Eric Roberts breaks down fitness to one principle: progressive overload, which means doing more work over time. Add reps, increase weight, progress exercise variations, expand range of motion, or manipulate tempo. His client went from inverted rows to a full chin-up using these five strategies.
Most people love to overcomplicate working out. Why? To sell you shit. That's why. If they can overcomplicate it and make them seem way smarter, then they have a higher likelihood of selling you their $4,000 per month personal training package where you can get VIP access to just hearing them bitch about how their girl made them sleep on the couch that night. Except the only thing is working out doesn't have to be that complicated. There is one main principle that if you can truly get a hold of with your workouts, You will see all of the progress that you want to see. And that one thing is called progressive overload. Now, you might be sitting there saying, Eric, what the hell? You're being that trainer. I have no clue what progressive overload means. Well, my new YouTube friend, don't worry, because that's exactly what I'm going to explain in this video. Progressive overload really just means doing more work over a period of time. I want you to think of building muscle, gaining strength, and seeing progress from your workouts as pulling 3 levers. If you pull each one of these 3 levers, progress is going to come as a result. That first lever is going to be the lever of stimulus that is placed on your body. The second lever is the recovery lever where your body can recover from the stimulus. And then leading into the third lever, the adaptation lever, where your body then brings the result of you wanting to adapt, change, build muscle, get stronger. Now, the key part here is that first lever, that stimulus lever. You have to pull that stimulus lever to be able to get to the other 2 levels, to be able to get to the result. I want you to think of that first lever, the stimulus lever, as like sweating to your body. What is going to happen if you stand outside in the heat For a prolonged period of time, your core body temperature is going to raise to a certain level, and then once that level is hit, your body is going to start sweating like I already am right now being outside for 3 minutes, because the stimulus has reached a point where your body then triggers that next step in the process, which is sweating. I want you to think of your workouts as the same exact thing. You need to bring a stress and a stimulus that is great enough in order to then pull those other 2 levers that we talked about to get to the end result that you want to get to. How do you make sure the stimulus is great enough so you can pull that first lever? There's many ways. Let's take, for example, my incline dumbbell bench press right here. Last week, as you're going to see I was able to get four reps on this exercise, but failed on the fifth rep. My homie had to spot me on that last rep. I was not able to get that last rep. That was last week. So this week, as you're about to see right now, I was able to get those same 120 pound dumbbells, but for a full five reps this time in my set. That right there is pulling that lever. That is making the stimulus great enough that the other 2 levers are then going to pull simply just from me doing one more rep than what I did the previous week. Or let's take, for example, my back squats. The week prior, I was doing 315 pounds for 3 reps, as you can see me doing right here. And then the next week when I went into my workout, I was able to get 320 pounds for 3 reps. So once again, I created the stimulus that's great enough in order to trigger the other 2 levers being pulled because I was able to add 5 more pounds than what I did last week. Or let's take a really good example here of one of my clients, Stephanie. Stephanie really wanted to get working towards her first chin-up, so she started with doing these inverted rows. This is an exercise regression from a chin-up. So a chin-up is very hard, very challenging. The barbell inverted row is a regression from that. So she started at the barbell inverted row, and then she went to the next most difficult exercise, which is going to be these band-assisted chin-ups. And then finally, she was able to get her first chin-up. Great job, Stephanie. I love you. So for Stephanie, in that example, the way she was able to do this was she took one of the lesser difficult exercises, and then she eventually worked up to the most difficult exercise of that variation, which is a great way to provide enough stimulus and pull that lever to then get to the progress that you want to see. Another really good example of this could be doing something like a goblet squat and then progressing your way to doing a barbell back squat. All right, so what's the common theme here? You are just doing more over time. You just saw 3 of my most favorite ways to do this are Trying to add reps to your exercises week by week, trying to add weight to your exercises week by week, going from a less difficult exercise to a more difficult exercise. The other couple of ways I really like to do this as well, getting a better and more range of motion. So let's say for example, you're somebody who, if you can only squat down halfway and you have to come back up, if over time you are then able to squat down farther, that is going to be a great way to pull that lever. Or another great way could be, let's say for example, you're doing that same exact squat and you're going 1 second on the way down and coming back up. If let's say now you go 3 full seconds on the way down and come back up, that is another great way to pull that lever so you can pull the other 2 levers and get the progress you're looking to see. And that's really it. If you're doing one of those 5 main things in your workout consistently, week to week, month to month, I promise you, you are going to see the progress that you want to see. I hope this video helped you. If it did, please feel free to chuck a thumbs up. Let me know below in the comments section. Subscribe to the channel, and I appreciate you watching.
