ERF 1,024: I Graded ChatGPT’s Leg Day (It Failed in 8 Places)

ChatGPT to write me a leg day, and I'll be honest with you, what it returned wasn't terrible. It was a 5 out of 10. But here's the problem: a 5 out of 10 workout gets you a 5 out of 10 result, and you're not spending an hour in the gym multiple days a week to get half the results you could be getting. So in this episode, after coaching over 25,000 clients and writing literally thousands of workout programs. I'm going to give you the exact leg day ChatGPT gave me. I'm going to grade it line by line, and I'm going to give you the 9 changes I would make to then make it a 10 out of 10 leg day. And every single one of these changes you'll be able to steal for your own workouts, immediately implement today to start seeing better and faster results. And before I dive into the actual leg day, I want to be clear. I'm not an AI hater. I don't think AI sucks. I'm not afraid it's going to take my job. I use AI in my day-to-day for many things. And even before AI was a real thing, I would go on bodybuilding.com. I would go on different websites to grab different workout programs that I could start doing because it's instant. It's free. Nobody's gonna judge you for it, and it gives you a starting point. But that's the point. Most AI outputs are a starting point that gets you half of the way there. And to see the best results you can, you're gonna need to make some adjustments to see those prog— see that progress that you're wanting to see. So let me go ahead and read you exactly what ChatGPT gave me. And the prompt that I put in there was, Give me a leg day workout I can do, because quite frankly, that's how most people use AI. Here's the output. Here's a simple, effective leg day workout you can do at the gym. Warmup, 5 to 10 minutes of light cardio, treadmill or bike, and some leg swings. Exercise 1, squats, 3 sets of 10 to 12 reps. Exercise 2, lunges, 3 sets of 10 to 12 reps. Exercise 3, leg press, 3 sets of 10 to 12 reps. Exercise four: Romanian deadlifts, three sets of ten to twelve reps. Exercise five: leg extensions, three sets of twelve to fifteen reps. Leg curls, three sets of twelve to fifteen reps. Calf raises, three sets of fifteen to twenty reps. Rest sixty to ninety seconds between sets. Finish with five to ten minutes of stretching. Stay hydrated and listen to your body. Okay, so this is where. The exercises themselves, we're doing some squats, some lunges, some Romanian deadlifts, leg curls, leg raises. Those are real movements. And I like how it had the bigger compound movements first, and then it ended with some isolation-based movements. And so it's roughly in the right order. There's a couple of things I would change to that, which we'll talk about, but it gives a rough starting point. That's why it's a 5 outta 10, not— A two out of ten. But I think this is where it hits a turn because I think this is why ChatGPT could be dangerous—not because it's wrong, but because it's half right. And this looks like a halfway decent workout, especially if you don't—you're not an expert in program design. And so here are the things that I would change to this to make it a ten out of ten workout. And the first one is going to be starting with. The warmup. So the warmup in this is like a checkbox. It's not really a warmup. 5 to 10 minutes of light cardio and some leg swings. What is that? That is not going to get you as optimally and efficiently prepared for the leg day that you're about to do. It may slightly get your heart rate up. It may slightly make your hips feel a tad bit better with some leg swings, which is very, very vague, but it's not going to Activate your glutes. It's not going to activate your core. It's not going to help you gain better range of motion in your ankles, in your hips. It's not going to help your thoracic spine. It's not going to get you prepared for lifting heavier weight. And this is the issue because especially for a lot of people who are listening to this, like myself included, I sit at a desk for a majority of my day doing computer work, doing content, answering emails. So for you, if you're sitting at a desk all day and then you try to go into the workout, lift some heavy weight by 5 to 10 minutes on the treadmill and some leg swings, you're asking for an injury. And I think of it like, imagine starting your car on a freezing morning and then like immediately flooring it on the highway. The engine is technically running, but Nothing is ready. So your first squat set on a treadmill-only leg swing warmup, that would be like you just flooring it on the highway immediately after you start the car. So the fixes are going to be a couple of layers here. Number one, you should incorporate glute activation. So when I say glute activation, I just mean you should be contracting your glute muscles. So think about A glute bridge. Think about a single leg glute bridge, a single leg hip thrust. You could even do something like a hip 90-90 where you're getting your glute, you know, your glutes are working to move your hips side to side. This is going to ensure a lot of your lower body movements, even