Hudson and Brandon White, a.k.a. the Buff Dudes of YouTube, frequently share their own experiences of trying out different approaches to fitness and nutrition. In their latest video, they share the rookie errors they made when they first started trying to build muscle in the gym, from the respective points of view of a hardgainer, i.e. somebody who eats a lot of calories but struggles to gain weight, and an easy gainer. They also explain how they overcame these early mistakes and obstacles.

Hardgainer Brandon says that inconsistent training and the absence of any clearly defined goals held him back at first. “It was time to get a little bit more serious, so I decided to enter a bodybuilding competition, and that was definitely a game-changer,” he says. “It gave me a solid goal to aim for, and all of a sudden, my consistency went up. Not only going to the gym, but now I was really tracking my calories and eating a certain amount every day, rather than yo-yo-ing back and forth. I started seeing a lot of gains in the gym, which motivated me to push harder.”

Hudson had a similar issue; while he was more of an easy gainer, he eventually figured out that he was eating too many calories, prioritizing protein to the detriment of his other macronutrients, and his workouts were not consistent enough, meaning that he was putting on weight, but not muscle. “When I was eating carbs, it was mostly junk carbs consisting of massive amounts of sugars,” he says. “There’s much more than just eating a ton of food and training sporadically.”

Brandon adds that he also had to address the kinds of foods that he was eating, as the volume he was consuming wasn’t necessarily getting him anywhere at first. “A lot of times you’ll eat a lot of food, or might feel like you’re eating a lot of food, but maybe it’s the wrong kind of food,” he says. “Maybe it’s the food that makes you feel full but doesn’t give you a lot of calories. That’s when you introduce calorically dense foods… Once you have those things in place, tracking your calories, the consistency, and the types of food, you might start to realize you’re not such a hardgainer after all.”

They go on to explain that there are a whole host of other factors which can affect a person’s body’s ability to gain muscle which might be unique to them, such as hormone levels, how their digestive systems respond to certain foods, whether their lifestyle outside of their weights sessions is more active or sedentary.

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