239 – Steven Borden

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Welcome to the art of living proactively episode 239. With Steven Borden. Who explains how blood flow restriction or BFR. Training works and its benefits. He outlines, how BFR uses inflatable cuffs to restrict blood flow. Allowing people to gain muscle and endurance at lower training intensities, and he covers about how BFR can aid rehabilitation. How it’s useful for traveling athletes, how it helps our cognition through lactate exposure and a lot more. And he emphasizes about how to use it in a proactive Way, when you’re unable to train at higher intensities maybe because of injury or because you’re staying in a hotel room or something. And he advises starting with lighter loads and going close to failure For muscle growth. Overall he conveys how BFR allows maintaining momentum despite circumstances that may limit training. So we’ve got a really interesting episode today with Stephen Borden all about blood flow restriction. If you do know anyone who would really get some value from this episode please do share it with them. Why not leave a review for us. Please do subscribe and i hope you enjoy this episode.

[00:01:18] Intro

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[00:01:18] Tony Winyard: Welcome to The Art of Living Proactively. My guest today, Steven Borden. How you doing, Steven?

[00:01:23] Steven Borden: I’m well, thanks for having me.

[00:01:25] Tony Winyard: And, we were just having a quick chat before we started recording. And you are in Southern California? Not that I’m envious at all.

[00:01:33] Steven Borden: Yeah,I’ll refrain from showing the camera outside where you can see the sunshine and ocean and all that.

[00:01:40] Tony Winyard: Yeah. If I showed you, we’ve actually, the weather here is, it’s very typical of England. It’s very downcast. Could rain at any time, but it’s not raining. but we won’t talk about weather. so Steven, I discovered you when I started researching a lot more into blood flow restriction, and you’re a bit of an expert in that and there’d be many people listening to this show who’ll be saying, what the hell did he just say?

[00:02:04] What is Blood Flow Restriction (BFR)?

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[00:02:04] Tony Winyard: What is blood flow restriction? So do you want to educate our listeners what is blood flow restriction?

[00:02:09] Steven Borden: Yeah, so it’s it is a training modality that has been around for decades now, technically. really kind of came into the scene as far as formal literature goes, and as far as more heavy adoption in rehabilitation and performance settings in the last, I’d say 20 years. and it, is it pretty much what it sounds like.

So it involves placing an inflatable cuff generally. On either your upper arm or upper leg. Generally it’s both limbs at one time, your legs, or both legs or both arms. And what that cuff is gonna do is inflate enough to restrict all the blood flow from leaving your legs. We have arterial flow that’s always, your arteries are carrying blood into the limbs and then your veins kind of transport that blood back out towards your heart.

And these cuffs are gonna prevent blood flow from leaving your limb, which sounds bad it’s actually not in this case, and they’re gonna partially restrict blood from going into your limb. So generally, somewhere between 40 and 80% of the blood that would normally travel into your limbs is occluded.

And then you engage in some form of training. There’s, it can be separated into more resistance training. So with a goal of building muscle or your, standard kind of endurance training, there’s, that’s a whole separate conversation. but the idea behind blood flow restriction, Is that the added stress of the occlusion through several mechanisms, which we can get into if you want, allows you to train at a lower intensity.

So by intensity in resistance training, we mean less weight, in endurance training. Generally it’s you could think of it as like a lower pace, a slower pace, or less output. You can train at a lower intensity and still achieve, pretty significant results in terms of muscle mass or gains increases in endurance.

That’s kind of the elevator pitch for BFR training and where once you have that kind of fundamental understanding, you can begin to think about situations where it would make a lot of sense to apply BFR training. what situation would, it be advantageous for me train at a lower load, but still be able to maintain or build muscle?

[00:04:18] BFR is great for rehabilitation

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[00:04:18] Steven Borden: Right away you think, okay, injury rehabilitation. If I’ve got a torn ACL I’m probably not gonna be loading 405 pounds on my back. Or what will go, you’re in United Kingdom, we’ll go kilos, 200 kilos or whatever the conversion is, my back, but I don’t wanna lose muscle. We know that muscle can contribute significantly to overall health, longevity, but also injury risk on the field of play or in life.

That’s one instance where BFR can be a real modality that makes a lot of sense to apply. And then there’s a ton of other instances from there. that’s kind of the elevator pitch.

[00:04:48] BFR can help oler people increase strength safely

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[00:04:49] Tony Winyard: but I’ll be right in assuming therefore, It would be very useful for older people, because they wouldn’t be needing to using such high weights as well.

[00:04:57] Steven Borden: Yeah, there’s been a good deal of research in aging populations. There is, some studies now we’ve seen where simply putting the cuffs on and having these individuals walk on a treadmill at a pretty slow pace. They’re building muscle mass in their legs.

[00:05:12] Tony Winyard: Right.

