Personalized Blood flow restriction is the use of a specialized tourniquet to reduce both vascular inflow and venous outflow of the limb during exercise or while at rest.
What makes it personalized is the cuffs utilized at Tensegrity automatically measure the individuals resting blood pressure to apply the appropriate pressure to ensure safe and effective training.
Why Do We Utilize BFR?
At Tensegrity, we utilize BFR during exercise to induce improvements in strength, hypertrophy, and pain for people who may not be able to exercise with heavy enough loads typically required for traditional strength training. This might include patients who recently underwent surgery or those with acute injury. Training with BFR has been shown to assist individuals in making considerable gains in strength to combat typical post-operative atrophy and allow for a timely rehab process.
Furthermore, the use of BFR following acute injury such as a hamstring or rotator cuff strain is often effective at assisting in reductions in pain. Decreased pain for multiple days post workout is a frequent subjective response by athletes.
How BFR Works
There are multiple mechanisms to how BFR works:
- Increased recruitment of larger fast twitch motor units secondary to the hypoxic environment created by the cuff
- Increased metabolic response by the target muscles.
- increased growth hormone
- increased insulin like growth factor
- Increased myogenic stem cells
- Decreased myostatin
All function to increase skeletal muscle protein synthesis following exercise
Who Might Benefit From BFR Training
- Those with acute injury who can’t tolerate heavy loads in their training
- People with chronic tendon complaints in the upper or lower body (achilles, glute, patellar, rotator cuff, biceps)
- Individuals required to minimize loading during post operative rehab ( rotator cuff repair, ACL, meniscus, Achilles)
- Mid season athletes who may not tolerate training with heavy load due to their limited schedule