The Worst Advice on YouTube for Skinny Guys (We Tried It)

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Starting out in the gym as a skinny guy, we heard all the worst advice. Not only the worst advice, but conflicting advice. And that's what makes it so confusing for guys who are just trying to grow in the gym. You get all this different information. This guy says through this, the Harley twins are telling you to carb cycle, and this guy says carnivore is best. What the [ __ ] do we do? Well, I'm just going to give you our honest experience after working with over a hundred clients, and also my own personal experience, and you can come to your own conclusion after the video. I'm so jealous of guys that started listening to the right people from day one and just started doing the right things from day one because I think we literally took the longest [ __ ] road to get here to where we were actually doing [ __ ] that's conducive for growth.

[00:00:38]Did we grow? Yeah, of course. When you first go into the gym, you're going to grow. But you can do [ __ ] right? And probably half the amount of time it's going to take you to get to that end goal. The first thing we heard, I used to watch someone called Dylan Mcnite and his whole approach was just bulk, bro.

[00:00:52]If you haven't seen his videos, you can think of it much the same as like Sam Sulik would give out similar advice. And it was this calories in, calories out approach. All macros are the same. You just need to eat big to get big. Now, there is some truth in that. Obviously, yes. If you just eat more food, you are going to be in a surplus and you're going to grow faster than if you weren't in a surplus. But is good enough really what you want? Or do you want the optimal approach? Because there is an optimal way to go about it. And the thing is, when you go into this massive surplus and you instantly put on a bunch of weight, it looks good. You're looking at the scale, but what you've done there is you've quite literally halfed or quartered the time that you could be bulking if you put yourself into a lean surplus because you'll get to the point where you're 15 16% body fat and you've only got, you know, eight more weeks until you got to cut that bulk off.

[00:01:38]Yeah, this is not how you should look 6 to 8 weeks into a bulk. And you definitely can get to this body fat in under 6 weeks. And I've done it. I've literally put on 10% of body fat in like 4 weeks because I just pushed calories high. I didn't have my macro split, right? And I was forcing my body to just store everything as body fat.

[00:01:55]Realistically, anything past what's being stored as glycogen or muscle mass is being stored as body fat. So, I don't know what you're out here doing eating 3500 calories as a skinny guy. Yeah. I mean, any actual coach or bodybuilder coach laughs at the if it fits your macros because if you understand it and you actually look into it, it just makes no [ __ ] sense. And it couldn't be further from the truth. I understand why people do it. And I can understand it because I did it. And it's because you want to get big ASAP. You're extremely impatient. And when the scale is flying up, it looks great. Looks like you're achieving the results that guys have taken years to get to in a matter of a few months. and you're like, "Well, all all I got to do now is just shave off this bit of body fat and I'm going to look great. I'm going to look like my dream physique." And then you have the depressing reality of going exactly back to where you started. You might have built one or two kilos of muscle and you basically look the same. You pretty much gained a bunch of fat and then lost the fat and got nowhere. And it's not bad that you gained that weight, right? Like it's not bad at all. Any progress is good progress. But the most depressing part is the fact that you had to cut that off so early when you could have been growing for another 5 to 6 months, man. Or the worst part is guys don't cut it off when they start to get fat. And they just accumulate a ton of body fat.

[00:03:05]And we've seen it countless times in our coaching. Guys send us the photos. They say, "This is what we're working with. I need to start a cut." And I'm like, "Man, what happened?" And then they tell me it was intentional. They have been going to the gym. They've been tracking macros, but they intentionally got fat.

[00:03:17]I'm like, "Bro, it looks like to me like you just were never on a diet. You just look like an out of shape guy." I'm sorry. That's just the honest truth.

[00:03:24]>> That's most guys that come through the door. they would be, to be honest, severely overweight, like obese. And every single person says the exact same thing. It's not like the traditional, I guess you could say, fat person where there was just no nutritional knowledge at all and they just eat McDonald's every day. They were trying to do that.

[00:03:41]That was the goal for them. Yeah. And then they sent photos of a few years ago and they look great. [laughter] I'm like, bro, this is how it should look 6 to 8 weeks into a bulk. Has there been really any body fat gain? Nah. Maybe 1% body fat gain. So for reference, this was Nelson at about 87 kg. And what are you at now? 93 first thing in the morning. 93 kg. So we've had a 6 kilo gain and it's all gone to glycogen fullness and built some muscle. We've been getting super strong and barely any body fat gain. But how do we do this?

[00:04:12]Because it's probably the first time ever that we've nailed it to this level.

[00:04:15]600 g of carbohydrates, a ton of [ __ ] carbs. Keeping fats and protein as low as we can get away with.

[00:04:22]You just need to eat the protein to be able to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and maintain muscle mass. It doesn't need to be as high as in a cut where you're trying to hold the muscle mass. You have the carbs there. They're protein sparing. And the fats, everyone's overeating on the fats. I'm going to beat it to death on this channel, but you can pretty much lower them and just squeeze in a ton of carbs, which are so much more productive for growing. Now, obviously, we don't eat 600 carbs every single day, otherwise we would get fat very quickly, man. On majority of the days, we're only really slightly above maintenance or at maintenance. And it's really only on this high day where we're pushing it up this far when we truly need it.

[00:04:54]Actually, a low day is in a deficit, right? A low day is in a deficit. I'm not going to bore you with the details in this too much because we've explained it in a lot of other videos, but you can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time or hold fat where it is, burn muscle on some days, and then go into a storing mode where you're putting on muscle and tiny little bit of fat on other days, leveling out so you're just gaining muscle. It's a bit of a cheat of the body's energy production and storage system when you run a carb cycling approach, especially when you go super aggressive like this, like 600 grams of carbs on a high day, 150 gram of carb on a low day. And it is almost confusing. I get it because it's almost assumed that a bulk is included with fat. Like people think that getting fatter is what a surplus is, but that's just not what it is. And like why does fat have to accumulate with muscle? There's nothing really in the body that says that that has to be true in order for you to grow.

[00:05:44]only for the scale to crow. However, in saying that, yes, over a bulk, it is inevitable you will put on a little bit of body fat. You basically can't just gain muscle without any body fat ever.

[00:05:54]In a bulk, you will accumulate body fat.

[00:05:56]But what we are trying to do is keep that accumulation as low as we can while not inhibiting muscle growth because yes, you still need a surplus to really grow to your maximum potential so that we can grow for the longest time. If I would have dumbed this whole video down, we don't try to bulk in as fast as we can. We try to bulk for as long as we can. And we do that by keeping the surplus small and using the carbohydrates for fuel for training, keeping the fats low, and using the protein for muscle protein synthesis.

[00:06:23]Yeah, that is about as simple as we can make it. And also, we're not just making this up. We do the same thing for our clients. So, this was a cutting phase, but he gained muscle, 2.4 lbs of muscle, and lost 10 lbs of body fat. So, that's a recmp. By definition, I guess that is a rec. approach works extremely well in a cutting phase or a gaining phase. If you do want to know more about it and you know a bit more into the details of it, we've got entire guides on carb cycling which you can watch. There'll be a video like somewhere around here. Or if you just want it done for yourself, you want to just have peace of mind knowing that you have the plan there, you can go to that first link in the description. And you can book a call and talk to us directly about how we can apply it to your