[00:05:13] Steven Borden: Someone like me, or if you think about a powerlifter somebody who resistance trains fairly frequently, they’re not gonna gain any muscle by walking under BFR.

stimulus is just not significant enough. But for exactly as you said for elderly, I. this can be an awesome modality for not only getting more out of your treadmill walk, but building muscle in a way that allows you to maybe spare your joints a little bit. If,joints are generally the concern for that population.

[00:05:42] Is BFR dangerous?

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[00:05:43] Tony Winyard: you touched upon it in just now in your description, but one of the first responses I get when I talk to people about BFR is that sounds very dangerous.

[00:05:52] Steven Borden: Yep. And we, so that’s because of that . we’ve done quite a bit of research at Saga, for just, we wanted to create kind of like a what does the current literature say on BFR safety? and it, it seems, right off the bat, there’s a few things that people are most concerned about.

One is blood pressure. ’cause it just seems like you’re restricting blood flow. There’s no blood flow going back to the heart. Blood pressure’s going to rise. and then the other one is blood clotting. and what we’ve seen in the literature is that BFR appears to be about as safe as general physical training, resistance training, as long as the intensity is matched.

So what BFR will do is increase the intensity of whatever you’re doing. So if you walk on a treadmill at two miles per hour, That’s gonna be for most people, a very low intensity. Now if you walk at that same exact speed under BFR, that’s going, it’s just naturally going to raise the intensity of that, which is perfectly fine for most people.

but there’s no, doesn’t appear to be any physiological difference between, somebody walking at two miles per hour under BFR versus somebody walking maybe just a little bit faster without BFR. all it’s really doing is kind of enhancing the stimulus, it’s just making it more difficult.

There’s less blood flow reaching your legs, and there’s no blood leaving your legs. for several physiological reasons. the difficulty is enhanced.

[00:07:12] Does it make the muscle work more efficiently?

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[00:07:12] Tony Winyard: So is it making the muscle work more efficiently or what, how is it doing that?

[00:07:17] Steven Borden: So there’s a few things as far as resistance training goes. we have when blood accumulates in your limb. So if you’ve ever, most people who’ve lifted weights know the feeling of the pump, the Arnold Classic, your muscles start to swell. It seems like the pump itself might be independently, cause hypertrophy, so when the muscle cells actually swell, this could be a signal to the body to eventually grow.

and what happens under BFR is we’ve got some blood coming in and no blood leaving. So there’s the swelling effect is kind of magnified. And this could be one reason why BFR seems to lead to a significant muscle gain, even at lower loads. So there’s kind of that element and then yeah, you’re training with less, a huge adaptation or I guess response to training we’re, whether we’re resistance training or, doing some form of endurance training after a while, the

Uptake of oxygen becomes more and more difficult, just, supply and demand kind of issue. Maybe that’s oversimplified, but, and when we’re training under BFR at times we’ve got 80% less blood flow reaching the limbs. so it kind of expedites the process to get to that level. you could, Just enhance that you could, get on a, an assault bike and burn out as fast as you can for a long period of time, and you’re gonna get to that level.

and in the example of BFR, you could probably get there quicker and with less output just by applying the cuffs to your limbs. I.

[00:08:48] There are many professional sports team using BFR

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[00:08:48] Tony Winyard: I believe there’s quite a few sort of professional sports teams are starting to use this

now or have been using it for a while now.

[00:08:55] Steven Borden: Yeah, you’d be hard pressed to find a elite sporting organization that’s not, applying BFR at some scale. some organizations will mainly have the cuffs in the athletic training room. So when . Players go down with an injury. it’s one of the earlier modalities that they’ll apply. Other organizations include them as part of their performance,modalities that they’ll apply. U F C Performance Institute is a primary example. they had, cuffs equipped for every single one of their fighters in there in Vegas. and so it just dependent on the organization. But yeah, pretty much if you’re a modern physical therapy sports, Or just, sports performance facility, you’re gonna have, BFR as a tool there.

[00:09:38] Tony Winyard: Right, and am I right in thinking that in the early days of it, it was more. bodybuilders people who are trying to, get hyper hypertrophy who were using this. But now it’s spread to many other types of sports. you mentioned endurance and so on before.

[00:09:54] Origins of BFR

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[00:09:54] Steven Borden: Yeah. Yoshiaki Sato, hopefully I’m pronouncing his name correctly. He was the, I guess the inventor of Katsu. the original, what he called, BFR training was just katsu. and he was, I. From my understanding, had a interest in bodybuilding. So when he first kind of had the idea, he was at this, memorial service where you kind of sit on your knees for a long period of time and he started to feel this, his calves felt like they were, he had been doing calf raises, like they had this huge pump.

He wondered, is this because I’ve, the way I’ve been sitting, blood flow is not getting into my calves. And then he thought, I wonder if we just restrict blood flow from getting into the limb, if it can mirror some bodybuilding effects. Kind of a novel, thought process that he had at the time.