if you're trying to prioritize your quads, the front of your legs, it's going to work your glutes. And if your glutes are properly firing, properly contracting, this also will take pressure off of your knees and And your lower back. So that's really important. Number 2 would be some sort of core activation. And again, this just means using your core muscles to contract your muscles before you go into the workout. This can be beneficial because the more your core is working, the less your lower back is going to have to work, which means the less your lower back is going to hurt. And then number 3, doing some sort of I'll pair these 2 things together, doing some sort of mobility work and/or making sure you do proper warmup sets. And the reason I kind of link those together is because let's say you're doing squats, for example, you could do a couple of lighter weight warmup sets. So let's say you're going to squat 225 pounds as your heavy sets. You could, you might squat 100 pounds, 135 pounds, 155 pounds for like 3 to 4 reps and really just focus on getting down to proper depth, maybe pausing for a second or 2 at the bottom, making sure your ankle mobility is good, making sure you can get proper range of motion, making sure your hips feel good and kind of moving through the range of motion in your hips to then allow yourself to do those squats when your body is now more warmed up versus just going into it with No glute work, no core work, no mobility work, and then going to go try and lift heavy. That is a recipe for injury. So all 3 of these things is what your warmup should include. And this is what we include in our, every single one of the programs I write and all of the programs our coaches write for our clients. It'll have 2 to 3 exercises as a warmup. And we can talk about exactly what this leg day is going to look like towards the end of this episode. So be sure to stick around for that, but it'll have 2 or 3 exercises and And then we do some warmup sets before you go and do your heavyweight. So that would be the first change I would make is to have a real warmup. Don't just BS the warmup. And this is important. And I'm talking to some of our clients who listen to this as well. Do not skip your warmup. It'll prevent injury. It'll improve your mobility, less aches, less pains, and it will help you lift heavier. And if you do it right, it should only take you 5 minutes. Even adding a couple of warmup sets. Let's say you do 2 to 3 warmup sets of squats. You might think, oh, it's going to take forever. Not really. You shouldn't be resting for a long time in between a warmup set because you're not going anywhere close to failure. You're just warming up. You're getting the range of motion and you're, you don't need to rest for a long time in between warmup sets because you're not pushing yourself super heavy. So that is fix number 1. Fix number 2. I believe the wrong muscles got a majority of the work. So let me count this out out loud. It has squats, lunges, leg press, leg extensions. That's 4 quad dominant exercises. For your posterior chain, for the backside of your body, your glutes and your hamstrings, you have 1 RDL. And one leg curl. The muscles that matter the most, especially for people who sit at a desk all day, got the least amount of work. And why does this matter? Your glutes are one of, if not the biggest muscle in your body. For people who listen to this, if you're not active all day, if you're not an athlete and you're sitting down all day, you're in what we call constant hip flexion, where like your knee is closer to your chest. So think about you're sitting down right now. This is technically hip flexion. Very rarely do we get into hip extension, where at the top of a hip thrust, for example, that is the top of that hip extension, or at the top of an RDL getting into some producing that hip extension. So our quads and our hip flexors are usually very tight, and then our glutes and our hamstrings are typically Not active. They're, if you've heard the term sleepy before, which your muscles are always going to fire, otherwise you wouldn't be able to walk. But for the purpose of this conversation, those posterior chain muscles don't get nearly as much work, which then means there's more work on the front, less work on the back, which causes injuries, muscle imbalances, tightness in your hip flexors, pain in your lower back. And so I believe the way I like to program design workouts, we should be trying to either balance and/or work in more of the posterior chain work as opposed to the anterior chain work. And the analogy I wrote down here was it's like watering your front yard every single day because that's what your neighbors see. And then your whole backyard turns brown. It's like ChatGPT just watered the front yard 4 times without giving the backyard a splash of water. And so the fix here would be, like I said, trying to balance out squat patterns. So think leg press, lunges, Bulgarian split squats, regular squats with hip hinge patterns, pulling patterns. So think RDL, hip thrust, single leg RDL, 45-degree back extensions, because you're trying