I Wish I Knew This Before Lifting Weights (Pt 3)
In this instructional video, personal trainer Eric Roberts, drawing on 13 years of personal lifting experience and nearly a decade of coaching, outlines six core lessons he wishes he had known earlier in his weight‑training journey. He debunks the myth that post‑workout soreness signals muscle growth, explains why consistent exercise selection for 4‑8 weeks is essential, and introduces the double‑progression method—using rep ranges (e.g., 8‑12) to determine when to add weight rather than linear weekly increases. Roberts advocates shifting to heavier loads with lower rep ranges (5‑8) to raise one‑rep max strength, and stresses the importance of scheduled deload weeks every 4‑8 weeks to avoid chronic fatigue and trigger super‑compensation. He clarifies the proper use of warm‑up sets, warning against counting them as working sets, and provides a concrete protocol for warm‑up set volume and rest. Finally, he describes how to select the correct working weight by ensuring the last 1‑3 reps of a set noticeably slow down, using a “dying‑battery” analogy. Throughout, he promotes a free workout program link and his paid coaching services, positioning these lessons as a roadmap for novice to intermediate lifters to achieve faster, sustainable muscle and strength gains.
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I've been lifting weights for 13 years, and I've been a personal trainer coaching people on their workouts for almost 10 years. And if I had to go back in time knowing the lessons I know now, here's exactly what I would do differently. Lesson number 1, soreness doesn't equal muscle growth. The mistake I see almost everyone make is thinking that if you aren't sore the next day after your workout, you didn't have an effective workout and you're not going to build muscle. And the truth is, chasing soreness is actually killing Let's look at what usually happens. You go to the gym and you do a random leg day you see on Instagram or YouTube. It has 10 different exercises with 4 sets of 12 to 15 reps. The next morning you wake up, you're in pain, you can barely sit down on the toilet, and you're smiling, telling yourself, wow, I really destroyed my leg muscles. I must grow muscle from this. But here's what's actually happening. Muscle soreness is like wearing a brand new pair of running shoes. When you wear them for the first time, what happens? Your feet are usually a bit sore and you might even get some blisters. Now ask yourself, did that blister make you run faster? No. Did the blister make your feet stronger? Not really. You get a blister simply because the shoes are new. Your skin wasn't used to them. Muscle soreness is like that blister. It happens because you do something new or something you aren't used to. It doesn't mean your muscles are growing. It means they were surprised. And if you're always changing your workouts, doing new exercises, you're just collecting blisters. But to actually grow stronger muscles and build more muscle, you should do the same exercises for 4 to 8 weeks, get stronger and lift more weight with them week over week, and do them until you don't really get sore anymore. And as long as you're doing Regardless of how sore or not sore you get, as long as you're lifting heavier weight with your exercises week over week, you are building muscle and you're having an effective workout. And by the way, if you need a free workout program to follow, there's going to be a link in the description of this video below. You can feel free to download it and it's all yours. And speaking of lifting heavier weight week over week, this leads me into my next lesson. Lesson number 2, when to lift heavier weight. Most people hear me say lift heavier weight every week and they're like, Eric, at some point that has to run out. And yes, it does. Adding weight every week is something called linear progression, and it may work for a bit, but over time, or with exercises like side lateral raises, it's not possible to keep adding weight every single week. For example, let's take a bench press. Week 1, you lift 185 pounds for 10 reps. Week 2, you lift 190 pounds for 10 reps, and it was kind of hard, but you still got it. And then week 3, you go to lift 195 pounds for 10 reps, and you only get 6, and you fail. Now you feel weak. You try again next week, but you still can't do it, and you hit a wall because your body can't grow as fast as you're adding weight. So what's the solution? It's something called Double progression. Imagine your workout is a video game. The heavier weight is the boss at the end final level. You can't fight the boss straight away; you're too weak. And if you fight the boss before you're ready, you will lose. First, you have to defeat all those little enemies and gain experience and level up along the way. And in the gym, reps. Are those little enemies. You have to earn the right and level up to be able to add weight. So moving forward, instead of just shooting for one rep, let's say 10 reps, give yourself a rep range. So 8 to 12 reps. And let's say you're lifting 50 pounds. If you can only do 8 reps, you're not ready to increase the weight yet. If you can do 10 reps, You're not ready to increase the weight yet. But once you hit 12 reps with good form, you've defeated all the enemies, gained experience, and you've earned the right and are ready to add weight. So you go to 55 pounds. You then drop the weight. So you go to 55 pounds. You then drop the reps back down to 8 and then work your way back up to 12. And you just keep repeating this cycle until Until you die. Which is a perfect segue into my next lesson. Lesson 3, more weight, less reps. At some point, most people hit a strength plateau. You're stuck on 185 pounds for bench press, 225 pounds for squat, 25 pounds for dumbbell curls. And you think to build muscle, you need to keep doing higher reps, 10, 12, 15 reps. But because you never go heavier in weight, your body stops getting stronger. And because you aren't getting stronger, you can't go to the heavier weight that you need to grow. So let's say you've been stuck on bench press lifting 185 pounds for 10 reps. Every Monday you lie down, you do your 10 reps, you struggle on the last one, you try to get 11 or 12, but you're just stuck. You're waiting for this 185 pounds to magically feel lighter, but it never does. Why? Because you're never lifting anything heavier than 185 pounds. To fix this, we have to look at your top speed. Imagine your body is a car, your one rep max, how much weight you can lift for one all-out rep is your car's top speed, your working sets where you normally do 10 reps, that's your cruising speed. If your car's top speed is only 100 miles per hour, it's very hard to cruise at 90 miles per hour, the engine is shaking and struggling. But if you upgrade your engine so your top speed is 200 miles per hour, suddenly cruising at 90 feels easy. Lifting heavier weight for lower reps is upgrading your engine. So for the next few weeks, drop your reps down to the 5 to 8 rep