Thursday, February 5, 2009

Lean Muscle Gains And Muscle Pumps - Why Pumps Won't Help You Gain Muscle


For those of you who have been working out for more than a little while you know that a pump feels great. For those of you who are relatively new to weight training, a pump is that fuzzy feeling you get as blood engorges your muscle tissue as a result of weight lifting. The muscles being exercised will grow in size and tightness.

To be clear, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a pump and more often than not a pump is a natural consequence of resistance training. But a muscle pump is not a good barometer of the effectiveness of a workout and believing so could actually be a costly error. Having easily spent thousands of hours in the gym, I have often heard other weight lifters raving about the crazy muscle pumps they experience as they share their personal methodology for achieving such pumps.

Simply put, a pump is the result of excess blood circulating in and around the muscle fibers.

Building serious muscle mass and incredible strength means training very intensely on every workout routine and set. In addition, you need to practice something called "progressive overloading" so that you improve from week to week. Progressive overloading is a fancy term that simply means doing more reps with a given weight than you did the previous time.

If you religiously do these two things then your muscle mass and strength will naturally increase at a speed that you probably never thought possible. Pumps are great but they likely won't help achieve the muscle mass you desire. Focus on intense workouts and gradually increasing your reps and you will get ripped before you know it.

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