to make sure the backside of your body is getting adequate, if not more than adequate amount of work to decrease that risk of injury and balance out your body to tweak and adjust your current lifestyle factors that are causing you to have the front of your body work a bit more. So again, I'm going to talk about what the exact rewrite of the program would look like here in a second, but I would actually remove some exercises, which hint, this may also be another fix I would make, and I would add in different exercises. So there might be less total exercises, but you're going to get a better workout. And this is an important part. A 10 out of 10 leg day isn't about adding more. You don't do more exercises, more workouts. It's often about deleting. It's often about taking Taking away, removing some exercises so you can have better quality. You may have heard the phrase before, you know, quality over quantity. That's the way I like to program design. And I often find it's very realistic for clients who, you don't live in the gym all day. You have other obligations and responsibilities between kids, between family, between work. So doing less will actually get you more, which is a crazy thing to think about. But it's happening. And again, I'll talk through exactly what that looks like in the rewrite. Now, fix number 3, if I go back and look at the actual program, everything is 3 sets of 10 to 12 reps, 3 sets of 12 to 15 reps. This is a, should I do lightweight for high reps or should I do heavyweight for low reps? We can talk about that, but damn near every exercise got like the same prescription of sets and reps, regardless of what the exercise is. And why does this matter? A squat and a leg curl are 2 different tools with 2 different jobs. A squat is a bigger compound lift that should be building a good amount of strength in your workouts. That means you'll typically do lower reps with heavier load. A machine and/or isolation-based work, maybe that might be a tad bit higher rep because you're specifically trying to target one muscle versus build overall strength. And so one of my biggest pet peeves with this workout program is nothing, no ex— even though the exercises were technically okay, none of them, in my opinion, were done with the correct sets and reps prescription to maximize the results you're getting from that exercise. Just doing like 3 sets of 10 to 12 reps for everything is like beige paint of workout programming. It's kind of what you pick when you don't wanna make a decision. It's kind of just like the neutral. Nobody ever walked into a house and was like, oh wow, like look at that beige. That's really, really cool. Like nobody who's gonna build a great set of legs, whether it be aesthetically, whether it be strength-wise, is just doing 3 sets of 10 to 12 reps. There are other rep ranges you should be including. And so what would the fixed be? The fix be for this? Try to match the rep range to the exercise a bit more. So if you're doing a squat, an RDL, a hip thrust, a split squat, typically those are going to be in that 5 to 8, maybe 5 to 10 rep range. So you're going to do a little bit heavier weight for a little bit lower rep. And then when you go to something like a leg extension, A leg curl, a calf raise. Now you might go more to like eight reps, maybe starting at ten reps to maybe twelve to fifteen reps. You might do a little bit lighter weight with higher rep. And a quick note here: even if you're doing twelve reps, you should still be picking a weight that is heavy to do for twelve reps. So everything is heavy. It's not like I'm going to do lighter weight. Technically, the weight you pick may be lighter than what you would do for five reps, but you should be picking a weight that is heavy. for 12 reps. But now when you make this adjustment, every exercise is doing the job that it's actually good at. Squats are a great strength-building exercise, so a little bit of lower rep would make a ton of sense there. A leg curl or a leg extension is great at isolating the muscle, so maybe an 8 or a 10 rep or a 12 rep would work better there. So The rep ranges, this will translate into once you get past the beginner stage, because if you're not doing anything, then you just doing something is going to produce results. But after you get past that beginner stage where like maybe you've been working out for, you know, a couple of months in a row now, you've started to be consistent. This is where you're going to see physically see these changes in both your strength and your physique, your aesthetics, your muscles. By making these adjustments to your rep ranges. And this is one of, if not the biggest things we see with clients who join us when they come to us for our online coaching program. We get a lot of people who they're just using ChatGPT. They have worked with another trainer who all they programmed was 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps. They're doing cardio classes like HIIT classes with very, very high reps. Once we switch up their workout program and get them on You know, some of these different rep ranges, I swear I don't say