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Muscular Pumping

The Difference Between a Good Muscle Pump and a Bad One

People often ask why it is that their muscles often deflate quickly after they have trained. One minute they feel really pumped, and then shortly afterwards they deflate like a balloon. This is a tricky question that relates to the kind of muscular pump that is obtained in your muscles during and after a weight training session. If you are on a specific bodybuilding meso cycle in which the aim is not to increase muscular endurance, but to purely concentrate on lifting the most amount of weight possible, then a, "bad pump" is not what you want as it means that the weight training session that you just performed was performed too quickly.

Muscular endurance is a vital component of bodybuilding. If you have little muscular endurance it means that you will not be able to tolerate the lactic acid that builds up in your muscles, and so you will grind to a halt quite quickly without being able to perform your desired reps range. So even if you are just performing a Bicep workout of just 12 - 10 - 8 - 8 on Barbell Curls without adding any other advanced training strategies, you will find that although the weight is not that heavy, the lactic acid build up is so bad that you are forced to stop before you get to the desired reps range. As a result you will have to lower the weight on your next set in order to ensure that you are to be able to get to your desired reps range.

So let's say that you are a beginner to bodybuilding and have worked your way through the various stages, and have just finished an 8 to 12 week beginners bodybuilding meso cycle. A good choice for the following meso cycle will be a part pre exhaust cycle as this will increase your ability to tolerate lactic acid. When you finish this meso cycle you may decide to go on to a meso cycle in which you concentrate only on lifting as much weight as possible. When you do this you will find that as your strength levels return you will not be as effected by the build up of lactic acid as you were in the past. As a result you will find that you will be able to increase the weight and add in more advanced strategies such as Drop Sets, or Forced Reps, as well as being able to perform your desired reps range.

This brings us on to the difference between obtaining a good muscular pump and a bad one.

Bearing in mind that I am still referring to the same meso cycle above in which the aim is to lift as much weight as possible without wanting to increase muscular endurance whatsoever, you have to be careful not to train too quickly. If you train too quickly you push so much blood and lactic acid into the muscles that the muscles tighten up quicker than normal, which gives you a lactic, or, " bad pump ", restricting the amount of work that you can do. This type of pump is as a direct result of burning carbohydrate so quickly in order to create ATP, that the majority of the glycogen is wasted. This lactic pump means that you will not be able to carry on. Your muscles will feel full as a result of all of this lactic acid, but once this goes down you have lost all the benefits. The aim is to fill the muscles with blood and not lactic acid so that the muscles can function at their highest levels.

Therefore, if you can train slower and more progressively, without training through the reps too quickly by pacing the way you perform the reps, and pacing the rest you take in between sets so that the rest you take is relatively stable and the same, then you should be able to slowly but surely increase the blood flow into the muscle during each workout. This will open up more capilliarisation, which means that more fresh blood can go in, and more importantly, that more waste products can removed. This in turn will yield greater results for this specific style of training in this meso cycle.

Obviously, if you were wanting to increase the amount of lactic acid in your muscles so that you can increase your tolerance to lactic acid, then the aim is to take less rest in between sets so that the lactic acid stays in the muscles that you are working.

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