How Long Does a Muscle Pump Last? What About Swelling?
A muscle pump looks impressive for about 30 minutes, then quickly fades over the next 1–3 hours. I surveyed 400 people to double-check. 61% said their pump lasted less than an hour. Only 2% said they could notice a pump two hours later.
But there were also quite a few people who said their pump lasted for 2–3 days. That’s something slightly different. There’s a second effect that keeps your muscles swollen for much, much longer. It explains an interesting lifting myth, too.
What’s a Muscle Pump?
A muscle pump is when your muscles swell up with blood right after training. Your body pumps blood into the muscles to give them oxygen and nutrients. Some of that blood gets soaked up by your muscle fibres, causing cellular swelling and giving your muscles a tight, “pumped” feeling.
It’s unclear if getting a pump improves muscle growth, but it might. Cellular swelling seems to be good for building muscle (study). Even if it isn’t, the style of training that gives you a pump is great for building muscle, so the two often go hand in hand (study, study).
How to Get a Bigger Muscle Pump
The best way to get a muscle pump is to do a few sets of 8–20 reps, keep tension on your muscles throughout those sets, and use short rest times. You can exaggerate the effect even further with blood flow restriction training (BFR).
It also helps to eat dietary nitrates, such as beets and spinach, and foods rich in citrulline, like watermelons. Or you could supplement with 8 grams of citrulline malate (study). Citrulline malate has a pleasantly sour taste. It tastes nice in a pre-workout.
It also helps to drink enough fluid. That will improve your blood flow and pressure, allowing you to pump more blood into your muscles.
Muscle Swelling Can Last 1–3 Days
The pump will be gone within a couple of hours, but it will be replaced by a different kind of muscle swelling the next day. When you train your muscles hard, you cause muscle damage, and your body sends in blood to help them repair and grow.
This causes a similar type of muscle swelling to a muscle pump, making your muscles look harder and fuller than usual (study). This swelling usually peaks 24–72 hours after your workout, but if you’re training unusually hard, it might linger for as long as a week (study, study).
This swelling is called edema, and the edema you get from exercise tends to be good for you. Lifting weights inflames your muscles, but then your body responds by reducing inflammation, both in your muscles and overall. It’s one of the health benefits of lifting weights.
The inflammation you get from exercise is kind of like spilling orange juice on the floor. When you clean up the orange juice, you also clean away any dirt that was on the floor, leaving it even cleaner than before.
Some people count edema as part of the muscle pump. Both cause cellular swelling in our muscle fibres. Both are part of the recovery process. They are indeed somewhat similar. With that definition, your pump can last for days.
Another Way to Make Your Muscles Fuller
You can also make your muscles look bigger by eating more carbohydrates. The moderate-rep short-rest type of training that gives you a good pump also burns through glycogen (the carbs in your muscles). If you’re eating plenty of carbs, your body will fill those glycogen stores back up, sometimes packing them even fuller than they were before.
How to Keep Your Muscles Full Forever
When researchers study muscle growth, they need to wait about a week after the last workout before they can measure muscle growth. Otherwise, they’d be measuring both muscle growth and muscle swelling, making it seem as if the participants gained more muscle than they really did. You don’t need to do that, though.
If you do 2–3 full-body workouts every week, you can keep your muscles somewhat swollen forever. You’ll get a muscle pump while working out, your muscles will be inflamed for the next 2–3 days, and you’ll be pumped full of extra glycogen. All three of those things make your muscles look bigger and harder.
That means if you get sick or take a week off, you might feel like you’ve suddenly lost ten pounds of muscle. There’s no pump or inflammation. Your muscles aren’t as packed full of glycogen. You probably didn’t lose a noticeable amount of muscle, though. You just lost your forever pump.
Shane Duquette is the co-founder of Outlift, Bony to Beastly, and Bony to Bombshell. He's a certified conditioning coach with a degree in design from York University in Toronto, Canada. He's personally gained 70 pounds and has over a decade of experience helping over 10,000 skinny people bulk up.
Marco Walker-Ng is the co-founder and strength coach of Outlift, Bony to Beastly, and Bony to Bombshell, and is a certified trainer (PTS) with a Bachelor's degree in Health Sciences (BHSc) from the University of Ottawa. His specialty is helping people build muscle to improve their strength and general health, with clients including college, professional, and Olympic athletes.
I have determined this experimentally with myself, n=1 ( I did not say this will work for everyone or that my n=1 findings apply to all–you need to experiment), that some creatine (I use 2.5 grams post workout as a top off) and plenty of water with fast carbs (carbo-hydrate-“Hydrate”) post workout contributes to longer periods of “Fullness, tightness.” Anaerobic exercise depletes localized glycogen stores. Replenishing that helps in lots of ways. Some pasta or rice the night before a workout also seems to lend to better workouts the next day or even 1 hour later. Science is some cool shit.
I totally agree. I’m not sure if people count the fullness from glycogen as a muscle pump. I think not. But it’s good for building muscle, looks great, and looks a little like a pump. I think it’s worth going after.