this often, but this is true for this. They see physical change in their body relatively quickly. I'm talking within like 1 to 3 months. And depending on who you are, you may think 3 months is a long time, but 3 months is not a long time. They see tangible physical change in their body and their strength. Because think about it now, if you're doing 12 reps on everything, now you're throwing in 5 reps of a squat automatically. You can lift way heavier for 5 reps than you could for 12 reps. And the more you do that, the faster your strength increases. So that's a big one that ChatGPT didn't get right. Now, fix number 4. And by the way, if you're listening to this and you're like, wow, this is starting to make some sense. And you're also thinking, I don't want to build this by myself. I don't know what to do. We already take care of this for you. So if you're interested in joining our online coaching program, there's 2 options for you. The first one is going to be our 8-week challenge. This is a fully custom personalized one-on-one coaching experience. You can click the link in the description of the episode below to learn more. The second one is my app. It's called my Clubhouse app. It has all of our programs inside. This is more of, if you just want a plan to follow, not as much accountability, that would be the right option for you. So that will also be a link in the description below of this episode. So feel free to go check them out. Now, Fix number 4, rest time. What ChatGPT said was rest 60 to 90 seconds in between sets, all sets. Why does this matter? Now that we're going to lift heavier for less reps, 60 seconds of rest after a really hard set of heavy squats before your next set you're supposed to do means you're not going to recover fully. So then you'll have to lift lighter weight For less reps. And every set after the first set is almost like a discounted set. You're not able to push as hard and as heavy as you could, which— how do you build muscle? You lift heavier, you push yourself close to failure. And you may think, well, if I rest shorter, I'm going to be burnt out. And that would be to failure. No, that would be to cardio failure. You would be failing because Your cardiovascular system hasn't recovered fully yet, not your muscles. And if we're trying to build strength and build muscle, which is what your strength training workouts should be centered around, you should do cardio separately. Then you want your muscles to be the point of failure, muscular failure, not your lungs failing. So think about it like a phone battery. You wouldn't leave your house in the morning at 20% battery. That would suck. But shorter rest on bigger compound lifts means you're starting every set at 20%. And then you're wondering why you're not able to go as hard, go as long, push yourself as heavy. So the fix for this would be, especially when we are focused on building strength and building muscle for big compound lifts, squats, bench press, deadlifts, RDLs, hip thrust, you should be resting for 2 up to 5 minutes. Everybody's different, but at least 2 minutes. And if you're like, my God, that's too long, what am I going to do? If you don't need 2 minutes of rest after a heavy set of squats, you're not going heavy enough. You need to lift heavier. That is a telltale sign that you could lift heavier and you should lift heavier. And even for other movements like a lunge, a leg curl, a leg extension, I would rest at least 90 seconds, if not still 2 minutes. You may not need as long Because you may not be as fatigued, both from mentally and physically as fatigued, but you should still be resting for 90 seconds because studies have shown that is the amount of time that will fully allow your muscles to recover, to allow you to push as hard as you can in the upcoming set. And for some reason, people think resting longer means you're lazy or you're not working as hard. It's Actually the exact opposite, because you are a— because you rest longer, you're able to push harder in your next set versus if you rested shorter, you're not pushing as hard in your next set. So you're working less hard the less time you rest. You're working harder the more time you rest. And by the way, I know I'm going to get some objections of, well, Eric, I only have 45 minutes to work out. That's going to take me so long. Don't worry. Later in the podcast, I'm going to talk about another fix that can help you. And I'll fix that objection right there. And the very last thing I'll say is, again, if you're somebody who thinks being out of breath is correlated with a good workout, number one, we have to separate cardio, high-intensity cardio workouts versus strength and muscle building workouts. Those are 2 separate things. And by the way, I am somebody who I do both. I am currently training for a HYROX race where I have to do some higher intensity cardio, and I'm still keeping up my strength training. So I do both. I'm not saying the high intensity cardio is bad, but you need to separate the high intensity cardio from your strength training. And so if you're somebody who's like doing these group classes and