Blood Flow Restricted exercise has been around for nearly 50 years, It is exactly what it says, you work out wearing bands on your arms and legs that slows down, restricts, the return of blood to your heart. It is not cutting off circulation. The veins return blood to your heart and the bands slow that down. What does this do? Muscles work using oxygen, aerobic work, and then when there is no or less oxygen, they work in the anaerobic phase of exercise. Anyone who has played competitive sports or has worked out hard has felt the BURN that occurs when your muscles enter the anaerobic phase of working. The burn is followed by rapidly increasing fatigue until the muscle can't do the work any longer and fails so to speak. Where for example, you simply cannot do one more repetition. So why is this even a thing to consider? Human Growth Hormone is why. As we age into our 30's, our body produces less and and less Human Growth Hormone(HGH). After 40, the drop is huge. HGH is what makes it possible for 20 year olds to not work out, eat whatever they want to, be as active as they want to, not get enough sleep and still feel fine and able to repeat these antics day after day without weight gain or fatigue etc. So as we age, things change as the HGH levels drop in our bodies. Weight gain. Less energy. Harder to stay physically fit, even with work outs. Working out becomes harder with longer recovery time, more soreness, and worst case, injuries.
Research has shown that the only way to increase the bodies HGH production after 40 is to do really intense hard long workouts as that is how one can achieve the anaerobic burn. That burn is what stimulates the pituitary to produce more HGH. These work are a problem for most of us. Basically the only people willing to spend 90 minutes to 2 hours ina gym working out that hard are professional, college, or Olympic athletes. Plus, they are the only ones with the actual time to spend that long in a gym daily. This is exactly why the BFR bands are so awesome. I used to work out 5-6 days a week for an hour doing P90X workouts. They are very intense and hard. I would be sore and tired to the point where I needed extra days in between. to recover. With the BFR bands, my 4-5 day total workout time is for the week is less than 60 minutes. I use much less weight and sometimes just body weight. In 6-10 minutes I get an intense burn into the anaerobic phase to near or total failure. All of the without feeling sore at all. In fact, 20 mins post exercise I feel more energy and like I never worked out. Even better, in 8 weeks I lost over 20 lbs without changing my diet or anything else.
So this is really great technology if you have not much time to work out, have limitations due to past injuries or you just want to work out less and not kill yourself in the process. It has be proven super safe and very effective in decades of study. The bands I use are made by a company called B3 Sciences. They are the best ones I know of. The B3 sciences website is simply b3sciences.com. There is a ton of information on this site. If you need more, simply come talk to me.
Yours in Health,
Dr Tom
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