Today we will continue exploring our workout sensations in practice. The technique we’ll discuss today is perfect for both beginners and professional athletes! It’s popular among both women and men. Once you experience it, you won’t be able to confuse it with anything else! So, what is pumping?
“I’m about to explode!” — these are the thoughts that cross my mind when I feel it during a workout. It’s hard to imagine a more enjoyable effect from training! Curious about what it is? Then read on.
Pumping is the filling of muscles with a large volume of blood during multiple repetitions of the same movement. To put it simply, it’s “pumping” the muscles with blood, mimicking the action of a pump. Why a pump?
The pumping effect! When you perform an exercise at a fast pace and start to feel good blood flow, you accelerate the pace! The muscle can’t “pump out” the blood at the same rate. As a result, blood, unable to find an exit, starts nourishing every cell in the muscle, causing it to swell, harden, and redden before your eyes! The set continues until muscle failure occurs.
Your muscle feels like stone. It’s hard to bend the limb, and your veins are swollen like water hoses! Don’t be alarmed! You’ve achieved the pumping effect.
The greatest bodybuilder, successful politician, and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger enjoyed this sensation so much that he compared it to the climax of sexual intercourse.
Why Is Pumping Suitable For Beginners?
Typically, beginners, after achieving some success, start to imagine themselves as “bodybuilding gurus” and lift excessively heavy weights to show off how they’re “super professional” athletes to other gym-goers.
This often looks, to put it mildly, amusing, but that’s not the point. The body already experiences significant stress at the beginning of training, as it has to transform all its systems to adapt to the load. And the load is excessive!
Human recovery capabilities are not limitless, and beginners start to lose muscle mass and feel weak. In short, overtraining sets in!
Pumping, however, doesn’t require working with maximum weights, as it involves a fairly quick pace of exercise execution. Therefore, it helps to condition the muscles and maintain proper technique during training, which is a common problem for beginners!
What about the main rule: progression of load?
Great! But what about load progression when the weights in a pumping workout can’t be as heavy as in working sets? Plus, you can pump your muscles with blood by doing, for example, 60 repetitions with a light weight (like in push-ups). This brings us to another essential aspect of a pumping workout: pumping should be heavy or nearly strength training!
Pumping should be used not as a replacement but as a supplement to strength training. Here’s why:
- First, it’s important to note that muscles don’t care how many repetitions you do—6 or 40—they care about the time under tension! Pumping helps to slightly increase this factor. Additionally, research from several reputable universities has confirmed that pumping can increase muscle volume by 20%, which is incomparable to the effects of pure “strength” training on muscle growth.
- I want to mention another very important feature of our muscles. Each muscle group in our body contains muscle fibers designed for different types of work (endurance, strength, extreme strength). I’ll discuss this in a separate article, so don’t miss it! This is crucial to know if you want to achieve significant results!
Pumping trains “endurance” or “slow” muscle fibers, which have excellent growth potential. By training only “strength” or “fast” muscle fibers, you limit your potential for muscle mass growth!
- Pumping drives a large volume of blood into the muscles, along with numerous nutrients and trace elements, which in turn nourish the muscles and contribute to effective training and better recovery afterward. Blood transports nutrients, supplying the body with everything it needs, including oxygen.
- But a large volume of blood in the muscles is not only beneficial for transporting nutrients. The blood also stretches the muscle fascia, allowing the muscles to grow even more.
Muscle fascia is the connective tissue sheath that contains our muscle fibers. In other words, it’s a connective tissue bag that holds our muscles.
Therefore, the softer it becomes (due to stretching by blood, for example), the easier it is for muscle fibers to grow.
- Pumping can be used for load periodization to further enhance progress from training. If you always train only with heavy weights, you can easily overtrain your body. Alternating with
"light"workouts will lead to even greater progress! After all, a beautiful, powerful, strong body is a long-term goal!
Here’s how I do it. First, I perform a warm-up set (1 or 2), then 3-4 working sets, and at the end, I do a pumping set (reduce the working weight by 20-30% and perform one more set at a fast pace, to failure)! I’ve noticed that this approach accelerates progress and it works. Try it yourself, as only by your own experience will you understand what works best for you.
Remember the most important points:
Pumping should be strength-based (reduce the weight by 20-30%)! Repetitions should be done to muscle failure. Pumping can be used by both beginners and advanced bodybuilders.
So, friends, if you’re still undecided about whether to go to the gym or not, at least try it for this sensation.