you're like, well, I'm lifting weights in them, just because you lift weights doesn't mean you're doing a strength training and muscle building workout. You're just lifting weights while doing cardio. Those are 2 different things. And you should, if you want to do that, that's fine, but they should be separated. All right. Going into fix number 5. And this is a big one that ChatGPT isn't going to be able to really do for you. So what ChatGPT did was 3 sets of 10 reps, 10 reps, 10 reps, 10 reps. Okay. At what weight? What is the intensity? How hard should you push? What happens next week? What happens next month? ChatGPT never says any of that. It just gives you a single workout with no target and no future. And why does this matter? This is the single biggest reason that people will train and work out, but yet look the same and stay at the same weight that they're lifting for years. If the weight never goes up, if the sets don't get harder, your body has no reason to change. Just because you work out doesn't mean your body's gonna change. Actually, your body will find every single reason not to change. It's called homeostasis. It wants to stay the exact same. So progressive overload, which just means doing a little bit more over time, is the entire engine of results. You have to have progressive overload specifically, purposefully, intentfully worked into your program. So ChatGPT just shipped the car without an engine. Like, imagine showing up to the same job, doing the same task at the same pace for 5 years and expecting a promotion just because like you've been there. That's what lifting the same weight for the same reps every week is. Your body doesn't promote you for attendance. It promotes you for doing more. For going above and beyond, for showing that you're capable of taking on more and doing more. So the fix here would be 2 rules. Number one, every set you do should be 1 to 2 reps shy of failure. So if it says 3 sets, all 3 of those sets should be heavy, hard, challenging, close to failure sets, not just the last one. Number 2, you need to track your workouts. Write down How much weight did you lift? Write down how much weight, how much, how much weight did you lift? Write down how many reps did you do? And then guess what? Next week, you're going to look back at that. You're going to see what you did and you're going to try to beat it this week. This is one of the reasons why our clients love my app so much that I built is because inside of our app, you can track your workouts and then you can click a button. It'll show you your all-time personal best on that exercise. And it will show you what you did last week and the week prior and the week prior. So you can see like, what did I do last week? I need to beat it this week. And you can see if, let's say you're doing an exercise in month 1, you don't do it in month 2, and you come back to it in month 3, you can look at that and see, oh, okay, the last time I did this, this is what I finished with. I'm gonna try to beat this next time. People love that inside of our Clubhouse app. Which again, there'll be a link in the description of the episode below if you want to get inside, but write that stuff down and try to beat it each week. And it's also really cool because every week you can make progress, even if it's just one more rep on one set, because you might be thinking, well, Eric, I can't lift heavier every week. You don't have to lift heavier every week. Add one rep on one set. If you're doing 3 sets, you're telling me you can't squeeze out one more rep. On one more set, of course you can. Almost everybody can do that at least once in their workout. And so every week you can make tangible progress because what did we say? Progressive overload is doing more over time. So one more rep on one set is doing more over time. So couple keynotes before I move on from this point here. Remember when I say pushing one to two reps shy of failure, that means. You should finish your set and think to yourself, I maybe could have gotten 1 or 2 more reps max. There's no way I could have done more. And this is also why just prompting, like typing into ChatGPT, just prompting this isn't going to make the 5 out of 10 workout plan a 10 out of 10 workout plan, because the plan has to react to how last week actually went. And this is one of the really cool things our clients love again with our program is a chatbot isn't going to watch your logbook, but a coach does. So like for our clients who are in our 8-week challenge with one-on-one coaching, every week they have a check-in with their coach and their coach looks over their workouts and I say, okay, cool. You did this, this, and this. I think you can do this, this, and this next week. Okay, cool. Here was your personal record last week. Let's try to beat it by doing this this week. Hey, I think you can lift heavier on this based on the form video that you sent over to me. An AI chatbot is never going to be able to do that for you. So fix number 6, single leg work is an afterthought. So what ChatGPT did, it put lunges in there. Okay. That's a single leg exercise. Fair enough. But number one, it's just 3 sets of 10 reps with no purpose attached. And every other exercise that was in here was both legs at the same time. So while it did give one single leg exercise, I think it's lacking in the amount of unilateral work that you're doing because almost everybody has one side that is stronger than the other, and your workout program should address that. And why does this matter? 