And so he ended up doing some research.

And so yeah, his early interest was, for muscle building, but I believe he, he had some sort of injury and then that really kind of, pushed him further down that rabbit hole of, Hey, low load training makes a lot of sense when you’re trying to recover. and yeah, so now it’s spread into the rehab setting, performance setting, endurance athletes, CrossFit athletes, pretty much everywhere.

[00:10:59] Does it effect blood pressure?

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[00:10:59] Tony Winyard: And so you mentioned, blood,blood pressure before. So would it. Would it help someone with low blood pressure or would someone with low blood, high blood pressure rather be advised not to use it?

[00:11:11] Steven Borden: I’m not aware of any, literature that suggests somebody with higher blood pressure should not use BFR. I always caution by saying, look, I’m not a, I’m not your doctor. So if anybody’s listening, go talk to your doctor. I. That said, probably one of the best things to do here I am right after I said, I’m not a doctor prescribing things, but in general, lifting, or moving weights and getting your heart rate up, any form of physical activity is gonna be good for somebody who’s got high blood pressure in almost every case.

And if BFR is kind of the tool that. Again, in the example of if you, if walking on a treadmill is all we’re gonna be able to get you to do, then yeah, let’s strap some BFR cuffs on and let’s try to, let’s try to get you closer towards,we want you breathing a little bit. We want your heart rate elevated a little bit more.

and so that’s times where I’ve found it to be a really nice tool as well for somebody who’s just not willing to, push to a certain level to get that heart rate up. BFR again is a modality there.

So

[00:12:10] Can it help people with Dupuytren’s Contracture?

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[00:12:10] Tony Winyard: when, I emailed you a couple of weeks ago about, a. Condition, and I haven’t discussed it on this show before. I’ll be meaning to introduce it, but I know that there’s some listeners to this show suffer from and I have it very mildly myself, something called Dupuytren’s Contracture.

And I may have pronounced that completely wrong. I don’t know how you’re supposed to pronounce it, but would something like this help at all with that?

[00:12:32] Steven Borden: can you, and I know you mentioned this before and I’m, would you describe the,the kind of, effects of this condition for me briefly?

[00:12:40] Tony Winyard: So as best, I’m no expert on this at all, but you get these sort of chords in palms of your hands typically. it won’t, you probably won’t be able to see it here, but, and some people get it. I have it very mildly, but it gets so bad for many people that their hands kind of get in a claw shape or maybe just one or two fingers to, and it causes all sorts of problems and they have to have operations and so on.

[00:13:03] Steven Borden: But from what I, my understanding of it, and it seems to be I’ve searched all over the place on YouTube and on Google and podcasts and whatever, and there’s just so little information around about it. But from what I do understand, improving blood circulation would improve this condition, but I’m not absolutely sure.

A few interesting things come to mind, and this is just, conjecture at this point, but one, if you, I’m assuming with this condition, you’ll do some sort of rehabilitation exercises, constant trying to move the hand. and this may be a situation where, Those exercises done under BFR, you might see, you might see a little bit more, you might see some favorable results there for a few reasons.

And then once BFR has been removed, so there, there’s an interesting. we, I interviewed an endurance researcher who’s done quite a bit of research under with BFR specifically regarding endurance for cycling and rowing athletes. And one of the things he described is something called reactive hyperemia.

So we’ve seen this in lower limb, in the lower limbs where. When the blood flow has been occluded for a certain period of time, and then you remove the cuff, there’s this, basically,it makes a lot of sense just on the face if blood flow is occluded for a long period of time and then you finally kind of open the channel up, a ton of blood comes rushing through at that moment,

[00:14:28] Tony Winyard: Right.

[00:14:29] Steven Borden: I.

This places, again, something that sounds maybe bad, but it’s actually, it can be pretty helpful. It places a sheer stress on the artery. this is called reactive hyperemia. And that sheer stress on the artery actually, causes the artery to dilate a little bit, and it can remain in that state for some time.

And so if you’re training under BFR consistently, you actually can have a . Resting femoral artery diameter that’s bigger, which just means more blood flow at any given time is passing through that artery. And again, this is just conjecture, but I’m wondering if there may be a situation where constant exposure to, BFR on your arm may lead to this kind of resting femoral, not femoral artery, femoral arteries down your leg, increase in the arteries.

the artery that’s carrying blood to the rest of your arm potentially. yeah, that, that’s one thought

[00:15:19] Tony Winyard: Right. and when you say for some time, what would that be? 10 minutes, 20 minutes? What? What kind of time period would

[00:15:26] Steven Borden: That was actually one of the questions that I asked the researcher and we don’t really know yet. He seemed to think that a couple train, just training BFR a couple times a week, you can kind of get that, To stick around, which is pretty cool, that adaptation. and so from my point of view, I would apply it a couple times a week and, assume that’ll hang around for a while.

