In this 13‑minute video, seasoned coach Eric Roberts distills 14 years of experience and data‑backed principles into a concise, actionable framework for building muscle efficiently. He first debunks the common myth that cardio hinders hypertrophy, explaining how low‑intensity cardio enhances mitochondrial capacity, allowing lifters to push harder, and recommends 15‑30 minutes of low‑heart‑rate cardio with a modest 100‑200 kcal daily surplus. He then overturns the habit of static stretching, advocating dynamic mobility work and 1‑3 light warm‑up sets of the target exercise to prime joints and muscles. Roberts outlines an optimal training frequency: 3‑4 high‑intensity sessions per week, split so each muscle group is trained twice weekly (e.g., lower‑upper‑lower‑upper or lower‑upper‑full‑body), avoiding the over‑training of 5‑7 days. He stresses that volume per session should stay under 8‑12 sets per muscle group, distributing work across the week for better growth. Regarding load, he promotes the 5‑12 rep range as a practical sweet spot, while noting that any rep range can stimulate hypertrophy if taken close to failure, but extremes (<5 reps or >12‑15 reps) increase injury risk or unnecessary fatigue. Nutrition advice includes a minimum protein intake of 0.8 g per pound of goal body weight, warning against excessive protein that displaces other nutrients. Carbohydrates are highlighted as the primary fuel for training; he suggests 0.3‑0.5 g per pound of body weight consumed pre‑workout or the night before. Finally, he warns users of GLP‑1 weight‑loss drugs (e.g., Ozempic) that suppress appetite, emphasizing that resistance training at least twice weekly is essential to preserve muscle and bone mass during rapid fat loss. Throughout, he intersperses client anecdotes and analogies, and concludes with a call to his 8‑week personalized coaching program and links to further resources.
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I've been lifting weights for over 14 years and coached over 25,000 clients with their workouts as well. And most of what you've been told about building muscle is ruining your progress. So here's everything I've learned so you can steal it and save you the time and get you results much faster. The first one you may have heard before: cardio is going to kill your gains. So like I did for a long period of time, I skipped cardio on purpose. The problem is this isn't true, and it's actually limits how much muscle you can build. Cardio helps you grow and strengthen the mitochondria in your cells. And all that means is mitochondria is like the tiny batteries that power every rep you do in the gym. So if you have more batteries that are stronger, you'll have more energy and be able to push harder. So doing cardio the right way can actually help you lift heavier and push out those last couple of reps, which is where you build the most muscle. It's like It's like if you were using one of those power drills and you were trying to drill in a screw, but your power drill died halfway through. So if you put a bigger battery in that drill, you'll be able to use it all day long, no problem. So do not keep skipping cardio. Do 15 to 30 minutes of low-intensity, low-heart-rate cardio either after you lift weights and/or on a rest day. And to make sure you can recover from this cardio, you might need to eat a little bit more calories. Typically, I recommend our clients to eat 100 to 200 extra calories per day when they do cardio, because to keep building muscle, you need enough fuel. And by the way, if you need to know exactly how many calories you should be eating, I have a free calorie calculator. Just click the link in the description of the video below. And the next thing I've learned It's where most people waste a ton of time, which they could be using to be more efficient, to see faster progress. Which brings me to your warm-up. Stop stretching before you lift weights. And I know you think you're warming up and preventing injury, but static stretching can actually increase your risk of injury and decrease your strength. Think of it like if you were to put a stick of clay In the fridge. It's cold, it's stiff, and when you bend it, it cracks. But if you warm it up in your hand, kind of knead it a few times, it molds into whatever you want. Stretching a cold muscle is just like pulling on cold clay. And I used to be this person who would spend 10, 20, 30 minutes stretching and warming up before my workout, only to still get injured and spend a ton of unnecessary time. So skip the static stretching. You can do some dedicated mobility work like Like you see some of the videos I'm doing right here before a leg day. And then the most important part, do 1 to 3 light warm-up sets of the exercise that you're about to do. So if you're going to go do squats, before you get into your 3 sets of heavy