In this solo podcast episode, fitness coach Eric Roberts reflects on 13 years of personal weight‑lifting mistakes and distills three core errors that sabotage most gym goers. First, he explains why traditional warm‑ups—static stretching longer than 60 seconds and prolonged cardio—reduce strength and waste energy, and he prescribes a dynamic‑mobility and light‑set warm‑up protocol. Second, he clarifies that muscle growth hinges on training close to failure: the final two to three reps of any set, regardless of rep range, are the only reps that stimulate hypertrophy. He illustrates this with client Kylie’s transformation when she began pushing those reps. Third, he critiques common “bro” and simple push‑pull‑legs splits, showing that natural lifters have a per‑muscle set ceiling of roughly 8‑12 hard sets per workout. By spreading volume across two weekly sessions per muscle group (e.g., upper/lower splits 3‑4 times per week), lifters can increase total weekly volume, lift heavier, and recover better. He backs each point with client anecdotes (Kylie, Dan) and research references, then promotes his online coaching program for personalized programming and nutrition guidance.
Chapters
I've been lifting weights for 13 years and have wasted a lot of time doing the wrong things. Plus, after coaching over 25,000 clients in the last 10 years, I have found there are 3 things most people are doing every single workout that quietly sabotages your progress. And if you don't fix them, you'll keep working out hard with no progress. to show for it. So here's all 3. The first mistake is something you probably do every time you walk into the gym, and you think it's helping you, which is you get into your workout, you sit down on a yoga mat, you start stretching your hamstrings, maybe doing some of these arm circle things, and then maybe you'll hop on the treadmill and do a 15-20 minute run, then you go lift weights. But there's only one problem. That is wrong. Because there's actual research to show static stretching for more than 60 seconds before you lift weights can actually decrease your strength by up to 5 to 10%. On top of that, doing cardio before you lift weights drains the exact fuel and energy that you were about to go use for your weightlifting session. So you're walking into your workout weaker than if you just would've done nothing. Stretching and doing cardio before your lift is like studying spelling words to prepare for a math test. You put in effort, you feel like you're doing some work, but you sat there memorizing how to spell Mississippi, M-I-S-S-I-P-P-I, and then you open the test and it's like, solve this math problem for X. It's the wrong subject and you wasted Your prep time. So here's what you should actually do. One, skip the static stretching, and if you want to loosen up, do dynamic stretches. These are exercises like hip 90-90s, leg swings, banded thread the needle for upper body mobility. These movements will get your joints moving while you stretch. And number 2, skip any cardio that's longer than 5 or 10 minutes. And your warmup should be the actual exercise that you're about to do. So if your workout calls for 3 sets of squats at 200 pounds, you would do 1 or 2 lightweight warmup sets first, maybe at 95 pounds and then 150 pounds for 3 to 5 reps. And you're not going heavy. You don't have to rest for a long time in between because these lightweight warmup sets are just to make sure you have the form. And warm up the muscles and joints that you're about to use. And then when you start your three sets, you're going into it strong instead of drained. And so now you fixed your warm-up, but there's a second mistake that determines whether the sets that you're about to do will actually build muscle. And almost everyone gets this wrong. Most people obsess over the wrong question: What is the best rep range to build muscle? How many reps should I be doing? That's not the right question to ask, and it's keeping you stuck. Here's what almost nobody ever explains. You actually only need 2 to 3 reps to build muscle. And yes, I will explain. Technically, you can build muscle in any rep range. 5 reps, 10 reps, 15 reps, 20 reps, 30 reps. Now, there is a most efficient rep range to build muscle. I talk about it in a different video if you'd like to watch it after this one. But really, any amount of reps will build muscle as long as one thing is true: you have to push yourself close to failure. And here's the part that's going to flip how you think about weightlifting forever. Let's say you're doing a set of 10 reps. You don't build any muscle in reps 1 through 7. You build muscle in reps 8, 9, and 10. The first 7 reps, they're just there to get your muscle tired enough that the The last two to three reps actually do something. Think of it like walking into an amusement park. The first seven reps is you paying for the ticket. You walk through the gate. You stand in line for the ride, but none of that is actually the ride. The ride is the last two or three reps of your set. The ones where you're grinding. You're barely able to get it up. That's what she said. You're making those ugly faces. Most People will pay for the ticket, walk through the gate, get to the front of the line of the ride, and then they leave the park. They don't push as hard as they need to in the last 2 to 3 reps, and they wonder why their body hasn't changed in a year. A perfect example of this is we had a client named Kylie who came to us who had been working out