And I’m sure over time it can compound a little bit. we see this with a lot, with a ton of physiological responses, even as far as hypertrophy goes or muscle growth. There seems to be a kind of a preparatory phase and then a phase where the muscle is more sunk in.

[00:16:02] Steven Borden: wrong nomenclature there, but where when muscle grows in the initial phase.

It might not be as, as, sticky where it’s gonna hang around. So you need to continue training a little bit longer before it’s kind of there. And then if you were to back off and go into more of a maintenance phase where you lower your training volume, that muscle will be more likely to stick around.

And so I’m wondering if there may be some sort of preparatory phase again, like I’m spitballing here. but yeah, just on the face it doesn’t seem like there’d be anything harmful about it. If anything, it could be useful.

[00:16:33] Tony Winyard: it’s only something I’m gonna play around with and see it’d be interesting to see what happens. As I said, I have it very mildly and related to that, well it’s not related to that condition, but what, how, you were just describing the sort of blood flow and so on and circulation and it got me thinking about, I dunno if, how familiar you are with the sort of word of breath holding and so on, and when you hold your breath for a certain amount of time, it increases red blood cells and so on.

And so there’s, is there any connection with what’s happening with BFR and that sort of thing, or nothing at all?

[00:17:02] Steven Borden: Technically in a way. Yeah, because BFR is your. You are creating a, an environment that’s very similar to higher intensity training in most cases. And so you’ll see an elevation in CO2. you’ll see accumulation of a ton of metabolites. So you know that burn that you feel in your legs when you squat.

Do a set of 20 or something on squat or run up a hill that is . Several things. It’s, there’s hydrogen ions that build up in your legs, but there’s also lactate, most of us are familiar with lactate. and BFR that’s largely caused by,constant muscle contraction. It’s just requiring energy and oxygen that is technically not there.

it’s there. But, yeah. So you’re kind of replicating this high intensity environment, so in a way, yes.

[00:17:53] How does it help endurance athletes?

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[00:17:53] Tony Winyard: So for someone you touched upon endurance. So one guy was asking me some questions about this , by no means am I an expert, so I’m not sure why he was asking me, but obviously, ’cause I had some cuffs of it, that’s why he was asking me. But he does a lot of, What is it? He does like hundreds of mile runs and so on, and I mentioned to him that I knew that these were useful for people that did endurance, but I couldn’t answer him the question as to why.

[00:18:16] Steven Borden: Yeah, so endurance athletes and I’m definitely not, that’s far away from my space. So I try to avoid going too deep into something that’s, I haven’t done a ton of research on. or don’t have a lot of direct experience with, being an endurance athlete myself, but I know that endurance athletes will, they do plenty.

They have plenty of exposure to kind of your long, steady state. Your, a friend of yours that’s run, will do a hundred mile kicks that he probably has an extreme amount of exposure to that kind of lower threshold, long duration, steady state training. And BFR can be a case where it, it’s hard to get a lot of those athletes from my understanding to, to want to engage in this super high intensity training just because it feels far away from what they generally need to do when they compete.

And but we know that having some exposure to really high intensity training can, for several reasons. Increase their performance by quite a bit. And so for one, you have that potential resting for oral artery, increasing the diameter, which is pretty cool. and then for two, it’s a fast way for them to get exposure to really high intensity training, get their body really good at buffering that lactate that builds up.

if you have that experience where if you go to run 20 miles, Lactate’s not really a huge problem. You don’t, your legs are not on fire the entire time, but if you were to run a 400 meter dash, that’s where you realize your legs feel like they’re gonna blow off. and so BFR can be a fast, efficient way for them to get exposure to those settings or those physiological environments versus those, 20, 30 mile runs.

[00:19:56] Is there anyone who maybe shouldn’t use it?

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[00:19:56] Tony Winyard: Are there any sports or types of people that it’s not advised to use something like this?

[00:20:04] Steven Borden: In general, if you’ve got,if you’re seriously dealing with,D v t, or really have a history of blood clotting, we try to say, maybe avoid it. Talk to your doctor. Yeah, always talk to your doctor. That said, there, there’ve been, there’s a ton of literature out there now.

There’s one study, at least one or two that I’m aware of, that looked at, elder elderly folks with congestive heart failure. they put ’em through us. I think it was a six week BFR training phase, a couple times a week, and, They didn’t see any detrimental outcomes, which immediately you’d think, okay, congestive heart failure, maybe people would, you’d wanna avoid,training at A BFR.

And there’ve been several studies like that with peop different pathologies that, people had and generally their older folks as well. and we, we’ve yet to see negative outcomes directly attributed to BFR, which is pretty cool.

[00:20:50] Tony Winyard: And it’s even used for swimmers, isn’t it?