2-leg exercises let your strong side just quietly kind of carry the load. Until you get injured. And this is how most injuries happen because over time there just becomes a bigger and bigger and bigger strength discrepancy. And at some point your weaker side is not going to be able to keep up, which means it gets injured. But doing more single leg unilateral work forces each leg to pull its own weight. And especially for somebody who sits at a desk all day, maybe you have some preexisting injuries just from, for example, I know a lot of the clients I coached Now, but especially in person, they were moms of like younger kids, or, or if they were just moms who had had younger kids at one point and they would carry their, their baby, they would carry their weight on one side. And so like their hips and their glutes were having a big muscle imbalance, which then led to back injuries, knee injuries, hip injuries. So like they had a preexisting injury because of some of their lifestyle factors. Or again, if we sit at a desk all day, and you're not doing proper exercises, there's going to be some muscle imbalances and injuries that pop up. So not only will it help with forcing each side of your body to do its own work, but it will also help with balance, stability, having strong and healthy joints and bones, and being the person who doesn't have to worry about getting up and off the toilet at 70 years old or going up and down the steps at 80 years old. Imagine like if one tire on your car is more worn than the other 3, the whole car kind of starts pulling to one side. You can keep driving it, but you're burning the other good tires to try to cover the bad one. And that's like your legs with only doing 2-leg exercises on everything. So what would the fix be like? Cool. I would keep the lunges, but I would Have the proper rep range, and I may put something else in like a single leg RDL. So not just a quad dominant single leg movement, but I would now do some sort of hip hinge single leg dominant movement. So a single leg RDL, a single leg hip thrust, a kickstand hip thrust, a kickstand RDL, some sort of movement that will also work your posterior chain and. Starting with your weaker side. Again, something that ChatGPT didn't say here. If you know you have a weaker side, start with that weaker side and let the weaker side decide what weight you are going to use. So don't use 2 different weights for each side. You should be using the weight that you can use for your weaker side and then match that to your stronger side. Because otherwise the muscle imbalance will just make— get worse. And by the way, single leg exercises kind of suck, like Bulgarian split squats. You know, these exercises, I get it. They're not as fun. And it may add some time to your workout, quite frankly, because you're going to have to do each side as opposed to just doing one of the, you know, two leg squats. But number one, it's worth it. And number two, you need to set up your workout in a way that doesn't take so much time, which we will talk about. Now, fix number 7, it had zero core work, zero, not one exercise. And leg day is secretly the best day for your core because your core is already going to be working doing squats, deadlifts. So, and like I mentioned earlier about the warmups with doing squats and deadlifts and lunges and RDLs and hip thrust, if you don't have your core working properly, you're Back is at such a higher risk of injury. And if we're sitting all day long, our core is not active when we're sitting all day long. So you're asking yourself to— you drive to work sitting in a car, you go to work, sit at a desk all day, you drive to the gym sitting in the car, and then all of a sudden your core is supposed to magically work as best as it could to go do squats and deadlifts. That's not realistic to ask your body. Your core is like the foundation of your house. You can build heavier and heavier floors On top of your house. But if the foundation never got reinforced, eventually those walls are going to crack, and that crack is your lower back. So how would we fix this? Like I said earlier, putting in some core exercises in the warmup, even just one exercise of a side plank, a regular plank, a cable crunch, a Copenhagen plank, some sort of core workout to get that strength and stability. And then also what we have been doing recently for our more recent programs with our clients is incorporating it into supersets and/or during rest times. So I'll give my example. I recently did a leg day where I did front foot elevated split squats superset with a hollow hold pullover. So that's, you're, you're laying on your back. Your legs are up in the air, you're taking a weight, you're going behind your