Top 6 Most Common Muscle Building Mistakes

In this video, let's cover the top 6 reasons why you're not building the muscle that you want to build and what you can do to fix them so you can build muscle and look better naked. Let's dive in. The first reason you are not building the muscle that you want to build is because you are not lifting with nearly enough intensity. And let me make sure I make myself very clear on what I mean by intensity. I do not mean how sweaty you are. I do not mean how high your heart rate is. I do not mean how out of breath you are. I don't mean you're like doubled over on your hands and knees and really just exhausted. That's not what I mean by lifting with high intensity. What I mean by lifting with high intensity is you need to be pushing yourself very close to failure and lifting heavy weights. We will talk about what heavy weights means a little bit later in this video, so please feel free to stick around. But you need to be lifting with heavy weight and pushing that heavy weight very close to failure. And the reason this is, is because there is something called mechanical tension. You don't even really need to know what that means or the science behind it. You just need to know that's what you need. You need mechanical tension in order to build muscle. If you don't have mechanical tension, you are not going to be able to build muscle. And just think of mechanical tension as like creating a lot of tension, creating a lot of stress inside of your muscle fibers. And so when you lift heavy and you push yourself very close to failure, you are creating high levels of mechanical tension. If you are going into your workouts and just like, You're having a tickle fest or you're having a pillow fight or you're working out and talking to your friend beside you about where you guys are going to go get Starbucks after, that is not lifting with enough intensity. And this is going to sound harsh, but please just stick with me here. If somebody had a gun pointed to your head and was like, do as many reps as you can, I need you to go all the way to failure. And if you don't, I'm going to pull the trigger. I know it sounds harsh, but stick with me. The reason I say it with that much intensity is because think about you and your workouts right now, right? When you're doing your workouts, if somebody put a gun to your head and said you need to go all the way to failure, how many more reps do you think you could do? Could you do 5 more? Could you do 10 more? Could you potentially do 20 or 30 more reps? Which by the way, I have seen that before. I have never put a gun to somebody's head. Let me make sure I'm very clear, but I have made somebody push themselves very close to failure. And with that being said, they got an extra 8 reps or 10 reps or 20 reps that they didn't think they were going to do. The reason this is important is because of this. There is something called your RIR. This is going to stand for reps in reserve. Okay? This is like when you get done a set. So let's say you're doing 10 reps. When you get done a set, You need to make sure that you are having anywhere between like a 0 to 3 RIR. What does that mean? That literally means when you get done that set, again, gun to your head, you maybe could have done 1, 2, or 3 more reps. Maybe if there was a gun to your head, you could have done 1 or 2 or 3 more reps. That needs to be your RIR, a 1 to 3 RIR on your sets, on your exercises, because that is what is going to provide the most mechanical tension, the most stimulus in order for your body to then create change. Because remember, your body wants to maintain something called homeostasis. It doesn't want to lose weight, gain weight, doesn't want to lose muscle, build muscle. It just wants to stay the exact same because that is what is easiest to keep you alive. And so for you to create change, you need to give your body a reason to change. Otherwise it has no reason to change. It's going to stay the exact same. This is where the RIR, this is where lifting with enough intensity, this is where creating this Mechanical tension comes into play. That's the main driver. And if you're not lifting with a 1 to 3 RIR, reps in reserve, you're not going to build muscle. And it might seem like super simple, but it's just the truth. If you lift very close to failure, you will be able to build muscle. And you're probably going to ask me, Eric, you know, what is heavy? How do I know if I'm going close to failure? We'll talk about what heavy means in a second, but I'm going to put a video up right here where I want you to watch from the start to the finish. Do you see how from the start my reps are kind of like, they're going pretty smooth, going pretty well, and then as I look to get into the latter part of the reps, you're going to see the speed on the way up is going down. So the speed on the concentric portion, which is like, think about if you're doing a chest press or a shoulder press on the way up, or if you're doing like a lat pulldown or a row, it's actually on the way up. So it's a little bit inverse, but when you're actually performing the exercise, the speed slows down. Not because you're trying to slow it down. You're still trying to move it heavy and move it quick and you know you're trying to be explosive. You just can't move it that fast because your muscles are getting close to failure. That is the easiest way to know if