Every story of someone who got lean or muscular tells the quieter story of far more people who trained, ate ‘right’, and still failed miserably. I’m here to ensure this doesn’t happen to you. Here are seven tips on how to make the most of your time in the gym.
Tip #1: Training program
The least effective way of training is doing new exercises every single week because someone on Instagram mentioned something about muscle confusion. Yes, you can make gains training like that but it’s not ideal because it makes progress tracking much harder.
What you want to do is to get a well-designed, logically structured training program and follow it for many months. Make it repetitive. Make it boring to watch. Work on slowly adding reps and/or weight to the exercises.
And if your training program design skills are LOL-status, any free training program on the web will be better than dicking around in the gym and doing random exercises.
Even better, since the weather is getting really, really depressing where I live, maybe buy one of my programs and help me spend a few weeks where the sun is chirping, the birds are shining, and the water is wet. The Philippines or something. Thanks.
Tip #2: Ease into it
Whether you’re a new lifter or not, you still want to take it easy when you start a new training program. It’s almost always better to start slightly lighter and farther away from failure. Which is why I have this recommendation in the programs I design for my new clients:
So the first few weeks are usually done with 3 to 5 reps shy of failure to ensure a client’s body doesn’t go poof:
Once we have proper technique in place, that’s when we start pushing sets harder:
Anyway, the general rule is to always err on the side of caution and start with lighter weights.
Tip #3: Technique over weight
Yes, you want an increase in performance over time aka progressive overload — more weight, reps, greater range of motion, etc. — but it shouldn’t come at the expense of technique.
Training with proper technique is more important than lifting heavier weight. The weight should be challenging but you should also be able to execute the exercise well and with control.
I expect you have a question that goes something like ‘I get it, Egis, I shouldn’t deadlift with my back looking like a downward curved penis. But what actually is proper technique?’
Proper technique comes down to three main things. The first one is… Oh, hang on, I realised that I’ve covered three pillars of optimal training technique in this post. Go read it. Alternatively… Well, there’s no alternative. Go read it.
Tip #4: Video yourself
Wanna massively improve your technique? Film yourself regularly when you lift. My clients do that all the time:
Then they get the feedback. They have something very specific to work on in their next workout. And they improve.
If you don’t have a few hundred bucks to hire a coach, get a second job and hire me. Nah, I’m joking.
Video yourself if you don’t have a coach, so you can review your technique and get better at lifting. Compare it to a demo video on YouTube. Pick a thing or two to adjust during your next set.
Don’t try to fix everything all at once. One or two things. Try to fix five different things at the same time and your head will go kabloom. Too much info.
Tip #5: Log your workouts
Muscle growth is notoriously hard to see visually in the short term. Which is why strength is the best indicator of your progress — if your strength consistently goes up, so does your muscle mass. But how do you know if you’re getting stronger if you’re not tracking your workouts? Huh? HUH?!!?!
Track weight and reps at a bare minimum. This will give you objective targets to aim for during your workouts and help you see whether you’re on the right track or if your progress has stalled, requiring adjustments. Every single client I work with logs their workouts:
Just writing down weight used and reps performed in a notebook or an app isn’t some sort of complicated medical shit. So please do it.
Tip #6: Intensity over sets
Hooboy, the many times I’ve said that doing more sets doesn’t necessarily get you more muscle growth or fat loss… Just because you can build bigger glutes, chest, shoulders, or what have you, doing 20 sets doesn’t mean you actually need that much.
If you do loads of sets for the same muscle group per workout and week, you’re probably not giving every set and exercise maximum effort and needlessly spending more time in the gym.
Dunno about you but I don’t think most people in the gym lift weights for fun. Bringing a fishing pole to an aquarium is fun. Randomly placing gnomes in your neighbor’s yard is fun. Spending 5–6 days at the gym is not fun unless you’re a trainer.
The closer you train to failure, the fewer total sets per muscle group you’ll need to build muscle. From my personal experience working with clients, 6–10 hard sets per muscle per week, taken to 0–3 reps shy of failure, will give you most, if not all, of the possible gains. Heck, even 1–5 sets per muscle per week can be enough to get you quite a bit of muscle growth.
So start with 6 or so hard sets per muscle per week, track your progress, and only add more sets if you don’t see any increase in gym performance.
Tip #7: Nutrition
There’s a 1 in 67 chance of getting great gains if you eat like a dick. Yes, resistance training offers numerous health benefits, even if your diet consists of medieval-style foods. While I’m not certain, I believe cabbage and onions would make up 99% of your medieval-style diet.
But to get the best out of your training body composition-wise, you need to dial in your nutrition:
- Give your body enough calories to support workouts
- Prioritize big servings of protein with each meal
- Eat at least one fruit and veggie serving per day
- Get at least 25g of fiber each day
- Make at least 80% of your food choices from whole, minimally processed foods
That sorta thing.
As smart people who wrote the Scientific Principles of Hypertrophy Training book said,
‘A poor diet can make an amazing program seem almost completely ineffective and a great diet can make a mediocre program lead to consistent growth — as many IFBB pro bodybuilders unfortunately demonstrate.’
If you buy one of my fully structured training programs but continue to get high on Oreo’s and wash it down with a Corona, don’t email me and go all ‘Your training program sucks balls, I’m not gaining muscle, gimme my money back, I need another case of Corona’. That’s on you.
In Sum
There’s not much more I can add. I think this is a great article. I doubt even ChatGPT University could have written a better one.
If you’re confused about program design, apply for my 1-on-1 coaching program, pretty please? I tend to get cool results. Check my approach and results on Instagram.
Originally published by me on Medium on the 5th of October, 2025
