STOP Lifting Heavy! How Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) Science Can Change How You Grow
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In this video I answer all your questions about blood flow restriction training (aka occlusion training), drawing on dozens of peer-reviewed studies, and show you exactly how to best use it to transform your training!
The purpose of BFR is to partially restrict blood flow while you train. And if you do it right, the benefits are wild!
First, you can use super light weight and fewer sets, but trigger growth that’s equal or greater than high load, high volume training. You can think of it as tricking your muscles into behaving as if you had trained way heavier, harder and longer than you really did, and that opens up a ton of possibilities.
The most obvious are that it almost completely eliminates injury risk, saving your joints,
And it drastically accelerates rehab, which is why surgeons and PTs now prescribe it.
But the benefits go far beyond injury prevention and recovery.
Isolation exercises that are impossible to really train heavy like supinated tricep extensions can now get high load growth with BFR.
It significantly increases fast-twitch fiber recruitment, making you more explosive.
If you’re traveling or don’t have access to equipment, you can get high load growth using just bodyweight.
You can even add pro-grade BFR to cardio and trigger maximum growth on top of the aerobic benefits simultaneously.
In fact, BFR also doubles muscular endurance in just 4 weeks by enhancing muscle oxygen capacity.
Studies show that even just walking in high-pressure cuffs can match the muscle growth of weight lifting.
One of my personal favorite use-cases is that you can combine BFR with an e-stim unit to build muscle while literally doing nothing!
What’s more, BFR-induced growth is slower to atrophy, making your gains last longer. And it can even prevent atrophy in completely immobilized limbs.
And by the way it does all this not only for the muscles distal / below the cuff, but also those proximal / above (like the shoulders, chest, back, and glutes), and the same muscles on the opposite side of the body also get a portion of the BFR benefits, even if they weren’t directly trained!
BFR also boosts your VO2max far more than normal training.
A single BFR workout can spike testosterone over 600%, and growth hormone up to 29,000%
It also makes stem cells turn into muscle, activates heat shock proteins, increases expression of hypertrophy genes, and enhances bone strength and structure.
Which brings us to the all-important question of how tight they should be.
The amount of pressure it takes to completely cut off blood flow is called arterial occlusion pressure, or AOP, which is roughly 10% more than your systolic blood pressure.
Now, with BFR we want to partially restrict blood flow, so you’ll use up to 90% of your AOP. The exact ideal percentage depends on the weight load. The higher the pressure, the less weight you can use and still trigger all the benefits we discussed.
So here’s the shortcut I came up with. You want your weight load percentage and your cuff pressure percentage to always equal 100. That could be 10% of your 1RM with 90% pressure, or 50% weight with 50% pressure, etc.
Next question, how does BFR work?
First, it triggers massive metabolic and oxidative stress with blood pooling on both sides of the cuff, with oxygen deprivation below and oxygen overload above. Both trigger anabolic hormone cascades, local growth factor release, increased motor unit firing and fast-twitch recruitment, and boosts mTOR signaling and muscle protein synthesis.
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Key Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:39 2 BFR Types
0:57 The MANY Benefits of BFR
4:06 How Does BFR Work?
5:01 BFR Leg & Arm Placement
5:30 Arm Cuff Width Importance
5:47 FAQ—How Tight Should the BFR Be?
6:25 FAQ—How Much Weight Should I Use?
7:49 FAQ—Do Percentages Need to Be Exact?
8:04 FAQ—Can I Use BFR with Heavy Weight?
8:23 FAQ—How to Know If They’re Too Tight?
8:44 FAQ—Is BFR Safe??
9:36 FAQ—Should I Remove Them Between Sets?
10:16 FAQ—Do I Need to Leave Them On Post-Workout?
10:35 FAQ—How Many Sets & Reps?
10:59 FAQ—How Long Should a BFR Workout Be?
11:24 FAQ—How Many BFR Workouts per Week?
11:44 How the Dr. Gains BFR Pros are Different
13:39 Get 4 FREE Science-Based BFR Workouts!
13:59 How the Dr. Gains Nylon BFR bands are Different
14:37 Hidow Wireless EMS/TENS Details
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Disclaimer: Michael is not a medical provider. This is not medical advice.