How to build muscle and recover better with Ebenezer Samuel

Originally published on August 14, 2019

Muscle-building advice works best when it matches your goals, your recovery, and the way you actually like to train. In Episode 035 of the WHOOP Podcast, Men’s Health Fitness Director Ebenezer Samuel explains how he blends bodybuilding, CrossFit-style conditioning, boxing, yoga, and WHOOP data to build strength without treating fitness like a single-discipline club.

Samuel brings an unusual background to that conversation. He studied journalism at Syracuse University, covered professional athletes for the New York Daily News, and turned what he learned from interviewing players into a practical training approach built on experimentation, movement quality, and recovery awareness.

Note: This article covers WHOOP 3.0. For the latest hardware, see WHOOP.

To listen to episode 035 in full, head to the WHOOP Podcast on Spotify.

What can lifters learn from CrossFit, boxing, and yoga?

Samuel’s biggest training idea is simple: fitness improves when you stop treating methods like rival camps. Covering New York Giants players taught him to ask better questions about speed, rehab, and durability, and years of trying classes across Manhattan showed him that different systems solve different problems.

That is why Samuel does not talk about bodybuilding, CrossFit, boxing, or yoga as identities. He treats them as tools. A lifter can use yoga to improve positions, a CrossFit athlete can benefit from slower strength work, and a boxing class can teach pacing and concentration under fatigue. It is a similar thread to another WHOOP Locker conversation on training across athletic backgrounds.

In the podcast, Samuel gives boxing as a good example of hidden training value. Three minutes in a round feels much longer than a typical interval block, and the mental demand is part of the stress. That makes it useful for people who want more than a mirror result from training.

As Samuel puts it:

“There are CrossFitters and there are bodybuilders and then there are athletes, sprinters, and we don’t always play together or realize how our training can kind of, we’re all kind of doing the same thing.”

What you should take away

• Training styles can complement each other when you use each one for a clear purpose.
• Boxing, yoga, and strength work each expose a different kind of fatigue.
• A mixed training week can build a more durable athlete than a single-style routine.

If you want to hear Samuel unpack why bodybuilding, boxing, and yoga can all inform better programming, listen to the full episode on Spotify.

What does a smart muscle-building week look like?

Once that mixed-discipline mindset is in place, Samuel gets very practical about adding muscle. For people who want more size, he keeps returning to a pull, push, legs split across three training days.

His reasoning is straightforward. A body-part split gives you room to train one area from multiple angles, at multiple speeds, and across more than one plane of motion. On a pull day, that could mean starting with a row, adding pull-ups, and finishing with faster work like a dumbbell clean or snatch. On a leg day, it could mean opening with a squat or deadlift and then adding lateral or rotational patterns.

Samuel is not dismissing full-body training. He is pointing out that three hard full-body sessions in a row often create more fatigue and leave less room for targeted work. That view lines up well with Don Saladino’s discussion of training stress and rest.

Samuel explains it this way:

“I always go back to pull, push, legs. To me, that’s like the ideal split for somebody who wants to put on muscle.”

What you should take away

• A pull, push, legs split can make muscle-building sessions easier to organize across three days.
• Targeted days create more room for accessory work than repeated hard full-body sessions.
• Variety in angles, planes, and movement speed can make a muscle-building plan more complete.

If you want to hear Samuel go deeper on why he prefers pull, push, legs over repeated full-body sessions, listen to the full episode on Spotify.

How can WHOOP help you test whether a workout idea actually works for you?

That training structure leads to the next question: how do you know whether a fitness theory is useful for your body or just good marketing? Samuel uses WHOOP as a self-experiment tool, not just a training log.

He likes to study heart rate curves during classes, compare how different interval designs change the graph, and test what happens after the session ends. When he wanted to examine the afterburn effect from high-intensity intervals, he logged the workout and then logged the next 15 minutes to see whether heart rate stayed elevated. When he tried cryotherapy, he watched his heart rate change as his attention shifted. During one 500-meter row, the data showed the exact point where he mentally backed off even though his finishing time still looked respectable.

That kind of testing works best when you understand how WHOOP measures Recovery, Strain, and Sleep. Samuel’s point is that numbers become useful when they help explain behavior.