[00:20:53] Steven Borden: Yeah, swimmers, any endurance athlete, swimmers, rowers, cyclists, will engage in BFR training. you have the, technically the difficulty of trying to, I’ve seen swimmers try to apply BFR in the water, and one of the difficulties you have there, Is most devices that are, for example, our device, it’s, it has some electronic components to it.

And and those are there for a reason. Believe me, if it was, if it made sense to just create a strap, we would create a strap and the complexity of production would be, significantly reduced and our margins would probably be better. but. I, you technically could wrap a strap around your legs or arms and go in the water.

the difficulty there is you’re really unsure how much blood flow is being occluded at any given time. Are you training under complete occlusion? Meaning there’s literally no blood reaching. Your limbs? Probably don’t wanna do that, for that long. or are you just training at, maybe a level that’s not enough to create a stimulus?

And then third . If you’re repeating this type of training, and on Monday you get in the water and you wrap your straps up and you have, let’s say it, it ends up occluding, maybe 50% of the blood flow into your limbs. And you time yourself, you do whatever swimmers do, and then on Thursday you come back and do the same thing, but it’s wrapped a little bit tighter, and now it’s at 80% occlusion.

And you time yourself again. There’s a huge difference between 50 and 80. so it’s a tracking problem. And I note this with people who lift weights, that we track our sets, our reps, tech, sometimes our rest time, how many reps we have in reserve. We track all these metrics. and I think if we’re training with BFR, we should

Use the same level of specificity and, tracking there. and so that’s an example that maybe swimmers may have an issue with if they’re trying to use a strap.

[00:22:43] Why shouldn’t people wear BFR cuffs on arms and legs at the same time?

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[00:22:43] Tony Winyard: And so what is the reason, why people shouldn’t wear this? ’cause you mentioned that the straps can be used at the top of the arm and top of the leg, but you shouldn’t use both at the same time. so why is that?

[00:22:53] Steven Borden: Yeah, it’s, I’ve seen people do it and, Some people do it all the time and they love it. We don’t advise it. When you have, like I mentioned, it’s not so much about the blood getting into your limbs. In this case, it’s about the blood that’s not leaving your limbs. a ton of blood is being trapped in your legs.

Totally fine. Then you add on top, a ton of blood is being trapped in your arms. So there’s a lot of blood that’s not making its way back to your heart. And that can reduce, relatively reduce what’s called your stroke volume. when you, when your heart beats, it pumps out a certain amount of blood.

It’s kind of in reference to your stroke volume. And part of what helps that process go along is the blood coming back to the heart. it kind of rushes back to the heart and almost creates this like elastic pump that shoots heart, blood back down. and when blood flow is significantly reduced, the amount of blood that’s going back to your heart, your stroke volume can go down maybe to a level that would not be, safe.

that’s my understanding. I.

[00:23:52] Does it effect HRV?

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[00:23:52] Tony Winyard: And would using these affect heart rate variability in any way?

[00:23:58] Steven Borden: potentially, in the moment, certainly your heart rate variability when your heart rate climbs basically I is horrendous. so anytime you’re training, running, lifting weights, whether you’re using BFR or not, your HRV’s gonna be super low, which is totally fine. People look at H R V as a measure of recovery.

It’s, that’s a tough one. I think it’s a probably a really lagging indicator. we’ve seen that over time. I. if you wake up in the morning and your H R V is super low, that could be attributed to so many things. it might not have anything to do with your physiological state currently. It could have just been that you ate a late meal not to go down the rabbit hole on H R V.

you could have maybe had a little bit of alcohol before bed. You might have just been hotter than normal, and your resting heart rate was a little bit high. so there’s that complexity. but then also it all, it seems to be a really lagging indicator that if your HRV is down . You probably needed rest maybe several days before.

but what BFR can do in the, we talk about BFR as a recovery tool, is, if you’re in a case where you wanna make sure you maintain muscle, but your joints are feeling it and you’re, just the psychological and physiological fatigue that comes from getting under heavy weights, BFR can allow you to kind of push that aside for a little bit, get under some lighter loads, spare your joints, bring down total fatigue, but still drive a pretty strong stimulus to your muscle, the local muscle, which is ultimately what you’re looking to grow in most cases.

So in that case, yeah, you could see a H R V change, over time if you kind of reduce fatigue a little bit through BFR.

[00:25:28] Examples of how it can help

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[00:25:28] Tony Winyard: So give it, a couple of examples. So say someone, we’ve got two, two people. First person. Who is looking for hypertrophy and they want to incorporate this into their training somehow. What would be a suggested way that they could use this, like how many days a week and then someone else who isn’t looking to be a bodybuilder or anything, just wants to be, maintain general sort of fitness and so on.

how would it differ for those two cases?

[00:25:52] Steven Borden: Yeah, there’s, there’s so many ways you could take this ’cause we’ll get questions of people who will say, I want to train pretty much exclusively under BFR. And that would be kind of one answer, for their resistance training. And then some people say, I just want to kind of toss it in a session.

