Weekly Workout Routines || How to set up a fitness routine
In this instructional video, Eric Roberts outlines a complete weekly fitness framework for people aiming to lose fat and build muscle. He begins by emphasizing the necessity of strength training for health benefits such as bone density, metabolism, and injury prevention, and recommends training 3–4 times per week using a lower‑upper‑full‑body split (3‑day) or alternating lower/upper days (4‑day). He stresses hitting each muscle group twice weekly, allowing 1–2 full days of recovery between sessions, and warns against back‑to‑back full‑body workouts. Roberts advises keeping the same 3–4 workout variations for 4–8 weeks to enable progressive overload before rotating. For cardio, he sets a daily step goal of 5,000–10,000 steps and suggests 1–3 low‑intensity steady‑state (LISS) sessions of 20–30 minutes per week, explaining that LISS aids recovery without adding excessive stress. Nutrition guidance includes creating a calorie deficit of 250–750 kcal (e.g., 2,500 kcal maintenance → 1,850–2,250 kcal intake) and targeting protein at 0.8–1.0 g per pound of goal body weight, while carbs and fats are less critical. He recommends 90 % consistency with the calorie range. Throughout, Roberts promotes his free calorie calculator, the Eric Roberts Fitness Podcast, and his Clubhouse app, which provide detailed workout plans, instructional videos, and community support. The video concludes with a call to action to like, subscribe, and check the linked resources.
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YouTube, what's going on? Welcome back to the channel. Welcome to this video. In this video, you and I are gonna be talking about how to set up your weekly fitness routine if you are somebody who wants to lose fat and build muscle. And here's a fun fact for you, not really fun for me, but really fun for you. I just filmed like a 45-minute video of this exact thing and I never hit record on my camera. So those 45 minutes of my life, I will never get back, but we are here now and I can't wait to do this for you. The second time, I'm even more fresh. You always got to look at the positive side of things, right? I'm even more fresh. There's stuff in my head I might have forgot from last time. I'm ready to rock it out for you. So let's do this. So there are 3 main components when we talk about your weekly fitness routine. The first is going to be your strength training. The second is going to be your cardio. And the third is going to be your calories. We start, and I'm going to start with strength training because I'm a firm believer, no matter who you are, no matter where you are in your journey, no matter what's going on, I am a firm believer that You should be getting in some sort of weightlifting, some sort of strength training, because there are certain health benefits that you are going to get from lifting weights and resistance training you just simply can't get from anywhere else. Whether it's talking about bone density, whether it's talking about metabolism, whether it's talking about strength and injury prevention and core strength and core stability, hip stability, hip strength, glute strength, There are certain things you can't get from if, let's say, you're doing yoga. Nothing wrong with yoga, but you gotta lift weights. If you're walking, that's amazing. We'll talk about that later, but you gotta lift weights. And so I am a firm believer everybody should be doing some sort of resistance training. I don't need you to be a bodybuilder or a powerlifter or compete or this, that, and the other, but I do need you to have some resistance training in your weekly routine. So the way I usually like to set this up is going to be either in a 3 or 4 times per week fashion. Now, if you're somebody who's going to do the 3 times a week, that's totally fine. Or if you're doing 4 times a week, that's totally fine. And you— some people might actually be surprised I said only 3 or 4 times a week, but if you follow a proper program, which we're going to talk about here, 3 or 4 times a week— I've probably coached in my life, and at this point, thousands of people, and 98% of them have followed either a 3 or 4 times a week workout and gotten tremendous results. I can put, you know, some results. I'm not one to brag, and I'm not really I'm not really bragging because they did all the hard work, but I'll put some results here. All of these people you see followed 3 or 4 times a week. So I promise you it's going to work if you have a proper program. And I also promise you it's enough. There's a lot going around, you know, people think you have to work out 5, 6, 7 days a week in order to like see real progress. Just not the case. 3 or 4 times a week for strength training is going to be more than enough. We'll talk about the rest a bit later in this video. But if you're going for 3 times a week, It's going to look something like a lower body, an upper body, and a full body day. If you're going for 4 times per week, it is going to look something like lower body, upper body, lower body, upper body. And there's a couple of extra things I'll say here. Number one, I wrote down, which is you're trying to hit your muscle groups 2 times per week. That is generally speaking what is going to be the most Optimal frequency, how many times you're working out per week, that is going to be the most optimal frequency in order to see progress. And you can see you're doing that because obviously lower body, you're working out your lower body, legs, glutes, hamstrings, quads. You're doing that on your lower body day and your full body day because full body, you're hitting your entire