you are working out and if your workouts are actually going to produce muscle building is are your last couple of reps looking like that? Are your last couple of reps slowing down involuntarily? And again, the involuntarily part is very big. You're not trying to slow your reps down. You're still trying to be explosive and move them. You just can't because your muscles are getting close to failure. If that's happening, then you know you are lifting heavy enough. You know you are lifting with enough intensity in order to build muscle. The second reason you're not building the muscle you want to build is because either you're not lifting with enough volume or you're lifting with too much volume. And let me explain. Number 1, what does volume mean in the terms of muscle building? Volume is just going to be described as how many sets per muscle group per week are you doing for that muscle group. And by the way, this is working sets. What we just learned in point 1, going close to failure, pushing yourself, the last couple of reps are slowing down on the way up, that is going to be a working Set. There is a difference between your working sets and your warmup sets. Let's say, for example, your workout program tells you to do 3 sets of 6 to 8 reps. Those 3 sets are all working sets. They should be, they should all be working sets. And so you shouldn't be like, okay, set 1 was like kind of easy. And then set 2 was like, okay, it was kind of hard, but set 3 was really hard. That set 3 is actually set 1 because every one of your working sets should be that difficult, should be that challenging. If you're doing 3 sets of 6 to 8, it shouldn't be 2 sets are kind of easy and then finally your last set's hard. No, all 3 of those sets should be hard working sets that are close to failure. So volume means there is going to be working sets Per muscle group per week. That is the definition of volume for building muscle. Now, how much volume should you be doing per muscle group? It somewhat depends on your training history. So if you're a beginner, you're really going to see progress no matter what, especially if you're following a really good training program. I really wouldn't even super concern yourself with it because I would just be more concerned with Are you following a good program? If you're not, or if you're just kind of like making shit up along the way or whatever the case may be, I would strongly encourage you to follow a really good training program because that's going to help. That's going to be making sure, you know, you're getting all the volume, you're getting all of the sets, you're getting all of the reps, you're getting all of these things. You won't have to think about it once you get a little bit more towards that like later stage beginner, more intermediate to even more advanced. Usually speaking, for your bigger muscle groups, it's going to be somewhere around that, like 10 to 20 sets per muscle group per week. Let's just take your glutes, for example. Let's say you're doing a 4 times a week lower body, upper body, lower body, upper body. Let's say you're doing glutes on both lower body days. You're doing Bulgarian split squats for 3 sets of 6 reps. You're doing hip thrust for 3 sets of 8 reps, and then you're doing a glute kickback for 2 sets of 10 reps. Okay. Bulgarian split squat, 3 sets. Hip thrust, 3 sets. That's 6 sets. And then you're doing 2 sets of a glute kickback. That's 8 total working sets for that day. That's day 1. Let's say on day 2, you know, you're doing a Romanian deadlift, you are doing a step-up, and then you're doing some sort of single leg hip thrust. Let's say you're doing 3 sets, 3 sets, 2 sets once again. So that's 8 sets on day 1, 8 sets on day 2. That 16 total working sets for your glutes throughout the course of that week, which by the way, that would be way more than enough for most people to actually see progress, which we're going to talk about that a little bit later in this video as well. So be sure to stick around, but that will be 16 total sets. That's how you figure out how many sets per muscle group per week you are doing. And again, a rough range is going to be around 10 to 20 sets per muscle group per week for your bigger muscles. For your smaller muscles like biceps or triceps or side delts or those sorts of things, usually those don't need as much direct work. Again, especially more like beginner intermediate stage, because think about when you're doing a shoulder press. If you're doing a shoulder press, you're working your triceps. If you're doing a heavy chest press, you're working your triceps. If you're doing pulldowns and rows, those are going to be working your biceps, right? So Those don't need nearly as much, usually around, call it 4 to 8 hard working sets per muscle group per week is generally speaking what most people can look to stick around. Obviously these guidelines are going to be somewhat dependent on you, the individual, but for the most part those are the guidelines you're looking to get. Now you might not be hitting at least 10 to 20 sets per muscle group per week, and so in that instance you would just need to up your volume. So let's say, you know, you're only working out your legs once a week, which again we'll talk about later in the video, but let's say you're only working out your legs once a week and you're only doing 8 sets for your glutes. Cool. Even if you are going