If you’re, if for option two, if you just want to kind of include it as a, maybe a modality in your training, I’ll just try to stick to somewhat, common numbers here. For somebody who’s maybe in the gym three times a week, maybe they train full body three times a week. what they could do is I.

If they want to sprinkle BFR in, they could do finishers with BFR. on your lower body day, if you’ve got a quad focused session, you could maybe you’re, if you’re, if you really want to continue lifting heavy weights, cool. Do your thing. And then after your last set, you could do a set of 30,under BFR, bodyweight only, or with very limited load, somewhere around 20% of your one rep max. I would say if you want to elevate your heels, that’ll help you. In that case, put more emphasis on your quads and less on your spine, which is kind of cool in that case, you wanna grow your quads. so you could sprinkle something like that. Or for upper body you could do a, bicep, tricep, superset.

So some. Any curl bicep, curl variation, superset with a tricep extension, variation. And these are generally higher rep sets. So in general, if you’re training with BFR, you should pick a weight that you can manage about 20 to 30 reps with. So that’s a good starting point. And if you’re using it for your entire session.

So to kind of go back to the person in example, number one, who wants to pretty much exclusively train with BFR, the 30 15 15 15 protocol is a really good kind of calibration starting point for people. And we have a whole episode on that, on the Blood Flow Restriction podcast. If you wanna just look up re it’s called 30 15.

1515 I think. And all it means is you do one set of 30 followed by three sets of 15 with about 60 seconds rest in between sets. You don’t have to strictly adhere to those numbers. Those are kind of like a guiding framework. So the most important thing is that 30. strap your cuffs on use occlusion somewhere around 50%.

So you’re about 50% of the blood flow traveling into your limbs is occluded at this time. It’s a pretty good starting place for most people. And then pick a weight, whatever movement you’re doing, and there’s, there. You don’t need to do special magic movements because you’re training in A BFR.

You can do pretty much any movement that you would do normally in the gym. Pick a weight that you can manage about 30 reps with. And then the most important thing is just to make sure that you get close to failure. You should be probably within a couple reps away from going, I could not push up another rep if I wanted to.

Once you’ve done that and you rest maybe 60 or so seconds, go back to your second set and, Same thing. It might be 15 reps, but it might be 17, it might be 21. and you’ll see what you’ll see is that each set, you do each subsequent set, you’re gonna be able to produce less reps. If you do more reps in set four than you did in rep set two, you probably did something wrong.

That’s kind of a good starting place. Think about just movements that you would normally do in the gym. That’s a long roundabout answer, but in summary, pick movements you would normally do in the gym, somewhere around 50% occlusion. Make sure your first set is around 30 reps. pick a weight that you can manage around 30 reps.

And then most importantly, just try to stick to proximity of, of failure. So maybe one to two reps or all the way to failure. Then do a volume that you can handle and you can recover from. So if you’re training three times a week, whatever amount of sets allow you to, wow, that was a really tough session.

But when I come back on Wednesday, I’m recovered and ready to go again. That’s a guiding framework that you can use BFR or not for training to put the most amount of muscle on in, in the safest possible way.

[00:29:35] BFR is hugely helpful for those with fatigue

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[00:29:35] Tony Winyard: and I guess is that its biggest selling point that. In that situation, if you’ve got one guy who’s just always doing really heavy weights and then he just feels really bad for the next couple of days, ’cause they work so hard. Whereas someone else who’s training with BFR, they’re not gonna feel so bad afterwards.

I.

[00:29:51] Steven Borden: Yeah, there’s,some interesting research on this, and for sure you’re gonna have a lot less stress on your joints. If you’ve ever put,200 kilos on your back or pulled 200 kilos or more off the floor, or whatever that is relative to your strength, a lot of weight. You’ll notice that.

When the weight gets high enough, you start feeling it in the joints. you might be fine in the session, but the joints will start to, to wear over time and that’s fine. but it’s something to manage. And we know that our connective tissues, our tendons, recover, Slower than our muscles do they get less blood flow.

They’re, so they re, their recovery timelines are a lot slower than our muscles. And because of that, over time our muscles might be in a place where they’re ready to produce a ton of force, but, our connective tissues are kind of hanging on by a thread. so BFR can be a really good tool there where you’re like, wow, I’m still training the muscle a ton.

and funny enough, BFR appears to. To, provide a similar stimulus to our connective tissues as heavy lifting. there’s still some science to sort out there, but there could be some really interesting, research over the next few years on BFR being a modality to improve the strength and health of people’s connective tissues at much less of a cost with much less weight and, risk of injury, which is cool.

[00:31:11] There are a lot of studies that have been done in this field?

