Torniquets and Muscle Growth

[simon m]

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If it's serious is it not dangerous, i can see excessive vascular and tissue damage occuring?

RC

The electro stimulation thread was not all mickey take - some was for fun, but lots of it does work.

Occlusion training is very much cutting edge and not dangerous if done correctly.

Although, I would always recommend more traditional working out like drop sets, but this stuff is interesting to nerds like me!

[Ripped Barbarian]

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RC

The electro stimulation thread was not all mickey take - some was for fun, but lots of it does work.

Occlusion training is very much cutting edge and not dangerous if done correctly.

Although, I would always recommend more traditional working out like drop sets, but this stuff is interesting to nerds like me!

Yeah, there was a worrying mix of mickey taking and people taking it seriously so it wasn't much use, there is indeed some benefits from electro stimulation, especially in regard to TENS machines etc.

Are there any serious articles on the occlusion training techniques?

[sendos]

I really cant see this being beneficial at all, all it will do is induce tissue ischemia and place the muscle under unnecessary oxidative stress. IT is quite damaging to the affected cells.

[simon m]

Here's some info from X-resp which is an Ironman spin off. I haven't linked as I'm not sure if there are adverts on there:

In the last issue we talked about occlusion training, or blocking blood flow, and how it can increase your muscle size and strength. One study showed that subjects who used occlusion above the forearms for two minutes got an immediate 20 percent strength increase on wrist curls over the subjects who didn't block blood flow prior to the set. Then there was the Japanese scientist who got an 8 percent increase in quad cross-sectional area in only two weeks with occlusion training! It took him four months to get that size gain with conventional methods. Amazing.

The immediate strength gains may have something to do with more blood ramping up muscle energetics, while the dramatic size increases may be the result of either fiber remodeling or getting new growth from different fibers (and being a bodybuilder, you want a big dose of all of the above right now; we'll tell you how get the ball rolling in a moment). Let's talk strength first...

If you block blood flow to a muscle for a minute or two, the moment you remove the occlusion, it's like a damn breaking--blood floods to the bodypart like a tidal wave. That means there's much more oxygen available to the muscle. If you've been following our X-Rep discussion in this newsletter and in IRON MAN magazine, you know about the size principle of fiber recruitment--the low threshold motor units fire first (slow-twitch endurance fibers), followed by the mediums followed by the high-threshold motor units.

It could be that with so much more blood in the muscle, the slow-twitch endurance fibers carry more of the load early in the set, sparing more fast-twitch recruitment for later. That would result in more reps, i.e. impressive strength (20 percent would take a 300-pound bench to 360). Interesting stuff. Now for the real excitement--muscle size increases...

If you could increase your biceps' and triceps' cross-sectional area by 8 percent every two weeks (like the Japanese scientist did with quads), your arms would be twice as big in about three months! That's right, double their current size! They'd be ripping through the sleeves of your shirts! Okay, that may be wishful thinking, but with proper occlusion training you can get some incredible new hulk-like increases fast. (We think that's a big part of the reason we made such spectacular gains in only one month with X Reps, as they provide significant occlusion at the end of a set.) It's possible that blocking blood flow works so well in creating new size by affecting the slow-twitch, or type 1, fibers. Those fibers are aerobic, which means they require oxygen. One theory is that if you starve them of oxygen with occlusion early in the set, they adapt by getting larger--and that means you get bigger faster!

Bodybuilders tend to focus on the fast-twitch fibers because they've had it hammered into their heads that those are the ones with the most growth potential. That's true, but growth in the slow-twitch fibers will obviously improve the size of a bodypart as well. As we've said, bodybuilders should try to build all fiber types and subtypes for the most size possible--and occlusion training is key to making that happen.

Even conventional heavy resistance training will build both type 1 (slow-twitch) and type 2 (fast-twitch) fibers (Kraemer, Patton, et al. 1995) but obviously favors the type 2s. Occlusion may favor type 1 growth--and therefore give you greater overall size increases much quicker. Remember, lots of fiber types growing at once translates into bigger, fuller muscles in record time. (You should be getting very excited, especially if you're a hardgainer with more slow-twitch fibers. Occlusion may be one of the big solutions to your muscle-building problems!)