A Conversation with Anabolic Aliens’ Eric Cue & Mike Rosa

By: Jacob Elyachar, jakes-take.com  

It is a pleasure to welcome Eric Cue and Mike Rosa to Jake’s Take. Together, they are best known to both the online fitness and YouTube communities as the Anabolic Aliens.

Since 2014, the Anabolic Aliens have been building a strong, supportive community through their intense fitness programs and their informative, entertaining, and inspiring YouTube videos. The Anabolic Aliens have inspired over 146,000 YouTube subscribers who have viewed their videos over 9 million times to begin their respective fitness journeys.

In addition to making waves on YouTube, the Anabolic Aliens have networked onto other social media networks including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and BodySpace. Friend to the blog, Scott Herman, who collaborated with Eric and Mike when they were just starting out on YouTube, saw their potential and told Jake’s Take how proud he was of both of them and “can’t wait to see how large they grow!”

In this edition of “A Conversation,” Eric and Mike shared their YouTube creation process, how they overcame the obstacles of breaking into the fitness industry and revealed the reason why social media is the core of the Anabolic Aliens brand.

Jacob Elyachar: Could you please share the Anabolic Aliens’ origin story with my readers?

Mike Rosa: We met back in high school playing baseball together. Eric went to college to Worcester State University initially to play baseball, and I went off to Western New England University to play baseball. Neither of us ended up liking our schools, unfortunately, resulting in us both transferring and the end of our baseball careers. Fortunately, this was the start of our fitness careers. We were always athletic and worked out to stay in shape, but when baseball was no longer limiting our time and our choice for the style of training we could do, lifting became a real passion. After months of getting serious with fitness, I took on powerlifting and Eric declared his major in college as Nutritional Science. As we grew bigger, stronger, and became more advanced, more and more people started coming up to us asking for help in the gym, nutritionally, and questions along those lines.

Eric Cue: We knew were not very experienced and had a lot to learn, but we loved trying to help and motivate people to the best of our ability. One day we were lifting in the gym together, and I said, “Hey, we should start a fitness YouTube channel.” There was no hesitation after this. Neither of us had a plan of what exactly we wanted to do in life, but we both knew we loved fitness, had a passion for lifting, were good kind and knowledgeable at it with a mindset to keep getting better and wanted whatever we did to be in that industry. From that point, we came up with a model for our channel to follow which was to help, educate, motivate, entertain, and inspire as many people as possible.

MR: The unusual Anabolic Aliens name originated because we did not want to be just your average fitness brand with fitness in the name. We wanted to have fun with it, never limit ourselves meaning have topics covering nearly anything, and to stand out as our personalities. Ever since we released our first video on July 2, 2014, the Anabolic Aliens have been invading the fitness world!

JE: How long does it take the Anabolic Aliens to create a YouTube video from conception to posting?

EC: At the beginning of every month, we make a video schedule of ideas and when to upload for each week of that month. This schedule is altered as things come up or specific requests are made, but it gives us structure and the ability to plan details for these topic ideas. We have two primary filming days a week, and the editing process is done the day before we release the video. We upload to YouTube either the night before or morning of posting. Each video, from start to finish, takes at least eight hours with everything included. Keep in mind; the process is to form an idea, a plan, a script, film, edit, upload, tag, detail, share, and interact. It is always more than what meets the eye!

JE: What are some of the challenges that the Anabolic Aliens have faced breaking into the fitness industry? How did you overcome those obstacles?

MR: We faced three main challenges breaking into the fitness industry. The Anabolic Aliens’ first challenge was how the fitness industry is flooded with content. This was a challenge because getting exposure was challenging and frustrating. There is not an accurate method to overcome this, other than earning that exposure. The way we did this was by always staying consistent with putting out content, working hard daily on our physical fitness, always staying honest with our opinions and experiences, and educating ourselves on optimization tactics. A second challenge was how so much content out there is scams and false information so how were we going to prove our validity. The way we overcame this challenge was by doing research always to support our facts with evidence, using our personal experiences to voice real opinions, and have our physiques represent effectiveness and success.

EC: The third challenge was and is being natural athletes. The fitness industry is filled with steroid use and many of those users claiming natural (or drug-free). This gives people a false interpretation of what realistically can be accomplished. As natural athletes, it is impossible to physically achieve aesthetics or the strength that steroid users can get, especially at the rate they do. What the Anabolic Aliens do to overcome this is work hard every single day to be the best we can be, make our content relate to the realistic abilities of natural athletes (which most people are!), and motivate and educate others that results can be done naturally and never to give up.

JE: Let’s talk about social media. How has the social networking platforms helped Anabolic Aliens establish their audience?

MR: These days social media is a necessity for getting yourself seen and marketing your brand. Anabolic Aliens is consistently active on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and BodySpace. We connect with as many people as possible. The more connections we can establish, the more of a reach we can have and the bigger an audience we can build, the more people we can help. We work hard to engage with our audiences on all platforms because we want a community, not just fans. Fitness is a process where we can all help each other and improve together. Therefore, we use our social media platforms to share our passion for fitness, make our brand recognized and relatable and to build our community.

 

JE: Who are your dream collaborators? Why would Anabolic Aliens like to work with them?

EC: We have already done A LOT of work with Scott Herman, who has helped us build our brand from the ground up and we appreciate Scott taking us under his wings and helped guide us, while we created the Anabolic Aliens name. We would love to collaborate with Christian Guzman because his entrepreneurial mindset and success is inspiring. He seems like a down to earth guy who can offer great insight.

MR: We would also like to work with CT Fletcher. He would be incredibly fun to collaborate with because of his motivating upbeat personality. We feel like he’d push us harder than we ever have before and give us more motivation and instill us with an attitude to keep pushing ourselves for more and more. We would love to collaborate with Athlean X’s Jeff Cavaliere because he is extremely knowledgeable and we feel like we could learn a lot from him. It would be an awesome experience to pick his brain on aspects of fitness that we aren’t as advanced in ourselves.

JE: If you had the chance to meet with your fans who have not started their fitness journey, what advice would you share with them? 

EC: If we had the opportunity to meet our fans who have not started their fitness journey yet, we would give them three main pieces of advice to get them going and to keep going. First off, consistency is everything. It takes around a month to establish a habit. Get yourself in a routine to create that fit-minded habit, and it will become a lifestyle. Second, fitness helps manage your whole life. Not only do you feel better physically, but you also do mentally.

MR: Exercise is one of the best stress relievers. There are no negatives, only positives. If you want to better your life in more ways than one, starting your fitness journey will make that more and more possible. Third, you’re never alone. The fitness community is one of the most supportive out of them all. There is motivation everywhere. There’s a reason people say #fitfam. The journey is not easy, but incredibly rewarding, so progress is motivation to us all. We help each other out so keep going forward.

For more information about the Anabolic Aliens, visit their website!

You can also connect with the Anabolic Aliens on social media. Visit their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, & YouTube channels.