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[00:31:11] Tony Winyard: Yeah, absolutely it is. and from, listen, I mentioned to you, I’ve listened to quite a few of the episodes of your podcast, and we’ll talk about the podcast in a. I, I often hear you mention about there’s a ton of research going on BFR over the last, what, 10, 20 years? Isn’t there?

[00:31:25] Steven Borden: A ton. Yeah. And it, and there’s, shoot, BFR is kind of known for this low intensity training. People are training with higher weights, as I just gave, and protocol wise, but there’s people doing research now on high load BFR training, what does it look like if you’re training under, heavy sets of five under BFR?

there’s people looking at,NASA is doing research on,they’ll use BFR as a tool for for, anti-gravity situations. and yeah, there, there’s BFR research happening in pretty much every vector, which is really cool.

[00:31:56] The Blood Flow Restriction podcast

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[00:31:56] Tony Winyard: So your podcast, it’s called The Blood Flow Restriction Podcast, isn’t

[00:32:00] Steven Borden: Yeah,

[00:32:01] Tony Winyard: And so

you’ve

[00:32:02] Steven Borden: as straightforward as you can get there.

[00:32:03] Tony Winyard: and you are, how many episodes was it? 30, 40, 50

or something?

[00:32:07] Steven Borden: got about 20 plus episodes up now.

[00:32:09] Tony Winyard: Okay. And you’ve covered quite a different sort of range of different types of training and so on in those episodes, haven’t you?

[00:32:16] Steven Borden: Yeah, we actually have a, we’ve gone through endurance, different protocols. We, we went through the 30 15 15, we go into more physiology of, what’s happening inside the body when you’re training at A BFR. we did a three episode series on the potential cognitive benefits of BFR training, which is really cool.

We try to keep the, topics as . Spread out as possible and dive into a ton of different spaces there.

[00:32:40] How does it help cognition?

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[00:32:40] Tony Winyard: without, ’cause as you said, it was three episodes, so I’m not gonna ask you to exactly what are the cognitive benefits, but just a,

sort of, a,

brief summary. What then that might really surprise some people listening, cognitive benefits.

[00:32:51] Steven Borden: Yeah. the 60 second pitch is, it appears that lactate, which we were just talking about, is a, Brain enhancer, oversimplified way of putting it, both short and probably long term as well. Constant exposure to lactate. Dr. George Brooks, he’s a researcher at Cal Berkeley. He talk, he calls lactate fuel for the brain.

and what we see is when we’ve trained with elevated lactate for a period of time, we’ll see some cognitive enhancement, in a few different cognitive domains for a period of time, a couple hours even after training. And the problem is in some cases when getting a big rise in lactate, requires pretty significant output again, but if you get under BFR, you’ve got less blood flow reaching your limbs, it’s a bit easier to get, significant increases in lactate, sometimes three to six fold versus what you would see without BFR. and so exposure to lactate can potentially improve cognition, both short and long term, which is really cool.

And BFR is kind of a fast way of getting that lactate accumulation quickly.

[00:33:56] Some people still think lactate is the bad guy?

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[00:33:56] Tony Winyard: and there’s still a lot of people under the misapprehension that lactate is bad.

[00:34:00] Steven Borden: Yeah. Yeah. It’s actually the hero that comes in and prevents you from dying of acidosis basically. so yeah, lactate physiology is really interesting and, our body will find ways to something to do with it. And one of the places that it takes it is the brain. ’cause the brain can just chew it right up.

and yeah, that’s one reason why I think the BFR and cognition space is really interesting and that just as practical tool that people can use some of the research, all they did was take people, and have them walk on a treadmill. Back to the treadmill example,they got a certain amount of exercise on the treadmill.

And then others did the same protocol under BFR, same speed, everything else. And you see fairly significant changes between the two environments. so if you are already going for, for me, I take several walks a day just for productivity’s sake and increase my overall activity. And it’s kind of an easy thing to just strap some cuffs on and, maybe get a little bit more out of that walk than you normally would.

[00:35:03] Pair BFR with rucking

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[00:35:03] Tony Winyard: So I, as you said, that the first thing that came into my mind was, therefore it’s really, it can be paired with something like rucking.

[00:35:11] Steven Borden: Yeah, definitely rucking is a, is, longer duration. especially if you’re going uphill. Yeah, it’ll be fairly difficult.

[00:35:20] Tony Winyard: So for people who are listening and thinking, wow, this sounds especially what you’re just talking about in cognition and something, and all those other areas you mentioned, definitely check out, the podcast because the, yeah. Steve goes really deep into cognition and many of the other things.

So check out the Blood Flow Restriction podcast and if people wanna find out more about you and Saga and blood flow restriction, where would you advise ’em to look?

[00:35:46] Steve’s contact details

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[00:35:46] Steven Borden: Yeah, so we actually post a lot of short form educational content on our Instagram. So our Instagram is @MoveSaga, move SAGA, and then from there you can find links to the Blood Flow Restriction podcast pretty much on any, Podcast platform, Spotify, whatever else. If you just type in blood flow restriction, our episodes will come up in this top 20 search results.

it turns out there’s not a ton of people producing blood flow restriction content, on the internet. So yeah, that would be a good place to start.