body. So you're hitting your legs twice a week and then you're also going to hit your upper body twice a week as well with your upper body and full body day. And then again over here, Even if you like didn't even pass the first grade, you can probably understand. Lower body once, lower body twice, upper body once, upper body twice. And so that's why I like this 3 or 4 day a week split. I'm not the biggest fan of a 3 times a week full body split. I've actually done an entire YouTube video on why I'm not the biggest fan of a 3 times a week full body split. If you want to learn why, you can go ahead and check that out. This is typically the way I would like to set up your workouts. Now, what we can also talk about is making sure you have proper rest and recovery in between these workouts. And generally speaking, you are going to want to wait 1 to 2 days after hitting a muscle group before you hit that muscle group again. And when I say days, I mean like a full day. So for example, if you're doing lower body on Monday, you should be waiting till at least Wednesday, if not Thursday, in order to hit lower body. Or if you're doing upper body on Tuesday, you should be waiting till at least Thursday, if not Friday, in order to hit your upper body workout one more time. So let's take this 3-day-a-week workout for example. If let's say you did something like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, right? You are getting all 3 workouts in, you're hitting your muscle groups twice per week, and you are allowing for proper recovery because you're not hitting any muscle group back to back. It's one of the reasons why full body workouts, if you do multiple of them per week, generally speaking, aren't the best because when you have this full body workout, you got to have a day before and you got to have a day after. At the very least, you have to have a day before and a day after. So I like doing this lower-upper full body split. If you need to, you can do lower and upper back to back, but just make sure you have a day of rest between full body no matter what, because you're obviously, you're working your entire body. And the same thing over here goes for your 4 times a week program. If you're doing lower body, upper body, lower body, upper body, you could do something like Monday, Tuesday, rest Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So you can do these muscle groups lower and upper back to back because they're different muscle groups, right? But you don't want to do like lower and then lower again and then lower and then lower again or whatever the case may be. I also like having that day of rest if you're going to follow this 4 times a week. I do like having that day of rest in between the 2 like kind of workout blocks because normally speaking, when you do your entire body, You're going to be fucking exhausted, especially if you do it correctly. You're going to be exhausted, you're going to be fatigued. And the latter part of like these 2 workouts down here are typically going to take a hit in your performance because of your fatigue and because of your exhaustion. So I do like making sure if you can put a rest day in between these 4 days, I would try not to do all 4 in a row. I understand sometimes with people's schedules and traveling, kids, work, whatever, sometimes you might have to do 4 days in a row. It won't be the end of the world. I just know for a fact that it's going to be a little bit more optimal if you are able to get some rest in between that lower and upper workouts. And then again, you can obviously see you're having the proper rest days one more time. The reason this is important for you to like actually recover and have the proper rest times in between the days, and this is the issue with like a lot of the like HIIT boot camps or the cardio classes or the full body workouts 5 days a week, you're not giving your body that time to recover. Like the 24 hours after your workout and the 48 hours after your workout, that's when your body actually recovers. and goes through its like muscle protein synthesis process. You don't even really have to know what that means. You just have to know that's when your body actually changes. So that's when you build muscle, get stronger, all of those good things. If you're not allowing your body to do that and you're impairing that process, then you won't build muscle and you won't get stronger. And you're working out at that point just to work out and put stress on your body and not recover from your workouts, which is like if you're not going to see progress, then what's the point, right? So just make sure you have that proper rest in between right there. And the last thing I'll say, I get this question a lot, is let's say you're doing this 4 times a week workout. Every one of those workouts should be different workouts. So you should have 4 different workouts for the week or 3 different workouts for the week. You should keep those same 3 to 4 workouts for the entire 4 weeks and then roughly switch up after 4 to 8 weeks. So one more time, If you're doing 4 times a week, 4 different workouts for the week, keep those same 4 workouts for roughly 4 to 8 weeks at a time so you can have something called progressive overload. I've done a video here on YouTube kind of talking about like progressive overload, what it is, so on and so forth. I'll link it here. You can check it out if you want to, but essentially it's just like getting better at your workouts and doing more, doing more reps, doing more weight, pushing yourself more, having better form, whatever the case may be. You want to keep the workouts for 4 to 8 weeks. Switch up, have progressive