Samuel describes one of those experiments clearly:

“I’ll log that workout and then also log like the 15 minutes after it just to see what my heart is doing afterwards and how high it stays up.”

What you should take away

• WHOOP data is most useful when you test a specific question instead of collecting numbers passively.
• Post-workout heart rate trends can reveal whether a session keeps driving stress after the work is done.
• Heart rate data can expose pacing decisions and mental drop-offs that a finish time can hide.

For Samuel’s full take on using WHOOP to test interval training, cryotherapy, and rowing effort, listen to the full episode on Spotify.

What recovery habits matter if you train hard and live on a late schedule?

Once training gets more targeted, recovery has to get more targeted too. Samuel separates physical recovery from mental recovery, and WHOOP helped him notice that sleep quality changed his next-day readiness more than time in bed alone.

Samuel often trained late, got home around 10 or 10:30 p.m., ate a post-lift meal, handled work, and then went to sleep when he actually felt tired. What stood out to him was not that less sleep is ideal. It was that a shorter night of high-quality sleep sometimes left him feeling more recovered than a longer night with interruptions, television, and poor sleep quality.

He also treats recovery as more than sleep. Saturdays are lighter for his mind, with less gym focus and more distance from training. Physically, he leans on yoga, targeted mobility for tight areas like pecs and hip flexors, e-stim several times per week, and NormaTec sessions after leg day. People interested in the recovery side of movement work can also read Jordan Shallow on mobility, stability, and nervous system control.

Samuel puts the sleep point bluntly:

“If I get 4 hours of sleep, but it’s good quality sleep, I recover better the next day than if I got 8 hours of sleep but low-quality sleep.”

What you should take away

• Sleep quality can change next-day recovery even when total sleep time looks similar.
• Mental recovery deserves its own place in a training week.
• Recovery work is more useful when it matches the areas that actually get tight or overworked.

If you want to hear Samuel go deeper on sleep quality, yoga, e-stim, and late-night recovery habits, listen to the full episode on Spotify.

The bottom line

• Ebenezer Samuel’s training philosophy is built on mixing useful ideas from bodybuilding, CrossFit, boxing, yoga, and athletic performance work.
• A pull, push, legs split is Samuel’s preferred structure for people whose main goal is to build muscle.
• Targeted training days can create more room for accessory work, movement variety, and lower day-to-day fatigue than repeated hard full-body sessions.
• WHOOP becomes more valuable when it is used to test a question, such as how long heart rate stays elevated after intervals or how pacing changes during a rowing effort.
• Boxing-style conditioning can expose both physical fatigue and mental fatigue because effort has to stay high for longer uninterrupted rounds.
• Sleep quality can explain why two nights with different durations produce very different next-day recovery outcomes.
• Mental recovery, targeted mobility, and post-leg compression work all played a role in Samuel’s weekly reset.

Frequently asked questions about things discussed in this episode

How does WHOOP help measure recovery after hard training?

WHOOP calculates daily Recovery using signals that include heart rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep, and recent strain, which helps show how ready your body is for more work.

What does WHOOP show after interval training?

WHOOP shows whether heart rate drops quickly or stays elevated after intervals, which can help you compare different workouts and test ideas like the afterburn effect.

How does WHOOP help compare sleep quality with sleep quantity?

WHOOP separates time in bed from actual sleep and shows sleep-stage data, which helps explain why two nights with similar duration can lead to different Recovery results.

What does WHOOP do for people who mix multiple training styles?

WHOOP gives one continuous view of strain, sleep, and recovery across lifting, classes, conditioning, and rest days, so you can compare how each style affects your body.

How does WHOOP help spot pacing mistakes during training?

WHOOP records heart rate trends through a session, which can reveal the moment effort drops even when the workout time still looks solid.

What does WHOOP show when late workouts affect sleep?

WHOOP shows whether late training changes sleep quality and next-day Recovery, which can help you decide if your evening routine is supporting performance or cutting into it.

For people who mix lifting, classes, sprint work, and late nights, WHOOP makes it easier to see which habits actually support performance and which ones only feel productive.