[00:36:15] Tony Winyard: And have you got a YouTube channel?

[00:36:17] Steven Borden: That is coming very soon. We’re actually in the middle of building a YouTube studio this week, and so we’ll have a studio and what the plan there is to, to.

Take a lot of what we do on the podcast and we’ll make it a little bit more short form,and try to reach more people there. The podcast has been really neat. We’ve reached way more people than we ever thought we would. but I think YouTube is gonna hopefully 200 or 300 x that

[00:36:40] Tony Winyard: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So a question I always ask everyone, Steve is there a book that comes to mind that has really moved you for any reason?

[00:36:47] Steve’s favourite book

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[00:36:47] Steven Borden: Yeah, I, it’s funny, I thought I was gonna get outta that question ’cause I didn’t respond over email. I. So one book that’s been pretty interesting to me is Evidence-Based Habit Building by Dr. Melissa Davis. She’s a PhD in neuroscience and Human Behavior. she just talks about really practical steps on how to form habits and unformed habits that are unhelpful.

so I, I tend to be a person that leans really heavy into just,as objective and as practical as we can get. and so that book has been really cool. yeah, that’s the first one that comes to mind. Evidence-based habit building.

[00:37:25] Tony Winyard: I’ll definitely check that one out. I’ve discovered some amazing books by asking people that, that simple question.

[00:37:30] Steven Borden: I bet That’s a great question.

[00:37:32] Tony Winyard: and finally, Steve, as we finish, is there a quote that comes to mind that you really like?

[00:37:37] Favourite quote

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[00:37:37] Steven Borden: Yeah, the first one that came to mind is, tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions. I think in a lot of ways the quote itself is interesting, but the larger premise to it is in a lot of ways, I think sometimes I. Weaknesses that we have, we try to pass them off as virtues or that we try to view them as, well, I’m doing this because of this.

And I, I think the quote is really interesting because it just directly acknowledges often, yeah, something that, that we will try to self-identify, we’ll do whatever we can to make sure that, our, we preserve our kind of identity, but directly acknowledging . You know this. Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.

It’s no, you should look right in the mirror and understand that maybe you just don’t have a firm ground that you’re standing on. Maybe you don’t have convictions. I love this idea, like I, I, in this BFR world, it’s the. it’s, we lean really heavy into science and you need to have an extremely open mind as a scientist.

and I think that’s really important. but there’s that old quote that says,you don’t want your mind to be so open that it falls out. and so you, there, there have to be pillars that you stand on and pillars that you believe in, and principles that you don’t deviate from. And, yeah, that’s why, it’s, why it’s interesting to me.

[00:38:57] Tips on how BFR can help you be proactive with health

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[00:38:58] Tony Winyard: just to, to finish off, could you summarize, the whole podcast is about being proactive around health. So how would, how does BFR help people be proactive around their health?

[00:39:09] Steven Borden: It is, a tool in some ways that can allow you to mimic some of the effects of higher intensity training in environments or situations where, maybe that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Situation one, when you’re injured. you can’t move heavy weights. Maybe situation two when you’re traveling, if you’re a frequent traveler.

and we know this gyms often hotel gyms have very limited weights. Maybe there’s no weights. BFR can allow you to get a ton out of that low, weight environment. so there’s multiple situations like that. Where if you have low or limited access to weights, you’re traveling, you’re injured, you need to recover your in-season athlete or just somebody who’s down and out.

BFR can be a tool. So in a way that it allows you to maintain momentum in your life, despite some circumstances that might not warrant high intensity training. I think that’s the best way to put it.

[00:40:04] Tony Winyard: Well, Steven, thank you for educating the listeners on how blood flow restriction can be really helpful to them. So it’s been fascinating, so thank you.

[00:40:12] Steven Borden: Thank you for having me. This has been a great chat. I really enjoyed it.

[00:40:16] Next week, episode 240

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Next week is episode 240 with nurse practitioner Jonathan Mendoza who emphasizes the importance of a healthy liver for optimal health. He explains how poor diet and lifestyle damages, the liver leading to inflammation and disease. And he advocates using lab testing to track health metrics and inspire change. He provides practical tips for sleep, nutrition, and supplements to support liver function, and stresses That small daily actions for self care Add up to improve health. And we talk about becoming proactive And that it requires self awareness, community support, And incremental change, and he really stresses the importance of incremental change. so that’s next week episode 240 with Jonathan Mendoza. If you enjoyed this week’s show about blood flow restriction, please do send the episode to anyone you know who would really get some value from it .Please do subscribe. If you are On Youtube Hit that subscribe button And i hope you have a fantastic week.