD of all time, 1977's Pumping Iron. Actually, it's not a fitness video in the slightest, but shows us what real men were all about in an age where steroids weren't illegal. If you win Mr Olympia (you're judged on symmetry, proportion and size), you're officially The Best Man In The World. Better than that even, as Mr Olympia is a competition between a group of men who have recently won Mr Universe. It's big. And back in the 1970s, The Best Man In The World was Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Back then (Pumping Iron was filmed in the three month run-up to the 1975 Mr Olympia competition in South Africa), Schwarzenegger was 28, and had won Mr Olympia the previous five years. He was king of the bodybuilding world, and acted accordingly. In contrast, his main rival in the competition was Lou Ferrigno, who, although at 6ft 5 and 275 pounds was the largest bodybuilder ever, was still no match for the champ. Pumping Iron focuses mainly on the rivalry between the pair. The directors shot 100 hours of footage, hanging out with the contestants so much that they practically forgot the cameras were there. It's a fascinating, brilliant documentary. Here's what it taught me about being a real man.

1) Be confident.
Screenwriter Michael Arndt wrote Little Miss Sunshine as an angry response to a talk Schwarzenegger gave to some high school students. "If there's one thing in this world I hate, it's losers", said Schwarzenegger. "I despise them." And nowhere is Arnold's confidence and ambition more evident than in Pumping Iron. He's cocky, arrogant and fearless. He saw nobody as a threat. And he had everyone in the palm of his hand. Journalists, photographers, half-naked women, the other competitors: everyone fawned over him, including the filmmakers, who convinced him not to retire so they could have a real star in their documentary, and some of the sequences involving him are positively fetishistic. Take note of the music in this scene. Tell me it's not blowjob music.

2) Be an insecure kid.
One of the contestants in Pumping Iron, Mike Katz, was picked on at school for being poor and wearing glasses. He responded by getting into weights and sports, and wanted to be so big he was feared. In Pumping Iron, we see him showing off to his little kids, getting them to feel his biceps, asking them if "Daddy got a big muscle?" Lou Ferrigno got an ear infection when he was a baby, and the subsequent hearing loss he got lumbered with contributed to his late development in many areas. Like Katz, he responded by getting into weights and beefing up. Schwarzenegger wasn't such an extreme case, but he did have a conservative upbringing he describes as 'uptight' (his dad was a cop,) and he dreamt of going to America to be THE GREATEST.

3) Become the bully.
The winners in Pumping Iron use their minds as much as their bodies to defeat their rivals. They prey on insecurity and exploit weakness. Schwarzenegger, the master, all but talks Ferrigno into losing, a number of times. On the morning of the competition, Ferrigno and his parents invite Schwarzenegger for breakfast and he holds court, playing mind games, bragging that he told his mum he's already won, and berates Ferrigno for not being in shape. Ferrigno, a mouse in the body of The Hulk, visibly, silently, falls apart. Mike Katz also gets bullied, after another contestant hides his t-shirt in the training room before the competition, to "mess with his mind." It works.

4) Have strong role models.
Schwarzenegger was always impressed by those powerful people who are remembered by history: "Dictators, people like that… like Jesus, remembered for thousands of years." Yep, dictators and Jesus are all the same to Arnie. If you're powerful and famous, you're ok. Lou Ferrigno admitted a few years after Pumping Iron that his idol at the time was Arnold Schwarzenegger.

5) Be clean of mind.
There's not even a flicker of emotion on Schwarzenegger's face when he hears he's won. It's no surprise. "I have to cut my emotions off and be cold," he says at one point. "If someone steals my car right now, I don't care." He also tells a story about how he didn't go home to his dad's funeral because it was two months before a competition and he needed to keep training. The fact that years later he confessed this was complete fabrication makes him even smarter, in a sneaky, conniving way: he told the story to project more confidence, for the sake of having one over his competitors and to look awesome on camera (he was meeting Hollywood agents at time of filming).

It was later revealed that the filmmakers set up some scenes and amped up the rivalries, pushing for heavily defined heroes and villains to make the documentary more entertaining. Schwarzenegger knew this, played up to it and revelled in it. He's more charismatic here than in any of his Hollywood films. I watch Pumping Iron every morning before eating 12 raw eggs and running 20 miles to a slaughterhouse to punch meat. Watch it yourself and join me.

ALEX GODFREY