range. Add more weight because you'll immediately be able to lift heavier weight for 5 reps than you could for 10 reps and raise your car's top speed. Because now when you're lifting heavier, when you go back to doing the 10 reps, the 185 pounds is going to feel light because you got stronger. Which leads me into my next point, which people really argue over. Lesson 4: Take deload weeks. This one is for all of you hard workers out there. And trust me, this was me. People think the only way to get results is to go 100% effort, balls to the walls every time. You think anything less won't get you results or you'll lose progress. But here's the truth. If you never let your foot off the gas, eventually, eventually your engine will explode and you will crash. What usually happens is you train really hard for a few weeks, you're crushing it, but then things kind of get weird. The weight suddenly starts to feel much heavier. Maybe your knees and your shoulders start to ache. You aren't sleeping well. You're feeling tired or grumpy, and you go to the gym and just push through it. But you're getting weaker. You're failing lifts that you normally hit with ease. And you think, I must be losing muscle. I got to train harder. You're not losing muscle and you don't have to train harder. You're actually drowning in fatigue. And to fix this, you need a deload week. Think of your progress like a slingshot. If you want to shoot a rock really far, you can't just like push the band forward. To create the power, you first have to pull back on the slingshot. Taking a deload week is pulling back on your slingshot. Every 4 to 8 weeks, go to the gym and lift lighter weight intentionally. Don't push yourself close to failure intentionally. And it may feel like you're going backwards or feeling lazy, but when you push yourself really hard, you build up fatigue. So when you're going lighter for this one week, your body does what is called a supercompensation effect, and it recovers from all of that stress and fatigue you've been building up over the last couple of weeks. And then it flushes out the stress, the aches, the pain, the tiredness. And when you come back after the deload week, not only you're fully recovered, you release the slingshot. And not only do you just go back to normal, you surpass and shoot past where you were with your strength and your muscle gains. And so now your progress looks like you push, push, push, take a deload week, push, push, push, take a deload week, and you'll continuously have a sustainable way to get stronger and make progress over time as opposed to just trying to push and then inevitably dipping and falling off. Which brings me to my next lesson. Lesson number 5. Use warm-up sets correctly. Please don't make the mistake of counting warm-up sets as working sets. You see 3 sets of an exercise, and the first set you do is kind of hard but not really. The second set is maybe a little bit harder, but you haven't really pushed yourself. And then finally, the third set is where you go all out. That's your heavy, hard, challenging set. By the time you get to that third set, You're either fatigued from the first 2 sets you did, or you've only done 1 set and you've counted the other 2 sets as working sets when they're not. For example, let's say your workout calls for 3 sets of 8 reps. Set 1, use 100 pounds for 8 reps. It's not really that hard. Set 2, use 120 pounds for 8 reps, and it's kind of hard but not really. And then set 3, 150 pounds for 8 reps, And that was your all-out set. You think you did 3 sets. You didn't. You did 1 working set and 2 warm-up sets. When a workout calls for 3 sets of an exercise, that means all 3 of those sets should be heavy, challenging, close-to-failure sets, not just the last one. It's like a pro baseball player or a golf player doing practice swings. Before they actually go and hit the ball as hard as they can, they take a few practice swings to check their form, get you— get loose a little bit, get used to the motion. And they're getting loose. They're not tiring themselves out with these practice swings. They're warming up. And then when it's time to go all out on the swing, they're ready to go. Before you do your 3 sets that your workout calls for, do 1 to 3 warm-up sets. And this doesn't need to be a lot. Do 3 to 5 reps max and use lightweight, nothing that really even challenges you or pushes you close to failure at all. And you also don't need to rest for a ton of time in between these sets. And this way you can make sure your form is good. You can get some blood flow to your muscles, which will help you prevent injury and lift heavier, and you don't tire yourself out. So then when you go into your 3 sets, you're ready to push as hard as you can for every one of those 3 sets. I promise this one change will make you more progress than you've probably ever made in your life. And which brings me to my next lesson. Lesson 6, how to pick the right weight to lift. If you get this wrong, your progress will be nonexistent. Most people look at a workout that says 15 reps and think, oh, okay, I'll just pick a light weight and burn out for that one. And on the contrary, they look at an exercise for 5 reps and they say, okay, I'm going to go super heavy here and go all out. Both of those are wrong, and let me explain why. The next time you do a set, I want you to video yourself, or at the very least, be aware of this when you're doing your set. Look at your first rep of the exercise. It moves pretty fast, right? Up and down, pretty easy. Now look at your last rep of that set. If your last rep moved just as fast as your first rep, the weight was too light. You didn't You can't challenge your muscles and you're not gonna grow muscle. To fix this, think of a toy robot with a dying battery. When you put fresh batteries in, the robot zooms across the room really fast. But as the battery dies, what happens? The robot tries to move forward, but it starts dragging and it's getting slower, and eventually it's barely moving at all. Your set should look exactly like that robot. It doesn't matter if you're doing 5 reps or 50 reps. The weight should be heavy enough that the last 1 to 3 reps of your set should slow down on the way up. And you should still be pushing as hard as you can, trying to move the weight as fast as you can. But the weight is heavy and your muscles are getting close to failure. So it's involuntarily slowing down. If the robot is still zooming across the room at the end of the set, putting back, go grab a heavier weight, and make the battery die. I promise if you take these lessons and implement them, you'll make more progress with your body composition in a few months than you've made probably in the last few years. And if you want more personalized help to build muscle and lose fat with a plan created just for you, you can click the link below in the description to learn more about my online coaching programs. And after you do that, you can watch this video here for more tips like this that I wish I knew before I started lifting weights.
