FT Questions....

[bill2]

Well, it seems like over those 9 mo. of MD training that adding in the 3 pump days didn't get you the gains you'd hoped for.

The real issue here, IMO, is recovery. The more you can train, the better, as long as you can recover, IMO. And this is a fine line, as you can recovery and continue to train in a certain way and not make substantial muscle gains if the nutrient surplus (and resulting insulin response, etc) is not there.

Consider a gain of 25lb of muscle in a year.

This breaks down to 2 lb / month or about ½ lb / week--> Roughly 1 ounce of muscle / day.

Muscle is mostly water, and in terms of protein accrual (protein balance) in skeletal muscle, this ounce of muscle gained means a protein balance of about 7-8 grams of protein / day.

Consider that you're eating lets days 200g of protein, so the shifting protein balance is very subtle to make even tremendous gains like this. Just a <5% shift in protein balance means growing like a weed.

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So, back to the case in hand: The issue is whether pump training, but increasing blood flow during the exercise would increase recovery. Yes, perhaps having greater blood flow might have some effect, but this would suggest that blood flow is sub-optimal in some way. By analogy, would having more food available at a buffet mean that a person eats more than otherwise?... Probably, not, as a good buffet (like a good circulatory system) has plenty of food for ad lib eating.

So adding more workouts - of a pump style of training - would be a way to target muscle growth via a metabolic stress mechanism. Lighter loading would mean less muscle damage (PERHAPS!) and fewer "inroads" to recovery, but these are still workouts from which one must recover.

In essence, IMO, you're adding training volume with more workouts that might not be as difficult to recover from, and create a different set of cellular stimuli for growth compared to a heavier type of training. The effect on blood flow per se is not what would make these workouts effective, IMO. On the contrary, blood flow and the pump is simply the normal response (reactive hyperemia) to the imposed metabolic stress, which is the real source of the growth stimulus.

-S

your point is that i wasnt able to recover=diminished gains when the day was over?