head, and you're bringing it back in front of you. So that was an anti-extension core exercise. I worked that into a superset of my leg day, and then I did a single leg RDL superset with a standing windmill. And this is more for like core, but also what is called your QL muscle, your quadratus lumborum. And this is like your lower back muscle. So I just worked it into a superset. And this is an easy way to get in some extra core work without having to add a bunch of time. You're already doing the front foot elevated split squat, just superset with a hollow hold pullover. And depending on how much time you have, you can either just superset this and then rest for the full 2 minutes, or depending on your time, you can just use this as a part of the rest because this shouldn't be super challenging for you. You should still allow yourself to kind of bring your heart rate down. And you may have heard before too, like, oh, abs are made in the kitchen. No, abs are actually made in your workouts. Your ab muscles are a muscle just like any other muscle. Your abs may be more revealed in the kitchen by losing fat through your nutrition, but losing fat and preventing injury are 2 different things. And so we're talking about not just seeing your abs more, but actually protecting Your abs and your lower back from injury. Fix number 8, stretch and stay hydrated. Okay. That is very vague. What ChatGPT said was the cool down is 5 to 10 minutes of stretching. Stretch what? How long do you stretch? What happens next week? There's like, it's just so vague. It's very, and also even if you were to prompt and ask it like, hey, well, what do I stretch? It might tell you, oh, stretch your hamstrings, but like, What stretches your hamstrings? If you stretch your hamstrings, what should you also be stretching? By the way, do you even need to stretch during, after a workout? And also stay hydrated. Okay. Well, what, how much should I be drinking? Does it matter how much I sweated or not? Does it matter how much carbs I ate or not? Does it matter if I did lower body or upper body or just a cardio day? So why does this matter? I think one of the flaws between all of this is like, it's just so vague. Results don't come from vague. Results come from specific. So I think like a workout is like a brick and a program is a house. ChatGPT might hand you the bricks all day long, but it's never going to build the house because it doesn't know what you did last week. It doesn't know what's going on this week. It doesn't know what are some of your strengths and weaknesses? What are your time allotments? What are your triggers? What happens when you get stressed? Do you live a busy life where you travel a lot? Well, how do you adjust for that then? Are you also doing some sort of cardio? Are you training for a HYROX race? So the fix for stretch and stay hydrated would be, it needs to be more specific. And quite frankly, I don't think you need to spend a lot of time, if any at all, stretching after your workout. If you would like to and it makes you feel better, that's awesome, but you don't need to by any means. And stay hydrated would be get more specific around If you're doing an exercise, if you're doing a workout that you sweat a bit more and it drains you a bit more, then you very well may need some extra hydration to go along with that. So let's say, for example, on my HYROX days, I sweat a shit ton, but I also make sure I know that. So I have extra electrolytes that day and I have about an extra 60 ounces of water that day. So you would have to get more specific with exactly what bricks need to be there to build the house. And then fix number 9. Too many fucking exercises. For those of you who have followed me for a while, you may have heard me say this, but squats, lunges, leg press, leg press, Romanian deadlift, leg curls, leg extensions, calf raises, 7 exercises on a leg day, and 4 of those being quad dominant exercises. Like, that's a good amount of exercises. Typically, we like to throw in about 4 to 6 exercises on a leg day. And why is this important? Because quality over quantity. You, I trust me when I say you do not need as much as you think to see progress. You just don't. It's one thing if maybe you're a bodybuilder and you're trying to step on a bodybuilding stage. The clients that we coach, we're not coaching bodybuilders who step on a bodybuilding stage. One of our clients, Coach Jenna, is doing that and she's awesome and she's going to crush it. And I can't wait to see her crush it. But typically we don't coach those people. So if you're just like a busy 30 to 55-year-old who you have a job, you have kids, you want to have a social life, you want to be able to enjoy your life a bit. You don't want to live in the gym. Most of our clients' workouts are between 30 to 60 minutes. Maybe if somebody really loves the gym and they have the extra time, maybe it's 75 minutes. But typically everything I just said here can fit within a 30 to 60-minute workout program. And how would this look like? Well, I'm glad you asked because now let's go ahead and read out how I would change this leg day to