How Does Blood Flow Restriction Work? - Athletico

Clients or post-operative clients, high load and high intensity workouts might not be medically suitable.

Blood Circulation Restriction (BFR) training is a strategy that integrates low strength exercise with blood circulation occlusion that produces comparable outcomes to high intensity training. It has actually been utilized in the fitness center setting for some time but it is gaining appeal in medical settings. Blood Flow Constraint (BFR) Training [modify edit source] BFR training was at first developed in the 1960's in Japan and called KAATSU training.

It can be applied to either the upper or lower limb. The cuff is then pumped up to a particular pressure with the objective of acquiring partial arterial and total venous occlusion. Muscle hypertrophy is the increase in diameter of the muscle as well as a boost of the protein material within the fibres.

Muscle stress and metabolic stress are the 2 primary factors accountable for muscle hypertrophy. Mechanical Tension & Metabolic Tension [modify modify source] When a muscle is positioned under mechanical tension, the concentration of anabolic hormonal agent levels increase. The activation of myogenic stem cells and the raised anabolic hormones result in protein metabolism and as such muscle hypertrophy can take place.

Growth hormonal agent itself does not straight cause muscle hypertrophy however it aids muscle healing and consequently potentially facilitates the muscle strengthening process. The accumulation of lactate and hydrogen ions (eg in hypoxic training) further boosts the release of growth hormonal agent.

Myostatin controls and prevents cell development in muscle tissue. Resistance training results in the compression of blood vessels within the muscles being trained.

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This causes an increase in anaerobic lactic metabolism and the production of lactate. When there is blood pooling and an accumulation of metabolites cell swelling happens. This swelling within the cells causes an anabolic reaction and results in muscle hypertrophy. The cell swelling might in fact cause mechanical stress which will then trigger the myogenic stem cells as talked about above.

The cuff is put proximally to the muscle being workout and low strength exercises can then be performed. Due to the fact that the outflow of blood is limited using the cuff capillary blood that has a low oxygen material gathers and there is an increase in protons and lactic acid. The same physiological adjustments to the muscle (eg release of hormones, hypoxia and cell swelling) will happen during the BFR training and low strength exercise as would accompany high intensity workout.

( 1) Low intensity BFR (LI-BFR) results in an increase in the water content of the muscle cells (cell swelling). It also speeds up the recruitment of fast-twitch muscle fibres. It is likewise assumed that once the cuff is eliminated a hyperemia (excess of blood in the blood vessels) will form and this will cause further cell swelling.

These boosts were similar to gains obtained as an outcome of high-intensity workout without BFR A study comparing (1) high strength, (2) low strength, (3) low and high intensity with BFR and (4) low strength with BFR. While all 4 workout routines produced boosts in torque, muscle activations and muscle endurance over a 6 week period - the high strength (group 1) and BFR (groups 3 and 4) produced the biggest effect size and were similar to each other.