Train For Veins: 6 Ways to Increase Your Vascularity

Relationship Between Vascularity and Fitness

How veiny you are is an important perimeter to determine your overall body fitness. The leaner you are, the less fat you have covering your muscles. That’s the reason to make your veins more prominent.

Keep in mind that vascularity is not only an attribute associated with low body fat. Increased muscle mass also helps in popping out your veins.

But increased vascularity is sometimes also a result of excess stress and hypertension. So, we cannot take vascularity as the only marker for fitness.

Role of Genetics in Vascularity

Some people naturally have translucent skin, it makes their veins more visible than others. Translucent skin means that their skin is see-through.

You can see different colors of veins i.e blue or purple through this type of skin. In some people, it also occurs as a disease.

Getting Lean and Building Muscle

The key to getting those veiny arms and increasing vein definition on important parts of your physique is by decreasing your body fat.

Your veins start to show when your body is at around 10 percent body fat. But, to maximize vein expulsion, your body fat should be below 8 percent.

At such a lower body fat percentage, there is practically nothing between your muscles and skin that helps in putting those veins on display.

Diet holds prime importance in decreasing your body fat levels. If you are struggling to lose body fat then subtract around 300-500 calories from your maintenance calories and stick to this diet for a minimum of 10 weeks.

Keep in mind that when you follow a calorie deficit diet, you might lose some muscle mass so keep the pace steady. Don’t try to dramatically decrease your calorie intake.

This brings us to the next important step that is building muscle. Losing fat is not enough, if you want to put your veins on display then you should develop muscle mass.

The bigger your muscles are, the more they will demand blood. Through strength training, your body adapts to expand its blood-vessel network to fulfill the demand for blood supply, this results in increased vascularity.

So, the first thing you would want to do for increasing your vascularity is to lose fat and build muscle.

Training Tips to Increase Vascularity

As we learned some lifestyle changes to increased vascularity, the next thing is to make some changes in your training methods.

1.     Using High Rep Ranges

When you stick to higher reps ranges during training, you cause an increased amount of energy to be used by the working muscle.  Due to this accumulation of metabolites occur which results in metabolic stress.

An increase in metabolic stress is directly related to increasing Nitric Oxide (NO). This chemical causes blood vessels to dilate.

The increasing workload helps achieve vascularity. If you aim to put those veins on display then you should be performing multiple sets with a higher repetition range.

2.     Blood Flow Restriction Training

As discussed before, increasing metabolic stress is a necessary element for increasing your vascularity. Blood Flow Restricted Training (BFRT) is one of the best ways to promote metabolite buildup.

Through BFRT, you restrict the blood flow in your veins while still allowing the blood to flow through your arteries to keep the muscle working.

You strategically allow all of that blood to enter the working muscle without allowing it to leave. This results in the greatest pump of your life.

This crazy pump allows your veins to pop up like filling a water balloon to its maximum capacity.

BFRT has benefits for increased muscle growth as well. It’s because your muscles are deprived of oxygen due to which the slow-twitch fibers are fatigued faster and your fast-twitch fibers are engaged which has more potential for growth.

How to Wrap For BFRT

You can use different types of bands to wrap your limbs for BFRT. All types of wraps can work to restrict the blood flow, some common types of wraps are as follow:

• Ace bandages
• Knee and elbow wraps
• Tourniquets
• Voodoo floss bands

For the upper body, you need to wrap it just below your shoulder.

And, for the lower body wrap below your gluteal fold from the back, it will rest just below the hip flexor from the front.

Make sure that you are not only sticking with the BFR method for training. Alternate between traditional resistance training and BFR, it will prevent training plateaus and allow greater blood vessel development.