How much time do we need to spend weekly in the gym to be healthy and have a great physique?

It may vary from 1 to 4 hours weekly, depending on your goals. But even with just 1 hour (two 30-minute sessions), if you push your limits hard, you can achieve a good body. The sweet spot is two 1-hour sessions per week — this is how I train.

Are there any secret exercises or training programs that will allow you to build an epic body faster?

The truth is — there are no secrets. Strength and muscle are built on timeless principles and basic exercises. You don’t need hidden techniques or flashy new routines. What you need is understanding:

– How muscles work.

– What tension is.

– What training to failure means.

– And how to perform the 20 or so basic exercises effectively.

Once you understand these, you can train anywhere, with almost any equipment, and still grow.

Don’t chase Internet workout fads or “miracle” programs. The closer an exercise is to basic human movements, the better.

The Real Secret

The only real secret is effort. Struggle and pain force your body to adapt and grow. Put in the work consistently, push your limits, and your body has no choice but to change.

No program will save you from this truth: growth is bought with effort and paid for in pain. https://video.nostr.build/2a2c0585d5aead712b8517678a1a0d439a6bd0765a8dcf42d8faf873b90d27ac.mp4

When you are building a house, you need bricks, cement, masons to lay the bricks, time, and rest. Without all of these, the house cannot be built.

In the same way, when you are building muscle, you need four essentials:

Real food — the building blocks, providing protein, energy, and nutrients.

Training — the tension and stress that signal your body to grow.

Sleep — the recovery phase, where muscles repair and rebuild.

Hormones — the internal environment that governs whether growth happens or not.

If even one of these is missing, the structure won’t rise. To build muscle effectively, you must optimize all of them. https://video.nostr.build/27762c1f5382d766cc544fefded1365543bcd89e8ddb0db528731dc8b8ba1c85.mp4

To build muscle, you need to show your body that the work you’re demanding is a struggle — something it must adapt to in order to survive. That means lifting heavy.

The goal is not random movement or easy repetitions, but lifting as heavy as you can for several controlled reps. Every rep should feel difficult, every rep should bring discomfort. That discomfort is the signal your body listens to — the trigger that tells it: “I need to grow stronger to handle this next time.”

If the weight is light and comfortable, your body has no reason to adapt. Growth only comes when you push near your limits, when the muscles are forced into tension they cannot easily manage. That’s the essence of progressive overload — adding more resistance over time to continue forcing adaptation.

So: lift heavy, embrace the discomfort, and teach your body what you want it to become. https://video.nostr.build/af053163fe7a19bc643bf929d39753241e48148f2947f91cc1f90aa0909e3b76.mp4

There is also another way to demand growth from the body.

Muscles store resources inside them that allow them to work. When these resources are depleted, you feel unable to perform more reps. If you push to the point of full depletion, you signal to your body that it needs more storage capacity. Since these resources are stored inside the muscle, the only way to increase storage is to grow more muscle.

To train this pathway, you can use a moderate weight — something you can move for 12–16 reps — and push it to absolute exhaustion.

The best approach is to combine both methods:

Heavy lifting (3–6 reps) to stress the nervous system and stimulate raw strength and muscle density.

Moderate weight lifting (12–16 reps to failure) to deplete energy stores fully and trigger muscle growth through increased storage capacity.

Together, these two strategies demand maximum growth by attacking the muscle from both ends: strength and endurance capacity. https://video.nostr.build/e6a6d59c2e7ded38476410c3eea78c85f521121d9565525384aca27f94d5f501.mp4

Feel it — how you become stronger, how your life changes, how people are drawn to you, how your self-respect grows, how you build yourself and your life.

You need to stay focused on the positive result you desire. The process and the pain exist only to test whether you truly want it. https://video.nostr.build/fa2653b591095b93d988b41e5f1fc075b281c7c066da557d72586d2d791673e1.mp4