really close to failure, you just might need, you know, another day where you add on 5 more sets or whatever it is to get a little bit more volume in. So that could be potentially your first problem. The second problem could be, and I see this very commonly, You're doing too much volume. I see people going into the gym and they're doing like 10 exercises for their glutes. You're doing squats, you're doing hip thrust, you're doing deadlift, you're doing Romanian deadlift, you're doing kickbacks, you're doing the adductor machine, you're doing the step-ups. You're like doing 8 exercises in one day. You think you'd be way surpassing the 10 to 20 sets per muscle group per week, but you're actually not because going back to point number 1, You're doing so much that you're not able to have the adequate intensity. You're not able to push yourself close enough to failure. You're not able to lift heavy enough to get that mechanical tension. You are just doing something what we call junk volume. Junk volume is just like you're doing the sets and you're doing the reps, but they're not really intense enough to actually trigger the stimulus to change and adapt. Like, that's what your body needs. It needs to make adaptations. If you're doing so many sets, So many exercises, you're working out your glutes 4 times per week. You're not going to build muscle doing that because you're not going to be able to be lifting with enough intensity. And you might feel like, but Eric, oh my God, I'm exhausted. Yeah, you're exhausted from number one, you're doing junk volume, so that's exhausting. But number two, you're more exhausted from like a cardio standpoint than you actually are from like a mechanical tension muscle building standpoint, which is why It's important to actually do less to do more. You don't need to do more in this situation. Like I said, if you're doing too many sets, you wouldn't need to do more exercises, more reps and more sets and all of that. You would actually need to do less. Take what you have, lift with more, lift with more intensity, lift heavier weight, lift closer to failure. You would do more of that kind of stuff, which would then actually bring you the result that you are looking for. Which leads right into the third reason you're not building the muscle you want to build is because you're doing way too many reps. Again, what did we just find out? Mechanical tension is the leading driver of you building muscle. How do you get enough mechanical tension? Well, you lift close to failure and you lift heavier. People always ask me, Eric, what is heavy? It's relative to you, but stick with me here. Let's say you're doing 15 reps. Okay, you're doing 15 reps for squats versus 5 reps or 6 reps or even 8 reps for squats. Don't you think if you do 5 reps or 6 reps or 7 reps for squats that you are going to be able to lift much heavier weight than if you were doing 15 reps, right? Because you just simply don't have to lift the weight for as many reps. So inherently, if you cut your reps in half going from 15 to call it 8, it's not exactly half, but if you're going from 15 reps to 8 reps, you're automatically going to lift heavier. When you lift heavier, you are going to create more mechanical tension just inherently from lifting heavier load. That's another way you can kind of like classify intensity is the load that you are lifting, the weight that you are using. The higher the weight, the higher intensity that you are lifting with, right? Because you're lifting closer to how many pounds you could do for that one rep, you know, whatever it is— squat, bench, deadlift, overhead press, whatever the case may be. So you're getting closer to that, so your intensity is higher, so you have more mechanical tension. Now, technically speaking, you can build muscle in any rep range. And so you might be like, well, Eric, why can't I do 15 then? The reason that most people don't build muscle in that 15-rep range is because, usually speaking, before you actually get to like muscular failure, you get to either cardio failure or a muscular endurance failure. So that's really what you would be training the most. Not all the time, but that's what you would be training the most when you're doing, you know, 15 reps, 20 reps, 30 reps. You're training more of your cardio or your muscular endurance as opposed to training the actual muscular strength and muscle building component, which is why I often recommend the majority of your training should probably fall within that 5 to 12 ish rep range. Sometimes you'll do sets of say three or four, and sometimes you might do sets of fifteen, for example. But for the majority of your reps that you're doing, if your main goal is to build muscle, change your physique, get stronger, all of these things, your main rep range should be in that five to twelve rep range because that's where you can maximize your mechanical tension. That's where you can maximize the weight that you're lifting. That's where you can lift heavy enough, but also not risk injury by doing just like 1 rep, 2 rep, 3 rep all the time, 24/7, because that can be a high risk of injury as well. A lot of stress on your joints and tendons and ligaments and all those things. And then it's not so light to where you're going too far away, you're having too low intensity and you're not creating enough mechanical tension. So, you know, in the exact reps you should do for each