How long does it take to heal

[Spoon's]

How long does it take for muscles to heal after a workout?: mainly the chest, sometimes when i go to the gym the day after a good workout, i cant lift for as long as i was able to the day before. If i give my muscles a rest for a day, they do good. But if i give my mucles a two day rest, its realy hard to lift.

If someone could answer these short questions for me i would be realy greatful
1. How long does it take for my chest to heal.
2. How long will your muscles stay pumped without decreasing.
3. When your mucles do decrease, how hard is it to get them pumped up.
4. If i do less sets of the same weight, and a quicker workout than normal, will it still build muscle, and pump the muscles back up.
5. Do pushups help muscluar endurance on bench.

If you can answer, or explain any of these i would be greatful. . Thanks a million.

[1/2man1/2amazin]

1) For a FULL recovery of your muscle tissue, everone is different, but the max is around 7 days of rest for that particular muscle group. You shouldnt be training your chest more than once a week.

2)A couple of hours, being pumped just means they have lots of blood in them.

3) By pumped do you mean you've incresed muscle mass or do you mean the concentration of blood? If you mean muscle mass, it will still take a while, but not as long as it took to initially put the mass on. As far as pump, it takes me 2 good sets to get a muscle group pumped.

4)It will build the muscle, not nearly as effectively, or quickly. You will still get a pump though, but again, a pump really means nothing.

5)Depends, if you can do 50 pushups and only 8 reps at any weight on bench, then yes it will help.

I think you're putting too much emphasis on the 'pump'. Giving your muscles time to heal and recover will help them grow faster in the long run.

[the wister]

1. 3-4 days before you should do any heavy lifting again. Try going in the day after and doing quick reps with light weights, it'll help get the lactic acid out.
2. About 4-5 hours
3. Do 1 set of heavy bench? Or maybe 20 quick pushups. When your muscles start feeling warm again, they're circulating more blood.
4. Pump the muscles back up? Probably. Build muscle? No, you have to train your muscles harder than they can normally stand to make them stronger, and if you do less work than your normal routine, then you are not training them hard enough
5. Yes, because you're using less weight and you are (hopefully) doing more reps.

[imipono]

remeber this basic idea and you'll do well in your workouts: you're body actually gets stronger in the recovery phase of your workout. When you workout you're breaking down muscle and in the recovery phase you are re-building it. If you overtrain beyond a certain amount (there is a 3-4 % window that overtraining can help) it will be counterproductive and you'll hit plateaus and feel like you're not getting anywhere. As far as recovery time you'll have to gauge that by how you feel...remember that there are many other things you can do in between your resistance training to help recovery...you don't have to lift everyday and dynamic stretching and agility drills are good ways to recover from tough strength workouts. Recovery also depends on what you eat afterwards, immediately afterwards. One very simple thing is when you are in the shower after a workout alternate between hot and cold water... say 30 secs cold, 1 min hot - as hot as you can stand and as cold as you can stand. You're asking what the hell will that do, huh? It increases circulation which increases recovery time. The cold water is vasoconstrictive and the hot acts as a vasodilator which will act as a "pump" for the circulatory system. Whenever you constrict blood flow to an area it will flood with blood/nutrients once the constriction is removed. Try it and see, if you don't like it throw away the advice and it's no harm done.