By: Sean Nalewanyj
Submitted: 2009-11-12 06:36:53 | Word Count: 815
Your back is firmly planted on the bench as you wrap your chalked hands around the cold, steel bar. With assistance from your training partner, you un-rack the weight, push the bar into motion, squeezing your triceps and chest with each taxing move. Re-racking the bar after working through 6 reps, you plant your feet firmly on the ground and stand up.
Your chest feels tight and engorged with blood. The fullness and vascularity of your chest is impressive as you glance in the mirror. The "pump" you're now sporting makes you feel strong, healthy, and powerful; it also motivates you to tear through your remaining workout.
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The fact is a pump is the best feeling in bodybuilding.
For the newbies at the gym, a pump develops during resistance training, when your blood gets trapped in your muscle tissues. Although this does a lot to swell up your muscles, making you feel stronger, does it really do a lot in stimulating muscle growth?
When you get a pump at the gym, it's not a bad thing, just a natural boost from intense weight training. But, to clear up the rumors, a pump doesn't mark the success of your workout or indicate whether or not you are stimulating muscle growth.
If you use the intensity of a pump to judge the success of your workout, you are sorely mistaken.
In the gym, it is very common to hear lifters talk about their best pump and how to obtain an even better one. "Try this, man, if you want a killer pump!"
If you're a regular at the gym, you've probably heard this before. Stimulating muscle growth has nothing to do with getting a great, big, and satisfying pump.
According to that theory, light weights and high reps would mean a successful route to stimulating muscle growth, if pumps were really an accurate gauge. Any serious lifter with half a brain knows that this simply is not the case.
Do you want to know how to truly gauge if a workout is stimulating muscle growth? It's not that hard…
Compare the reps and weights from last week's workout to this week's workout.
Are you progressing?
Did you change up anything by adding more weights or increasing the number of reps? If you did, you were successful in stimulating muscle growth, even if you didn't get blood trapped in your blood tissue to cause an impressive pump.
Building strength and muscle mass is all about working out with full intensity on every set and trying to improve your results on a weekly basis. If you can push yourself to achieve this week after week, you will be stimulating muscle growth regardless of whether or not you feel the pump.
Hopefully, this has helped you understand stimulating muscle growth and how it is not affected by the pump. Unfortunately, the Internet is rampant with muscle-building information that is often misleading and it's hard to find a source to trust.
Author Resource:-
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