exercise, you know, I have a video here on YouTube if you want to check it out where I kind of go over how to create your own workout routine. So feel free to check it out. Or you can always head to erfclubhouse.com. This is my actual app that I have where I have all of my training programs inside. You know, you can follow the training programs I write. We tell you how many sets, how many reps, what exercises. We lay everything out for you and take out the guesswork. You can look at either one of those 2 things, but it will somewhat depend on what exercises you are doing. Some exercises you might be better off in the 5 to 8 rep range, and then Some you might be better off in that 8 to 12 rep range, but generally speaking, that's the rep range you want to maximize if you're looking to maximize your muscle building. So if you're doing nothing but 15, 20, 30 reps, or if you're doing like this timed thing where like you're going for 45 seconds just trying to get as many reps as you can, I might look to change that up and start following a real program instead. The 4th reason why you're not building the muscle you want to build is because you are not taking enough rest. And yes, stick with me here. So I mean this in a few different ways. Number one, I mean it from resting in between your sets. If you're somebody who's only resting for like 30 seconds or 60 seconds in between your sets, you're missing out on potential muscle growth because when you do not rest long enough in between your sets— and we can talk about what long enough is here in a second, that's what she said— When you're not resting for long enough in between your sets, you're not letting your central nervous system recover, which then means you're not going to recruit as many muscle fibers. Like, and you won't be able to lift as heavy. You won't be able to push yourself as close to failure. And though, like, what did we say earlier? The 2 main things to build muscle: lift heavy, push close to failure. When you're not resting for long enough in between your sets, you won't be able to do those things. Your performance will suffer. I'm sure you probably know this. Like if you're somebody out there who's like, maybe you're doing like a HIIT bootcamp or maybe you're doing, you know, just like 30-second rest, you're probably going into that next exercise absolutely gassed and you're like, you have to either drop the weight or you can't do as many reps or your performance just decreases. Maybe your form suffers, which we'll talk about in a second as well. But any one of those things happen, your performance decreases, which then means your results are going to decrease. And so generally speaking, Resting between 2 to 5 minutes in between your sets is usually going to be what is most optimal in order for you to maximize and optimize your muscle building and strength gains as well. Both of those 2 things together. And if you're somebody who's like, 2 minutes, what are you talking about? If you think 2 minutes is like too long in between your sets, you're not lifting heavy enough. You're not pushing yourself close enough to failure because if you were, you would need that 2 minutes of rest. And that's like one more way to know if you're lifting with enough intensity, if you're lifting heavy enough. If you don't need 2 minutes of rest in between, you need to lift heavier. You need to put some more weight on the bar, pick up heavier dumbbells, whatever the case may be, because you should be needing that rest time in between your sets. And by the way, people often ask me, oh my God, Eric, I'm going to be in the gym forever. No, because this is where you do less exercises like we talked about earlier. And you can also utilize something called supersets. I have an entire video here on YouTube that talks about how to utilize supersets in your workouts. If you want to check it out, please feel free to check it out. Just rest in general. You're not taking enough real rest days. You're not changing your body while you're in the gym doing your workouts. You're changing your body outside of the gym when you can recover from your workouts. This is how your body works. You put a stress on your body, your body recovers from that stress, and then your body adapts to that stress. You adapt by building muscle and getting stronger. If you're not recovering, then you're not going to adapt. It's 2 charts. There's the stress, which is the workout, right? And by the way, it's not just stress from workouts, it's stress from your entire life. But there's the stress, and then there's the recoverability. You need to make sure the recoverability— the ability to recover— is higher than the stress that you are placing on your body. So if the stress comes up to here, Your recoverability better be up here because you need to be able to recover from what you're doing. Because if you can't recover, you can't see change. There are things you can do to increase your recoverability, your ability to recover. You can number one, sleep more, getting at least 6 to 7 hours per night. Again, that's literally when your body does its, its repair process during your deep sleep process. So the more deep sleep you're getting, the more your body's actually recovering. Number 2 is going to be making sure you are not hitting your muscle groups for at least 48 hours after hitting it. So for example, let's say you're doing chest on Monday. You better