make it a 10 out of 10 leg day. So first I would start with a specific warmup. This would look like glute bridges, 2 sets of 8 reps, hip 90-90 rotations, 2 sets of 6 reps each side. And exercise number 3 in the warmup would be a plank Transfer, where you're moving the weight side to side. Because now you're warming up your glutes, you're getting hip mobility, and you're getting core strength in that warmup. So that's 2 sets of those 3 exercises. That should maybe take you 5 to 7 minutes max. The first exercise after the warmup is going to be a superset. We'll stick with a squat pattern. So a barbell back squat, 3 sets, of 5 to 8 reps superset with a hollow hold pullover. And you're going to rest for 3 minutes after those 2 exercises. So you'll have one set of the squat, one set of the hollow hold pullover, rest for 3 minutes, maybe 2 minutes if you're really short on time. You'll do that 3 times. Next is going to be a single leg RDL, 3 sets Of six to ten reps, superset with some sort of ankle mobility. I like doing something like an elevated ankle mobility or an ankle wall touch, and this would be three sets of five reps. You could definitely count this one during your rest because this is not going to be very taxing for you at all. And again, you would rest for two minutes in between that superset. You'll do that three times. Third exercise would be now some sort of single leg quad dominant. So this might be a rear foot elevated split squat, and you would do 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps superset. I'm sorry, not superset. 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps starting with the weaker leg. So if you know your left leg is typically weaker than your right, you would start every set with that weaker leg. So that would be exercise number 3. And then exercise number 4 would be a superset. Of a simple leg extension and leg curl. So you'll do 2 sets of 10 to 12 reps for each of those, resting for 2 minutes after the superset. So you'll do the leg extension, go into the leg curl, rest for 2 minutes, leg extension, leg curl, rest for 2 minutes. And that's it. That is the exercise. That is the workout. That specific workout will likely take you, I'd say, 45-ish minutes. You can, you can change some things up if you need only 30 minutes. You can change, we would change some things up there, but But that's the leg day because now you're having all of the rep ranges, you're resting for the proper time. All of the fixes that we just said there can be worked into a very specific 30 to 60 minute leg day that hits all of the things we talked about. And then of course, like we said, you would track your workouts. You would write down how much weight did you lift. You'd make sure you're resting for the proper amount of time. You're making sure you're doing the unilateral, starting with the weaker side. You're now working in core work, mobility work. You're being very specific. You're, you're, you're pushing 1 to 2 reps close to failure. And so that's how I would set up a 10 out of 10 leg day for you. You have everything you need, all the fixes that we talked about with 5 real leg exercises. I'm not gonna count like the core and/or mobility exercises that we just talked about because those are just kind of like a supplemental that you can do in conjunction with. But you have about 5 core leg exercises that will take you roughly 45 minutes. And so again, here's the truth. ChatGPT didn't give you a bad workout. It just gave you an incomplete workout. It gave you a half workout, but you don't want to do a half workout to get half those results. Even if it looks close enough, you're going to do it for 3 months, 6 months, and not fucking get anywhere, which I don't want you to waste any of your time. That doesn't make any sense. So If you got to the end of this episode thinking, wow, Eric, this is exactly why I don't want to guess anymore in my workouts. That is what we do in our online coaching program. I just chatted with you for 50 minutes straight here about workouts. And trust me, I could keep going, but I don't want to bore you. So like, think of it like this. ChatGPT can print you a map, but coaching is the GPS. The map doesn't know where you took a wrong turn. It just, it doesn't know where there's traffic. It doesn't recalculate when life happens. It just shows you how to get there. A GPS every single day updates in real time. So if there's traffic, if you miss a turn, if there's a better route, that's what myself and my team do with our online coaching program. We will build it around your schedule, your body, your goals, your routine, and then we adjust every single week based on what's actually happening. So the link for our 8-week challenge, one-on-one coaching, is in the description below. Or if you're like, I don't need a lot of accountability, I just want a plan, you can check out my Clubhouse app. The link will be in the description below as well. I really hope this podcast today helped you, and if it did, feel free to share it with somebody so they can learn as well. Hope you guys have a great rest of your day, and we'll chat soon.