I have been doing research. Real research. Not "pump science" research. Actual academic research with actual citations from actual journals. And I am here to tell you, with evidence, that the pump is a scam.

Below are my 14 citations. None of them are from "pump journals" because pump journals are not real academic journals. But they are all real citations from real publications and they all support my thesis that the pump is fake.

[Citations 7-14 were posted in a follow-up reply. They include: 2 more papers about cheese aging, 1 about tidal patterns in the North Sea, 1 about parking lot design, 1 about the mating habits of the European badger, 1 about medieval tax collection in Burgundy, 1 that was just a link to a Wikipedia article about bicycles, and 1 that was another recipe (this time for cornbread).]

As you can see, the evidence is overwhelming. The pump, when subjected to rigorous academic scrutiny, does not hold up. I rest my case.

Dave. I have reviewed your citations. All 14 of them. I do this professionally. I review citations for a living.

Here is my review:

Citations 1, 3, 8, and 9 are about cheese. Four of your fourteen citations — 28.6% of your evidence base — are about cheese. Citation 1 is about how cheese deforms when you press on it. Citation 3 is about how cheddar gets harder as it ages. Neither of these disproves the pump. They are about cheese.

Citations 2 and 5 are about bridge engineering. Bridges are not muscles. The fatigue analysis of a steel cable-stayed bridge deck has no relevance to whether the pump is real.

Citation 4 is about hydraulic fluid systems, which is the closest any of your citations comes to being relevant, and it is still not relevant because human muscles are not hydraulic systems.

Citation 6 is a recipe for enchiladas. It is on AllRecipes.com. It has 4.5 stars and 847 reviews. I actually bookmarked it because it looks good. But it is not a citation.

Citation 14 is a cornbread recipe. Dave. Why are two of your academic citations recipes?

I have published 14 actual papers about exercise physiology. Would you like me to cite them? They are about the pump. They prove the pump exists. They are not about cheese.

I'm the other Dave on this forum. KeepItSimple_Dave. I've been here since 2002. I want to make it very clear that I am not associated with CitationNeeded_Dave in any way. We share a first name and nothing else.

CitationNeeded_Dave. Buddy. I have read all your citations. I don't have a PhD. I'm just a guy who pumps. And even I can tell that a paper about European badger mating habits does not disprove the pump.

I have a question: did you search for these citations specifically to disprove the pump, or did you already have a collection of papers about cheese and bridges and just decide to use them?

Because honestly either answer is concerning.

OK. I want to address some of the feedback.

First: the cheese citations are relevant because cheese undergoes structural changes under pressure, similar to how muscles change under the pressure of exercise. The parallel is clear. Cheese is compressed. Muscles are compressed. Both are physical phenomena. Both can be studied scientifically. The fact that one is a dairy product and the other is a body part is a superficial distinction.

Second: the enchilada recipe was included by mistake. I was researching in multiple browser tabs and it got mixed in. I stand by the other 13 citations.

Third: the cornbread recipe was NOT a mistake. Cornbread, like the pump, is something people claim to enjoy but which has no intrinsic value beyond basic caloric content. This is a metaphorical citation and I believe it is valid.

Fourth: the badger paper is about repetitive physical behaviors in mammals, which is literally what pumping is. Badgers dig. Pumpers lift. Both are performing repetitive motions for no cosmically meaningful reason. If you can't see the connection, that's a failure of imagination on your part.

CitationNeeded_Dave. I have been on this forum for 16 years. I have seen a lot of anti-pump arguments. A mathematician once tried to disprove the pump using the Pumping Lemma. A doctor once correctly explained the entire physiology of the pump and was banned for it. A nihilist once argued that nothing matters, including the pump.

But you are the first person to cite cheese as evidence against the pump.

I want you to know that I do not say this to be cruel. I say it with a kind of awe. You came to this forum, a place where people have cried during bicep curls and debated the definition of the pump for 14 years, and you said: "I have evidence." And the evidence was cheese, bridges, badgers, parking lots, medieval taxes, bicycles, and two recipes.

This is not a rebuttal. The citations speak for themselves. I genuinely don't know what to say. You have rendered me speechless, which has not happened on this forum since 2001.

Please go pump. Or go make enchiladas. Either would be more productive than this thread.

I am now being called "Cheese Dave" in multiple threads. I want the record to show that only 4 of my 14 citations were about cheese. That is 28.6%, which I acknowledge is higher than ideal for a non-cheese argument. But it is not a majority. The majority of my citations were about other things.

I have prepared 8 additional citations for a follow-up post. I want to assure you that none of them are about cheese. Two of them are about yogurt, which is a different dairy product entirely and therefore not cheese.

I realize I am losing this argument. I realize my citations were not as relevant as I believed them to be. I realize that the enchilada recipe should not have been included and the cornbread metaphor did not land the way I intended.

But I stand by my core thesis: the pump is a scam. And one day, someone will come to this forum with proper citations — citations about muscles, about exercise, about physiology — and they will prove me right.

[Editor's note: This was CitationNeeded_Dave's final post. He was banned later that day. The 8 additional citations were found in his drafts folder. Two were indeed about yogurt. One was about the tensile strength of rope. One was a link to a YouTube video of a dog on a trampoline. The remaining four were actually about exercise physiology and were quite good, which makes everything else worse.]