BFR Causes Muscles to Work Harder

Elastic BFR booty bands partially restrict the venous blood (oxygen deficient blood flowing from the limbs back to the heart) return. This makes the muscles work even harder to pump the blood back to the heart! BFR workouts involve periods of exercise and rest. During the periods of exercise, blood is rapidly circulated from our heart, to our arteries, to our limbs, to our veins and back to the heart. The elastic BFR bands can be equated to a dam. The muscles in the limb have to work even harder to pump the venous blood past the BFR booty bands back to the heart. At the local cellular level, this dam effect produces a disturbance of homeostasis – lower oxygen levels in the muscle cells, acidic muscle cells, and other changes that make the muscles fatigue quickly, just like they would with heavy weights. Then during the periods of rest, the muscle cells can recover, but it is important with elastic BFR that the bands be left on.

How the Brain Responds to Changing Oxygen Levels

Similar to heavy weight lifting, BFR Training allows your body to experience periods of rapid circulation of blood where oxygen is flowing throughout your entire circulatory system. It is very important to understand that the decreased oxygen levels that our body experiences is temporary, safe and essential for BFR to work. Once our brain gets the message that less oxygen is freely flowing, the brain sends out an “alert” to our endocrine system. When using BFR, the anterior pituitary gland in the brain responds by releasing growth hormone, which helps with muscle cell reproduction, muscle cell regeneration, and lipolysis (fat breakdown).

How Your Limbs Respond to Changing Oxygen Levels

Locally, our legs also sense the body’s temporary lack of normal oxygen levels. Because of this, two things happen—our fast twitch muscle fibers are trained and our muscles cells are regenerated.

1. The lack of oxygen to our limbs makes our muscles fatigue more quickly and allows for the training of our “anaerobic, fast twitch” muscles. Anaerobic, fast twitch muscles are needed to run faster and jump higher. These include muscles like our calves, quads, hamstrings, biceps, triceps and other muscles that may be key in your rehabilitation.

2. The lack of oxygen at the cellular level encourages protein synthesis. Protein synthesis is key to muscle repair and muscle strength.

You can do pretty much any exercise with BFR.

Essentially, you can take any exercise you do in your usual workout routine, reduce the weight or intensity, add the BFR Booty Bands , and get the same results. You can do anything you normally would do with the BFR: squats, lunges, deadlifts, push-ups, biceps curls, walking on a treadmill.