Blood Flow Restriction training with Brendan Scott | EP#87

6:25 -

• It lessens the mechanical stress on the body without impeding the growth of muscles and its muscular strength. BFR allows you to grow muscles and increase strength without lifting heavy weights.
• Altering hemodynamics facilitates resistance training athletes who are on a recovery regime following an injury, those who have little time to rest and recover between performances, and those with diminished abilities to recover due to aging.
• BFR basically increases the physiological impacts of a rather light-weight regime.

8:18 -

• BFR training can be beneficial for certain types of triathletes. Ideally, those who have lean physique with relatively small muscle mass such as runners who want to gain muscles to develop their swimming and cycling performance.

11:10 -

Increase in muscle strength comes via hypertrophy rather than neural adaptations. These neural adaptations are yet to be seen regulated by BFR.

20:53 -

• Make sure that you are not in any way contraindicated for blood flow restriction training (e.g. get screened for cardiovascular conditions and blood clotting diseases)
• Get your arterial occlusion pressure measured in order for you and your trainer to know the most appropriate amount of pressure to apply on your limbs during the training. About 60% of arterial occlusion pressure will be applied during BFR training.
• To stay safe, look for expert-recommended brands for bands, cuffs and pressure-regulation devices to use in your BFR training.
• You can also look up published formulas that factor in limb circumference and blood pressure aside from arterial occlusion pressure to help you set a ballpark and regulate restriction pressure. But the best route to safety when applying BFR is still to check with your physician or a specialist.

• You can use elastic wraps or power-lifting knee wraps. Wrap them around your thighs. Cut the wraps in half for your arms. Regulate tightness through:
  • Perception - tighten the wraps on your thighs so that you have a 7/10 pressure (10 highest pressure and thus inducing pain; 0 no pain at all). Do the same for your arms but with the wraps cut in half since your arms are smaller and requires less pressure.
  • Exercise difficulty - perform your exercise as usual and see if you can get through the sets. If you will have trouble getting through 50% of your sets, loosen the wraps as they might have been wrapped too tightly. If you’ve breezed through your session, you might need to tighten the wraps in order to gain the benefits of your BFR training.

28:00 -

• Safety first: while BFR training can be very beneficial, it comes with implications at any point in one’s training. So it is always best to get screened and to check with your doctor. 
• Practice BFR with efficiency: talk to your coach and see when it is the best time for you to apply BFR training.

29:06 -

• If your body responds less to the same external stimuli, that means it has beneficially adapted to the regime.
• Fatigue is when your body’s internal load increases at the same (or less) amount of external stimuli.

36:04 -

• Though I am not exactly sure what the actual mechanisms would be, there must be some research on how the ability to hold one’s breath longer after sessions of free dives is a sign of adaptation. This adaptation can be very beneficial for swimmers and triathletes especially for the swimming leg of a triathlon.