Blood Flow Restriction Training

Blood Flow Restriction Therapy is one of the biggest innovations to hit sports medicine rehabilitation in the last 20 years.  Originally developed by Dr. Sato in the 60s and versions have been widely used in the fitness industry for decades, it did not make its way into mainstream rehabilitation till 2012.  A PT in the military started to apply this technique to Veterans for the Gulf War when he was seeing accelerated rehabilitation times and improved outcomes.  It was after this aired on ESPN that this got a lot more attention in the sports PT world.  Now, it is a key component of getting accelerated results, especially after an ACL reconstruction.  At The Athlete Lab, this is a standard of care for ACL rehab.

Although it sounds more barbaric than it is, BFR uses a cuff device placed on the limb during exercise.  This cuff compresses the vein and prevents veinous return of blood from leaving the muscle.  When combined with high rep schemes and low loads, this puts the muscle in a hypoxic (low oxygen) state.  Doing this results in a significant and substantial increase in muscle recruitment.  When done over multiple sets, this results in the body’s release of a substantial amount of growth hormone and IGF-1 (insulin growth factor 1) and suppression of myostatin.  What does that mean?  This means that the combination of increase in muscle recruitment combined with an increase in these hormones being released that this significantly accelerates the rehab process.  What would typically take 8-12 weeks to cause muscle growth now takes 3 weeks with the use of BFR.

As a result of the systemic (hormonal) response to BFR, there is an increase demand on the body to have essential amino acids and protein available for soft tissue healing and muscle growth.  When BFR is combined with the proper nutrition, this can accelerate the results significantly.  That is why nutrition is so important during this type of training. At The Athlete Lab, we also know that early implementation of BFR in the rehab process has a direct and profound impact on how you move as an athlete (measured via ViMove+ AMI).  That is why, this is a big part of most of the rehabilitation protocols we do at The Athlete Lab.