weights, do 1 to 3 sets of much lighter weight for 3 to 5 reps, not trying to go heavy, just to get the movement down, warm up your joints and muscles. And doing that besides stretching Will save you a ton of time and get you better progress. And this next point is also going to save you a ton of time and get you faster muscle building progress. And that is training three to four days a week, be five to seven days per week. And I know it sounds crazy because you think more is better. You're going to see faster progress if you work out more. And maybe you've done this, but do you actually see any difference in how much muscle you build? Or do you just get more fatigued? You feel like you're working so hard. Hard, but not seeing the progress from it, and you kind of just get burnt out from it and don't stick with it. Think of your muscles like a houseplant. It needs water, so you water it. That's good. But if you water it 7 times a day every day, the soil is going to flood. The extra water just runs down the side or it drowns the roots. The plant isn't growing faster because you drowned it, and your muscles are the same. The training is the water. Going past what you can absorb Just creates excess overflow. And this was happening to one of our clients, Mike, who, as you can see, the dude is just jacked now. But he thought he had to work out 5, 6, 7 days a week. And when we got him on a 4 times a week workout program, he was kind of skeptical at first because he didn't know if it was actually going to work. But now he's lost over 40 pounds, stronger and more ripped than he's ever been from working out less, not more. And this is because working out 5, 6, 7 days a week is a lot for your body to recover from. And if you can't recover, you're not going to build muscle. So lift weights 3 to 4 days a week with high intensity, pushing yourself close to failure, and then use the other days to recover. 3 great workouts will always beat 6 half-ass sloppy workouts. But if you're going to work out 3 to 4 days a week, here's what nobody tells you, and that's how you should spread out those workouts throughout the week. And the mistake a lot of people make is only hitting each muscle group 1 time per week. And you've seen or done the classic bro split— chest on Monday, back on Tuesday, legs on Wednesday. Or maybe you've done a push-pull-legs split. And you think that's good, but what nobody explains is there is a ceiling to how much good muscle building work you can do in a single workout. Going past roughly 8 to 12 sets per muscle group per workout is actually going to lead to diminishing returns. more. So if you hammer your chest with 15 sets on Monday and don't touch it again for 7 days, half of those sets were probably wasted, and your muscle doesn't get any more growth signals throughout the week. Think of it like doing laundry. You've got a week of clothes. You could cram your entire family load of laundry for a whole week in one load, and the washer might run But then it also might overflow versus if you split up that load on Sunday and Wednesday, everything would come out clean with no overspill. Your muscles work the same way. As opposed to trying to cram all of your sets into one workout, split them up and hit your muscle groups twice throughout the week. And this is what helped one of our clients, Steph, actually body recomp, lose fat and build muscle at the same time. So if you're going to work out 3 days a week, day 1, lower body. Day 2, upper body. Day 3, full body. Or 4 times a week: day 1, lower body. Day 2, upper body. Day 3, lower body. Day 4, upper body. And now that you're actually hitting your muscle groups 2 times per week, how heavy should you be lifting and how many reps should you be doing? And you may have heard before, the perfect muscle building range is 5 to 12 reps, and they think the muscle's only gonna grow if you stay within a certain Rep range, except this isn't true. Technically, you can build muscle in any rep range as long as you go close to failure. But there is an issue with this statement, and there's a reason why people say five to twelve reps is the best rep. If you consistently lift under five reps, you are going so heavy on all of your movements that you're putting a lot of stress not only on your muscles but your joints. Your tendons, your ligaments, your connective tissue. So you increase the risk of injury and it's a lot of fatigue to put on your body always lifting that heavy. And vice versa, if you're always lifting above 12, 15, 20 reps, that's a lot of volume, which means there's a lot of fatigue for your body to also recover from just in a different stream. And most people who are doing 15, 20 reps in all of their exercises, you think You're pushing close to failure because it might be burning and you're getting a big pump, but you're actually going close to failure from a cardio perspective, not from a muscular perspective. Think of it like knocking on a door to wake someone up. If you swing with a sledgehammer, sure, they wake up, but you broke the door. That's going too heavy. Now, if you tap the door a thousand little tiny times, your hand is probably gonna cramp before they ever really get up, and that's going too light. 