Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Reasons Why a Pump And Muscle Gain Are Not The Same Thing

By Ricardo d Argence

Your back is firmly planted on the bench as you wrap your chalked hands around the cold, steel bar. Your training partner helps you un-rack the weight as you power the bar up and down, squeezing your chest and triceps on each grueling rep. You complete your 6 repetitions, re-rack the bar and stand up. Your chest feels tight and engorged with blood. You take a look in the mirror, thrilled with how full and vascular your pecs appear. You feel strong, powerful, healthy and motivated to blast through the rest of your workout with your newly achieved "pump".

A "Pump" is nothing but the tight, blood-congested feeling in a muscle after it has been intensely trained. Muscle pump is caused by a rapid influx of blood into the muscles to remove fatigue toxins and replace supplies of fuel and oxygen. But it doesn't matter how great you feel, if the goal you're trying to reach is to build muscle.

A pump is in no way indicative of a successful workout. It doesn't mean it's bad for you to achieve one during your session, it's simply a natural result of intense weight training. But if you focus your workout in getting a pump instead of muscle gain, you are making a huge mistake, and it will tax you.

Maybe you have heard them (maybe you are one of them), those guys telling "my firend, this will give you a crazy pump!", and, ok, maybe you'll achieve your pump, and it will feel like heaven. But once agai i tell to you: if you paid that membership and go every day to the gym to have big muscles, great muscles, if you want them look like stone, that pump is not the best way to get them.

A pump is just the blood flowing to the area. You can get a good pump without working all that hard. Giving your body no reason to grow. But you can get the greatest pump, and it does'nt mean your muscles will grow the most. If muscle pumps meant muscle growth, then super light weight, ultra high rep programs would be the most effective way to grow. And i think you'll agree with me when i say that will never work. So, how can i know if i'm in the right way? It's nothing complex.

Take your workout records (in terms of weight and reps) from the previous week and compare it to the current week. Did you improve? Were you able to either increase the resistance slightly on each exercise, or perform an extra rep or two? If so, you had a successful workout, regardless of how much blood you were able to pump into your muscle tissue.

I hope this article cleared up your confusion on the issue of "muscle pumps". There's so much misleading muscle-building information circling around on the Internet these days that it can sometimes be impossible to know who to listen to. - 15266

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