be waiting till at least Wednesday, if not Thursday, in order to make sure you're fully recovered. Because what happens is after you train a muscle group, The following 24 to 72 hours is when something called muscle protein synthesis is happening in that muscle group. All of that means is like your body's recovering. And so if you like hit chest on Monday, hit chest on Tuesday, hit chest on Thursday, you're not actually letting your body ever recover, which means you won't actually ever see any adaptations. And by the way, I made this mistake all the fucking time when I was younger. So I'm not speaking from a place of like you're bad or dumb if you're doing this. I've made all of these mistakes, which is why I can talk to you about them now. But you have to make sure You're giving your body enough time to recover. Number 3, you got to make sure you're eating enough protein. This could be a whole thing in and of itself, but we'll just cover it right here. If you're somebody who wants to build muscle, if you have body fat that you want to lose, you should be having anywhere between 0.8 and 1 times your goal body weight in pounds. So for example, let's say you weigh 200 pounds, but you want to weigh around 150 pounds. Take 150, multiply it between 0.8 and 1. That gives you 120 between 150 grams of protein per day. That's how much protein you should be having. If you're someone who doesn't have body fat to lose, maybe you're more like skinny fat, or maybe you just want to build muscle. Take your current body weight in pounds and just try to eat around your current body weight in pounds in protein. So that will help you recover because protein is the only macronutrient that helps you build and retain lean muscle mass. Number 4 could be like getting some extra electrolytes. Sodium, potassium, magnesium are the 3 main forms of electrolytes I would strongly encourage you to look into. You can get a supplement like, you know, it's like Liquid IV or Cure. I think there's one called like Element or something like that. I don't— I'm not sponsored or anything by any of those people. I just know of those brands. But you can look into getting an electrolyte drink or just make sure you're getting it through your food. Lightly salting some of your meals. And then number 5, again, it goes back, but like, make sure you have a proper training program. If you have a proper training program, all of this stuff is really just going to take care of itself. Like I said, you know, when I program workouts inside of our clubhouse, if you follow those, you don't got to worry about it. I'm not saying you have to join the clubhouse. You can if you want to. We'd love to have you inside. Link is in the description. Even if you don't join the clubhouse, like, if you're on a training program, you won't have to worry about it because you'll know the volume is there. You'll know you're having enough rest in between your days. You'll know that the exercises are right and the reps are there and so on and so forth. Right. And so again, you don't want to do too many reps or too many sets because like you're not going to be able to recover from that. Right. You don't want to do too many exercises. You won't be able to recover from that. So all of this stuff kind of like goes into making sure you have enough rest and recovery. But again, very simply, stress— working out is a stress on your body. You need to be able to recover from that stress. If you think of it like money, if it costs you $100 to work out, you better have $110 in your savings because you need to be able to pay for that and then still have some leftover. So number 4, not getting enough rest and recovery. And then number 5 is going to be following a bro split versus following a real training program. And what exactly is a bro split? A bro split is like Monday, Chest. Tuesday, back. Wednesday, legs. Thursday, shoulders. Friday, arms. And then repeat. And the reason this is not going to be the most optimal, and probably one of the reasons why you're not building as much muscle as you want to, is because a few things. We talked earlier about how many sets per muscle group per week that you could be doing. And you might say, well, Eric, if I get 15 sets of chest on one day, that would be 15 sets Per week. So what's the problem? Well, there's a few problems here. Number one, due to some of the research that we know, generally speaking, the max capacity of working sets per muscle group per workout that you can do before you start to see a negative drop-off— almost think of it like a bell curve. If you're going up, up, up, up, up, there's going to be a point where there's diminishing returns. Once you get to about that 8 to 10 mark of working sets per muscle group per workout. Once you start going past that, you start to get some diminishing returns because of what we talked about earlier with muscle protein synthesis, where the muscle protein synthesis is going to start to drop off after that, which is no bueno if you want to build muscle. So even if you are doing 15 sets of glutes or 15 sets of chest during a workout, You're actually going to have diminishing returns from that, which is not going to lead to much muscle building. And number 2, we talked earlier about you're just going to be so exhausted that you're not actually going to be doing sets that are close enough to failure in order for you to see progress anyway. You're