5 to 12 reps is that steady knock on the door. It's loud enough to wake them up, but not so loud you break the door. So for most of your set, you should be between 5 and 12 reps and picking a weight that is heavy for that amount of reps. And now that you're training hard in the right amount of days per week, most people obsess over this next nutrient that you don't need as much of as you— you've been told you need to eat more protein to build muscle. Agreed. Per pound of your body weight. And so you're scarfing down protein shakes or plain chicken breast at 9 PM at night. It's miserable. And what nobody ever tells you— going way over your protein goal doesn't build any extra muscle. In fact, it's probably going to stop you from building muscle because there's one other nutrient that helps fuel your workouts. And if you're not getting enough of it, then you're not gonna build muscle no matter how much protein You eat, and we'll talk about that in the next point. But right before we do, if you shouldn't eat a gram of protein per pound of body weight, how much should you? You're going to take your goal body weight in pounds, multiply that by point eight, and that's how many grams of protein per day you should be eating as a minimum. So if you want to weigh 150 pounds, you would eat at least 120 grams of protein per day. If you end up eating more than that. Awesome, but that's the minimum. And as long as you hit that, you will see muscle building progress. And again, you shouldn't go much over that because you want to leave room for the other nutrient that's actually going to help fuel workouts and build more muscle. And it's actually the nutrient that most people say you should cut out and is bad for you, and that is carbohydrates. Think about this: protein is the brick; carbs are the guys who show up and actually lay those bricks. You can have a truckload of bricks. But if nobody has the energy to lift them up and stack them, the wall never gets built. A your muscle never gets built. Carbs are the energy that actually let you train hard enough to have a workout that will produce muscle building results. If you cut carbs out and don't eat enough, you will get less muscle building results, not more. So a trick I like to use for our online coaching clients is take your current body weight, multiply that between point three and point five. And that's how many grams of carbs you want to have pre-workout or the night before, because your body will use those carbs as energy for your work. And speaking of having energy for your workout, there's one situation where your muscle will actually lose at a fast rate unless you do this. If you're on a GLP-1 like Ozempic, tirzepatide, Retta, that drug is going to work for fat loss. The main way it works is by suppressing your appetite. And the issue rises when you're not getting enough calories, protein, carbs. You may be losing weight, but you're also losing muscle because you're not eating enough protein, because you can't push yourself hard in the workout. And this is how you end up as that skinny fat where you've lost weight but don't look the way you want to look, and you're at a much higher risk of losing bone density and losing muscle. Think of it like a demolition crew tearing down a building. The drug is the wrecking ball. It will Be fast and it'll work. But a wrecking ball doesn't care what it hits, it's just trying to bring everything down. So strength training is a non-negotiable if you are going to decide to take a GLP-1, because the negative side effects that will come along with your weight loss if you do not lift weights, quite frankly, won't outweigh you losing weight. And even just twice a week for 30 minutes is more than enough to keep and protect your muscle and bone density. And if you watched all of this and you're like, man, this is great information, but how do I actually build this into a plan and apply it specifically to my lifestyle? Well, that's exactly what we do with our clients in my 8-week challenge. You can click the link in the description below to learn more. We build you a personalized workout program, get you set up with a simple and realistic nutrition plan for your life, and pair you up with a one-on-one coach to check in, hold you accountable, and make sure you actually stay consistent. And if you want even more help dropping 10 to 20 pounds and building muscle in the next 60 days, I did an exact video on how to do that. You can just click this link here to watch it next.
