As an athlete, you know how important training is to ensuring success in whatever sport or event you participate in. Even if you aren’t competitive, you probably have personal goals you’d like to achieve. Anything to maximize your workouts and help make you stronger and recover more quickly would be a welcome addition to your lifestyle. Or maybe you’re recovering from an injury—anything to help recuperate would be amazing.
Adding something like Blood Flow Resistance, or BFR, into your training or recovery regimen is just the ticket to help build muscle strength and endurance. Companies like Source Fitness have blood flow restriction cuffs that can help anyone practice BFR to maximize workouts and target multiple areas of the body at once, as well as prevent muscle wasting while healing from injuries.
How Does BFR Help To Strengthen Muscles?
First, it helps to understand how BFR works. Using a pneumatic cuff, you restrict blood flow while performing low intensity exercises. If you aren’t sure what a pneumatic cuff is, picture a blood pressure cuff tightening around your arm as you measure your blood pressure. It’s a similar principle here.
Restricting blood flow increases your blood lactate concentration, so instead of doing the amount of work required for the low intensity exercise, you’re doing work as if you were performing a high intensity exercise. This causes your body to release growth hormones so your muscles increase in size.
This is excellent for rehabilitation exercises as well, because when you’re recovering from injuries you don’t want to overdo it. Pushing your body too far and overworking your muscles is a surefire way to set back your recovery. You can help to prevent re-injury by strengthening your muscles without putting too much stress on them.
Get The Most Benefit From Your BFR Cuffs
The best ways to get maximum benefit from your BFR cuffs are as follows:
- Cuff placement depends on what you’re exercising; place around your arm or leg as appropriate
- Use a lighter than normal weight for you, about 25-35% of your usual weight
- High reps at low intensity is key: do 20-30 reps for every exercise
- Keep the cuff on when resting
- Make sure not to entirely cut off blood flow. If your skin pales, it’s too tight and needs to be adjusted
It can’t be said enough: make sure you leave adequate flood flow while using the cuffs so you can be safe. Don’t re-injure yourself or introduce a new injury. Also, don’t place them on joints like knees, elbows, wrists, or ankles, and be sure to consult with a medical professional prior to using BFR.
BFR Cuffs From Source Fitness Are A Great Way To Enhance Your Routine
Kaizen, the Japanese concept of continuous improvement, is applicable to all parts of life, especially your physical fitness. You want to make sure you’re getting everything you can out of your workouts and recovering as quickly as safely possible from injuries. BFR offers another way to increase muscle size, improve endurance, and prevent atrophy. Why not add it into your training?