overload, switch up, so on and so forth. Because you want the different workouts, because without getting too in-depth here, and I've also done a video on this and I've written an article on this, but for the main reasons of you want to hit your muscle groups from different angles, you want to hit your muscle groups from different resistance profiles, and you want to avoid overuse injury. So for all of those reasons, you're typically looking to have 4 different workouts, same 4 workouts or 3 workouts for the Roughly about a month, switch up, do it again, switch up, so on and so forth. And so that's the weekly routine. I'm not going to get super in-depth on like how to actually set up a workout because this video will be like 6 hours long if I do that. If you want to learn more about that stuff though, I do have that on my channel. So just go ahead and head to my channel, check some of the videos out. I also have a podcast on how to set up a lower body workout and how to set up an upper body workout. I'll link that here below in the description. If you are into that kind of stuff. Now, going into the cardio side of things, now your first cardio is simply just going to be making sure you get 5,000 to 10,000 steps per day. And people often ask me this, like, you know, does it matter if I'm a teacher and I'm already working all day? I get 10,000 steps, I'm on my feet. I'm a hairdresser, I run around with my kids. Do I need to get extra? Like, no. Like, the goal is to get 5,000 to 10,000 steps per day. People also ask me, does it matter the speed you walk at or how fast you get? No, just get 5,000 to 10,000 steps per day. You know, and if you're somebody who like right now you get 4,000 steps per day, or you don't even know, and maybe you end up finding out you have 4,000 steps per day, cool. Work up to 5,000 and then work up to 6,000 and then work up to 7,000. The goal is to get as close to around that like 8,000 to 10,000, uh, step mark per day as possible. If you're not there yet, that's okay. Just get up to that mark. Going past that 10,000-step mark usually doesn't yield like a ton of extra benefits, and so you don't need to like kill yourself to get more than 10,000 per day. But roughly in that 5,000 to 10,000-step-per-day range, and that right there for 98% of people is going to be enough cardio from a fat loss and muscle building perspective. You don't need to inherently do extra cardio on top of that if you're already getting 8,000 to 10,000 steps per day. And one quick side note here, I know this happens, I get this question a lot, you can somewhat look at your steps from a weekly average. And so if you know you have 2 days per week where you go into the office and like you don't get as many steps, but the other 5 days you're, you know, getting more steps, you only get 5,000 steps those 2 days, but the other days you're getting, you know, 10,000, whatever the case may be, You can kind of average out your weekly steps to get your weekly step average. Just take your 7 days worth of steps, add them up, divide by 7. That's your weekly average. You can look at that to a degree because I don't want you to do this thing where like you don't get any steps for 5 days and then the weekend you take like 35,000 steps per day and you think that's going to be like a weekly average. No, I wouldn't go to that extent of it. No, I still want you to have a minimum of 5,000 per day. So just use that as like your minimum 5,000 per day, but you can look at it from a weekly average if you need or want to as well. So that's the first cardio. And like I said, that's more than enough for most people. Now, if you're somebody who like you might want to add in extra or you like might want to do more or whatever the case may be, generally speaking, you can add in anywhere between 1 to 3 times per week of low-intensity steady-state cardio. And I'm going to sit back on my couch. I don't know why I was sitting on my feet. My fucking feet, it was hurting me. 1 to 3 times per week of low-intensity steady-state cardio. And I say low-intensity steady-state, we're going to talk about like high intensity versus low intensity, but this could be the treadmill, this could be the elliptical, this could be the bike, this could be the rower, this could be the stair stepper, this could be literally anything you want to as long as it's low-intensity steady-state. What does that mean? You should be able to have a conversation when you are doing your workouts. Okay? The conversation we're having right now, you should be able to keep this level of conversation when doing your cardio. It shouldn't be this thing where you're going like this. That's too high intensity. And the reason you're trying to keep it low intensity is because low intensity does not add stress to your body. It actually helps your body recover, whereas high intensity actually adds stress and takes away from your ability to recover. Over here, You're already going to be doing high-intensity workouts. Think about your strength training workouts. You push really hard for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 reps, you rest, you push hard, you rest. That's already a high-intensity workout. For you to add on more high-intensity stuff, it's only going to lead you, generally speaking, under-recovered, which is going to lead to, like we talked about, not seeing progress, not building muscle, not getting stronger. It's also going to lead to More cravings, more hunger, poor sleep, more exhaustion, which is going to lead to the next point we're going to talk about. You're not going to be able to stick to your calories because you're under-recovered because you're