High Achievers & Athletes,

The pump… aka a particularly satisfying experience of increased blood flow to the working muscles and a temporary accumulation of fluid.

If you are familiar to resistance training or to the bodybuilding community,  it’s a word that you have certainly heard of more than once. 

As Arnold beautifully quoted during Pumping Iron documentary in 1977, The Pump, is a feeling and sensation of increased muscle fullness, vascularity, tightness during and after a workout mainly experienced with resistance training. 

“The greatest feeling you can get in a gym, or the most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym is... The Pump. Let's say you train your biceps. Blood is rushing into your muscles and that's what we call The Pump” - Arnold Schwarzenegger

So… why the heck do we want to feel our biceps popping? 

THE MMC & PUMP

In order to contract muscles and to bring fluids to your tissues, you must send a signal from your brain to your muscles in order to generate movement. This connection between your brain and your muscles through motor neurons is what we call the Mind Muscle Connection (MMC). 

With the following informations, you might reconsider how this MMC is crucial for your fitness, aesthetic, performance and long term health goals. 

Generally, when people want to get in shape is usually for improving their current body composition. 

We can debate extensively about this topic but in the end, we all want to look good naked (yes you do). 

Well, in order to look good, you gotta build muscle tissues and in order to build muscles, you need to slowly build those MMC in order to feel the muscles you are recruiting. 

IT TAKES TIME…

Solidifying those brain to muscle pathways takes time. An advance trainee know instinctively how to generate a pump by correctly contracting muscles while twisting the positions of their body segments (based on their own anatomy) hitting the right angles with the right tempo, and also to use the right equipments that generate (too them) the right sensations. 

For a beginner though, it’s way harder. When you start your fitness journey, those neuronal circuits are not well recruited. It’s only through repetitions and by solidifying those pathways over and over that those connections become stronger and that it “clicks” more rapidly.

The important thing to cover here is that generating a pump isn’t only useful to solidifying those MMC. It is vital because a pump might be (at the beginning) the only way that you can immediately perceive and see how you could potentially look like. Just the simple fact of looking bigger* for a few hours in the mirror thanks to all the muscle contractions you experienced during your training might be the one factor that contributes to that initial sparks of body image satisfaction that will push you to keep going to the gym (reread this).

*looking bigger is a result of vasodilation, blood flow, water, plasma and the accumulation of metabolic byproducts rushing to your muscles for supplying the increase demand of oxygen and nutrients consumption. 

As this satisfying sensation of feeling your muscles being bigger, tighter and swollen is fairly gigantic, what are the crucial elements for experiencing a pump? 

1.HONOR THE TEMPO: you need to slow your reps down. Slowly controlling the tempo of your reps will automatically results to better positions, better contractions and overall, a much better pump. Think about eating your favorite burger. If you quickly eat it with only 3-4 bites, you probably won’t enjoy it as much as if you took the time to take each bite thoroughly while chewing for 20-25 times each bite. Appreciate the pump is the same thing, slow the reps down (especially the eccentric). 

2.HEAT UP: in order to experience a pump more rapidly during your workout, you need to get hot. Elevating your body temperature and especially the muscle groups you are going to target in your session (prior to hit your main exercices) is absolutely crucial for developing a proper MMC and generating a good pump. The key components to properly heat up are:

• cardiovascular exercises

• core activation 

• higher rep ranges

EXAMPLE (Lower body bias):

PRE-FATIGUE: 

2-3 sets: 

10-8-6 cal Echo Bike (drop 2 cals every set & increase intensity)

15 Kettlebell Russian Swing (moderate to heavy weight)

20m Kettlebell Farmer Carry 

Rest 60’’ between rounds 

3.BE INTENTIONAL: you won’t feel your muscles if you are not thoroughly deliberate on your form, muscle tension and activation. In order to “feel the burn” and to experience a pump, you need to invest your whole attention and energy on the movement and exercices you are performing. Stop waisting time during your rest periods by chit-chatting all round or by using your phone. Keep your rest period short, consistent, and get the work done.

4.USE SUPERSETS: I see too many people wasting time after they are done performing a set of a single exercise. If you are not performing sets for MAX EFFORTS on any particular lift, there is plenty of room to add exercices or mobility work after you are done with your set. 

Based on the difficulty and intensity you give to an exercise, supersets (meaning you perform agonist or anti-agonist exercises back to back before resting for a longer period) is a great tool for increasing your number of muscle contractions by unit of time. 

EXAMPLE: 

Let’s say you are hitting a pulling session. You want to target back muscles and the posterior chain while working on your pull ups. 

Instead of just focusing on your set of pull-ups and rest directly after, you could do like the following of combining them with a more posterior chain exercice:

Every 2’30’’ x 4-5 sets:

1.Supinated Grip Pull Up: 4-6 reps @ 30X1

Rest 15’’

2.Dumbbell Hamstring March: 8 steps / side 

Rest during the remaining time before 2’30’’ hits. 

In a hypertrophy stand point, this could be a great way to spice your training up and contractions for an overall better pump. 

By selecting your main exercise and combining it with a less taxing one from another muscle group (or the same muscle region to add lots of volume) could be the one thing that increases the quality and enjoyment of your workouts. If you add on top of that more isolations movements of the same muscle groups with slightly higher rep ranges, you can be sure to experience a pump and to build muscle. 

5.HYDRATE & EAT YOUR CARBS: when you move and exercice, you move blood around. In order to facilitate all the different nutrition deliveries and oxygen exchanges that are happening while we train, being well-hydrated also plays a big role on the quality of your muscle contractions. Proper hydration throughout the day and during training will help you maintain optimal blood volume and facilitating efficient circulation.
Another key factor for enhancing your workouts is through your nutrition and especially with adequate timing of carbohydrates.  Carbs can help you achieve a much better MMC during training by providing a readily available source of energy for your muscles. When you consume carbs before a workout (between 60'-3h depending on your meal volume), carbs increase glycogen stores in muscles, leading to uprise water retention within muscle cells. This additional water volume contributes to muscle fullness and vascularity. Additionally, carbs stimulate insulin release, which promotes vasodilation (widening of blood vessels), enhancing blood flow to muscles and thereby improving the pump.

DON'T GET FOOLED

Now, experiencing a pump isn't a correlation to muscle hypertrophy or growth per se. 

While the pump can be a sign of effective training, it isn't the sole indicator of muscle growth. Effective muscle growth requires a combination of mechanical tension, muscle damage, and metabolic stress, achieved through a well-rounded training program that emphasizes progressive overload, proper nutrition, and adequate recovery. The pump is obviously a helpful indicator that muscles are being worked, but it is one piece of the larger puzzle of muscle hypertrophy.

KEEP THE FUN PUMPING

A big portion of strength and resistance training is about the health benefits of caring more muscle mass on your body. As your musculoskeletal system is the number one contributing factor for improving your metabolic rate and to promote better physical function with a much higher quality of life as we age, having a few understandings around “the pump” was therefore crucial. 

With that said, understanding is not the same then experiencing it. Despite having access to all the information, in the end, you are the one making your own experiences. In order to discover the true physical and mental benefits of what "blood rushing into your muscles" feels like, you need to fall in love & to have fun with it. 

Experiments. 

Try

Fail.

Do it again. 

Passionately, 

Max & Ben 

Written by Benjamin Desmet 

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