just going to end up doing what we call that junk volume where, yeah, maybe you are doing 30 sets of glutes in a workout, but none of them are anywhere near close enough to failure, they're all just junk volume. And so you won't be building muscle because your intensity isn't high enough. Even if you think you're exhausted during the workout, no shit, you're exhausted. You're doing 30 sets of glutes in a workout. Like anybody's going to be exhausted doing that. Exhausted doesn't mean you're having an effective workout. So you have to be mindful of that as well. Those are the 2 main reasons. The 3rd reason is you're only spiking muscle protein synthesis in that muscle group For that one time throughout the course of the week. And so think of it like this. If you do chest on Monday and you do a bunch of sets, we already talked about why that's not optimal, but let's just say you did it. You're going to have this big spike in what we call the muscle protein synthesis, which is just like your body actually like building muscle, so on and so forth. So you tell your body, all right, we've got to build muscle. And then Tuesday, like Monday, this is where it is. Tuesday, it kind of starts to go down and then Wednesday go down, Thursday go down, Friday Friday go down, Saturday go down, Sunday go down. Your muscle protein synthesis for that muscle group only is really spiked up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, maybe Thursday, and then Friday, Saturday, Sunday, there's nothing for that muscle group because you're not training it again throughout the course of the week. It would be better off if you had a 2 times per week frequency for your muscle groups instead, because again, let's take that same thing. Let's just say you hit your chest on Monday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday starts to go down. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and you just have this cyclical fashion where once the muscle protein synthesis starts to go down, you can spike it back up by training that muscle group again. So this would look something like instead of doing chest Monday, back Tuesday, legs Wednesday, shoulders Thursday, and arms on Friday, Monday lower body, Tuesday Upper body. Wednesday, rest. We just talked about rest and recovery. Thursday, lower body. Friday, upper body. Because that way you're going to be able to hit your muscle groups 2 times per week. You have proper recovery. You're going to be able to have the frequency, have the volume, have the, you know, pushing yourself close to failure, having the proper rest in between your days of working out and so on and so forth. That would be the quote unquote end optimal split. There is really no like one optimal. You can only do this. There's things, other things you can do, but that's an example of you can have a quote-unquote optimal muscle building split that would be better than you following a bro split. And last but not least, just a bonus one: please just don't have shit form. It's one thing to know all these things, but if you're going into your workouts doing bicep curls and you're just slinging the weight around nonstop 24/7, you're not gonna be even working your biceps. So you're going to be putting like 2 pounds on your— if you're curling a 30-pound bicep, like a 30-pound dumbbell, but you're just using a shit ton of momentum, you're maybe putting like 10 pounds of actual real tension on your bicep. You're putting 10 pounds on your forearm. You're putting 5 pounds on your shoulder, 5 pounds on your core. Like you're not actually using that muscle to move that weight. So don't just think about moving the weight from point A to point B. You have to actually make sure your muscles are doing that work. Work to be able to have the mechanical tension. Remember that we have the mechanical tension in order to actually create that muscle growth that we're looking for. And again, if you're doing a lat pulldown, and even if you're not doing like super momentum stuff, if you're doing a lat pulldown but your shoulders are always rounding forward at the bottom, which is very common, you're not actually going to work your lats. So then your lat muscle isn't going to be getting work done to it. Or if you're doing a hip thrust and you have improper form, your glutes aren't actually going to get the tension because you're not— you don't have the right form. You're not working the right muscles. Maybe you're working more of your quad or more of your hamstrings. So just making sure you have the proper form is giving my last little bonus tip to you. That is, I don't know, honestly, all this stuff is important, like I said earlier, but this might even be the most important one because unless you have this, it's really not going to matter that much. And if you want some help with your proper form, like I said, inside of the clubhouse, we have exact technique videos that are in-depth, not just like a 30-second little clip. 2, 3, 4, 5-minute videos covering form, how to do this, what are the common mistakes, how to fix them, so on and so forth. All of that is inside of the clubhouse. Plus, like I said, all of my training programs— you can get access to all of my training programs showing you exactly what to do, how to do it, taking out all the guesswork, all of that good stuff inside. And that was it for this video. Hope you enjoyed watching. If you did, please feel free