While chatting with Hany Rambod, Jay Cutler spoke about his early days training alongside Phil Heath. Same coach, different game plans.

Cutler avoided overworking arms to preserve balance, while Heath reduced direct arm volume for proportion.

“It’s just like you’re telling—which a lot of people don’t know—is like Phil: he didn’t train his arms so much because it threw the physique off. Everyone can have a crazy body part, just like my legs in the beginning. I had to not train them,” said Jay Cutler.

So, why was Phil Heath doing that? Well, in his conversation with Muscle & Fitness, he expressed that instead of training his arms every week, he was working them out until the last month before the competition, “That helped yield a better illusion because it didn’t take away the size that I had acquired in my delts and chest.”

Cutler further in his conversation with Hany expressed that every bodybuilder must be trained with individuality in mind.

He said he learned this while training under Hany’s guidance, which is why he consistently posts short-form content on his social media, targeting every muscle group to educate the younger generation.

“So I constantly put out a lot of educational content for all this short-form content, and I think it really helped people evolve at all levels,” said Cutler. Well, if both of them did everything in a calculated manner to appear their best on stage, however, according to Heath, that level of elitism no longer exists.

Phil Heath expresses concern over modern bodybuilding to Jay Cutler

Last March, Phil Heath sat down with Jay Cutler to have a conversation about modern bodybuilding on the CutlerCast podcast. During the conversation, Heath expressed that bodybuilding may not be in a bad place right now, but it is certainly not at the elite level.

“We’re not in a down year. We just don’t have a certain talent pool. In the 90s, the talent pool was the Levrones, Cormier, and Flex (Wheeler). The talent pool now is just different bodybuilders,” said Heath.

Heath and co-host Matt Daniels highlighted how social media pressures bodybuilders to stay relevant, while also fueling misinformation about contest preparation.

Cutler chimed in to say, “We were heavy on Twitter, but you didn’t have as many people looking at the images all day long. I remember when Instagram started this whole thing…even before video or storylines, you just had memories on there.”

Given that, what are your thoughts on Cutler and Heath’s opinion?

Written by

Suryakant Das

Edited by

Oajaswini Prabhu