but not really seeing the change in her body that she wanted to see, nor was she gaining the strength that she wanted to. And one of the biggest changes we helped Kylie make was just make sure the last 2 to 3 reps of her sets, she was actually pushing hard enough. And now she's lost fat, built more muscle and strength than she ever has in her life. And it's because now she understood what was missing. She actually got on the ride. So for you, every working set in your workout ends with the last 2 to 3 reps being incredibly difficult and challenging. This goes for every set, not just the last one. So if you have 3 sets of an exercise, all 3 of your sets should be this. And this goes for any rep range that you do. So if you're doing 6 reps, the last 4th rep, 5th rep, and 6th rep will be difficult. If you're doing 15 reps, 13th, 14th, and 15th rep will be difficult. If you finish a set and you're like, I could have done 5 or 10 more reps, you're not lifting heavy enough and you will not see a change in your body. You're wasting time. And so now that we're warmed up and you're pushing enough in every set to actually build muscle, the next mistake Is about what workout split you do. Because if you get this wrong, every hard set that you're about to do is just gonna get wasted. Most people will do one of 2 popular workout splits. The first is a bro split. You'll do chest on Monday, back on Tuesday, legs on Wednesday, shoulders on Thursday. You're basically working one muscle group at a time. Or people will do 3 times a week, push, pull, legs. But for both of those splits, the math doesn't work when it comes to producing results. Because here's something most people don't know. If you are a natural lifter, meaning you're not on steroids, there is a ceiling for how many hard sets you can do per muscle group, per workout, and still get results. And that ceiling is usually around 8 to 12 sets per muscle group per workout. Anything beyond that acts like a bell curve. So once you get to say 12 sets, if you start doing 15 sets, 20 sets, there becomes diminishing returns and you won't build muscle because your body won't be able to recover from it. So watch what happens when doing a bro split. If you train chest on Monday and you did all 12 sets of chest, that is your weekly total. That's all you can do. But now let's say we compare that to a lower body, upper body workout split. If you do upper body on Tuesday, and let's say you do 8 sets of chest, and then you do upper body again on Friday and you do another 8 sets of chest, you're now doing 16 sets of chest throughout the entire week. And not to mention, because you're not doing so much chest in one workout, you'll also be able to lift heavier. And have higher intensity. So you're doing more volume, you're lifting heavier and pushing yourself more. So you're gonna be able to build more muscle. And you can think of it like feeding your dog. You wouldn't just dump a whole week's worth of food into their bowl at once and say, ah, figure it out, because their stomach can only handle so much in one sitting and the rest is gonna spill all over the floor. It's gonna get wasted, thrown away. So you feed them twice a day, smaller portions. In this way, they can eat it all, they can absorb it all, and be ready for the next feeding. If you try to do 20 sets of chest in one workout, it's gonna overflow in the bowl, spill all over the floor, and it'll be a waste. But if you do the 2 moderate volume workouts per week, your body absorbs it all and it builds it all. And another example of this is one of our clients, Dan. Dan came to us wanting to drop body fat, build muscle, get stronger, and he had worked out before in the past. Past, but never on a proper strength training lower body, upper body workout program. And since joining our coaching, Dan has hit a PR on squats at 335 pounds, a PR on bench press at 245 pounds, PR on deadlift at 395 pounds. And again, he was working hard before joining coaching. He just didn't have a plan that was going to be able to optimize and maximize his time doing the right things To get the most results. So for you, you should be hitting your muscle groups 2 times per week. My favorite workout splits to do this are 4 times a week, lower body on Monday, upper body on Tuesday, lower body on Thursday, upper body on Friday. Or if you're working out 3 times a week, lower body on Monday, upper body on Wednesday, full body on Friday. And for most people, 3 to 4 times a week workouts is more than enough. But if you want to work out 5 times a week, you could do lower body Monday, upper body Tuesday, lower body Thursday, a push day on Friday, and a pull day on Saturday. Pick whichever one works best for your schedule, run it, and watch yourself actually make progress faster. And speaking of making faster progress, if you don't want to waste another year guessing whether you're doing all of this right, that's exactly what we do in my online coaching program. We build the workout split, we tell you exactly what workouts to do, we take care of your nutrition, and we guide and hold you accountable every single week. You can click the link in the description of the video below to learn more. And if you're sitting there thinking, all right, Eric, I'll fix all this stuff, but is there anything else I've been doing wrong? Well, I made a video on some other things you might be doing wrong with your weightlifting. You can click this video here next to watch that, and I'll see you over there.