doing so much high-intensity interval training. That's why a lot of these like HIIT boot camps or stuff like that can be really challenging. And one of the reasons why people don't see progress is because they're doing a lot of styles of cardio like that. So if you're going to do extra cardio, like I said, leave it to 1 to 3 times per week, 20 to 30 minutes of low-intensity steady-state cardio. Now heading into the calorie part of this equation of this weekly fitness routine, your calories— I'm going to drop in the description of this video below a calorie calculator that you can use. It's totally free. You can use it if you want to, and you're going to create a calorie deficit. Because you have to create a calorie deficit if you're somebody looking to lose fat. Okay? So what you're going to do is you're going to create a calorie deficit range of 250 to 750. And again, the calorie calculator in this description will already kind of do this for you. But let's say your maintenance calories are 2,500 calories. Okay? If you minus 250 calories from that, That's 2,250 calories. If you minus 750 from that, that's 1,850 calories, right? Your calorie deficit range is gonna be 1,850 to 2,250. That's how many calories you should be eating in order to lose body fat. Again, everybody's actual numbers are gonna be different, so use the calculator that I give you for free. Use the calculator, find out what that's gonna be for you. But you wanna have a range because you don't just need to stick to one exact number. This is where a lot of people go wrong. They think they're like fucking something up if they don't hit their exact— oh, your calories are 2,000 but you hit 2,100 so you fucked up. No, give yourself a calorie deficit range. It's going to be a lot easier to stick to. You'll probably end up losing anywhere between 0.5 to 1.5 pounds per week on average, which would be an incredible, incredible weight rate of weight loss if you're sort of looking to lose body fat. So make sure you have that calorie deficit range, and within that calorie deficit range, you are looking to be 90% consistent, roughly. So if there's 31 days in a month, you should be trying to hit your calorie goal 27 out of 31 of those days. You won't be perfect, and that's okay. You're not trying to be perfect, you're just trying to be consistent. And so if you're roughly around that 27 out of 31 days, you are going to be 2 thumbs up, good to go, and you will be able to see progress with your fat loss and muscle building. And the second part of this, it's kind of like a 1A, 1B. We're talking about your protein goal, right? So your protein goal is also important because not just for fat loss, it will help with fat loss, but especially for the strength training and muscle building perspective of things, you're going to want to make sure you're getting enough protein. Your carbs and fats really don't matter that much. You just need to make sure you're hitting your calories and you're hitting your protein. So your protein goal is going to be take your goal body weight in pounds and multiply that between 0.8 and 1. So let's say for example right now you're weighing 200 pounds and you want to weigh 150. Take 150, multiply it between 0.8 and 1, and that gives you 120 to 150 grams of protein Again, you have a range, you see, right? But that's going to give you your roughly protein goal for the day. Even if you don't hit that perfectly right away at first, that's okay. Just get as close to that protein goal as you possibly can. And that pretty much covers the calories and protein side of things. And that's going to be how to set up a weekly workout routine and a weekly just fitness routine in general. Now I'll say 2 things here. If you're somebody who you just watched this and you saw this, you're like, holy shit, this is a lot. I'm gonna say 2 things. Number one, please feel free to check out some of the other videos and resources I mentioned earlier. I have a ton of videos on this channel that can help you. I also, like I said, have my podcast that can help you a ton as well. It's called the Eric Roberts Fitness Podcast, so check it out if you want to. Number 2, on top of that, I also have something called my Clubhouse. This is my new app where I have literally all of this stuff already inside of there. So I take care of your workouts. I take the guesswork out of your workouts. I tell you exactly what exercises to do, what reps, what sets, instructional videos to show you how to do the exercises. I lay it all out for you. I give you your calories. We talk about cardio. We talk about protein. We also have an amazing supportive group and community inside of the Clubhouse where you can ask questions, get help, get answers, get guidance, all things of that nature. So if you want to check that out, you can just head to erfclubhouse.com. I'll link that in the description of this video here below as well. But that's something where like you won't have to spend time coming up with all of this stuff because I already do it for you. And number 2, you won't have to wonder if what you're doing is right. You will know for a fact it's right because I am creating it. You just take it, follow it, and see kick-ass progress like the people you saw earlier in this video. If you want to check it out, please feel free to. Other than that, thank you for watching. I'm hoping to God that this actually recorded. If I go around the other side to this camera and it's not recorded, you'll probably never hear from me again. I really hope this recorded. If you enjoyed this, give it a thumbs up. Let me know below. Subscribe to the channel. Thank you for watching. We'll chat soon. Bye.
