Friday, June 19, 2020

The KAATSU Choice: Higher Pressures Over Heavy Weights

For who? Baseball players, student-athletes, competitive athletes
For what? Functional movement, strength



"Your legs are stronger than life..." said New York Mets outfielder Yoenis Cespedes. He was explaining his condition after a tough KAATSU leg workout with ESPN sports broadcaster Jessica Mendoza in an ESPN interview.

Mendoza tried KAATSU with Cespedes and Mike Barwis, an early adopter of KAATSU, at the Barwis Methods Training Center in Port St Lucie, Florida.

Personal trainers, strength and conditioning coaches, and exercise physiologists believe that optimal muscle building requires lifting of weights or doing resistance exercises. This leads to DOMS (Delayed-onset muscle soreness) that is felt after a hard workout and acute muscle soreness that is felt during or immediately after a workout.

Conventional wisdom is that the heavier the weight and/or the more repetitions or time in the gym, the larger and faster muscles will develop.

The muscle-building process leads to DMOS where the muscle fibers are damaged while weight lifting, and leads to the secretion of HGH (Human Growth Hormone) that results in muscle recovery, growth and size.

Practically, this means that if you are bench pressing 50 kg in 3 sets of 12 repetitions, and then gradually increase the weight to 55 kg in 3 sets of 12 repetitions, then not only are you psychologically satisfied with your performance, but you are also getting stronger and most probably bigger in size.

And usually sore for a while after every weight training session.

Figuratively speaking, a strength and conditioning coach wants their athletes to lift more weights over more repetitions.

Let’s imagine that those weights are rocks. Let’s place those rocks in a bucket and ask the athlete to lift those imaginary buckets.

If the coach wants to increase their weight of that bucket, he will add another rock. But at some point, the bucket will be filled and no more rocks can be added.

But what if those rocks were replaced by sand? Rocks are clearly heavier than sand. But, if we filled the bucket with sand - tiny particles of little rocks - the overall weight of the sand-filled bucket will be even greater than a bucket filled with larger, heavier rocks.

Now imagine the coach wants to increase the weight of the bucket for his athlete. He cannot add another rock, but he can add some additional sand.

The sand enables micro increases of weight in a way that rocks cannot. This can enable the coach to help his athlete very gradually and very minutely increase the weight and performance gains.

Now figuratively imagine, a clever coach used powder instead of sand in his imaginary weight training bucket. Powder is obviously lighter than sand and significantly lighter than rocks. But powder enables the coach to very precisely and gradually increase the weight and strength of his athlete.

Essentially, the sand and the powder enables a more precise means to very incrementally increase the strength and performance of an athlete.

Using KAATSU is similar to this analogy of using rocks versus sand versus powder.

KAATSU equipment enables strength and conditioning coaches to very precisely and MUCH more frequently increase the strength and size of their athletes in addition to their speed and stamina.

The preciseness and specificity that is enabled by KAATSU the original BFR is unparalleled. With KAATSU equipment, one pressure point increase is the figurative and literal amount that is equivalent to a single grain of sand or tiny bits of powder. For elite athletes who seek victory by being only incrementally faster, better, and stronger than their opponents, KAATSU - or the equivalent of adding sand or powder to your bucket - can be the incremental difference.

Likewise, for a stroke victim or a paraplegic who is striving to make only slight incremental improvements in their movements or strength, KAATSU enables the tiny increases in their Quality of Life. Performed regularly and ideally daily for less than 20 minutes per day, these incremental increases in performance and in the Quality of Life makes significant changes in the lives of healthy athletes and injured individuals.

Some younger and some male athletes frequently want to lift heavy weights with their KAATSU Air Bands on.1 But it is not necessary to get bigger and stronger. The real key is two-fold:

* do KAATSU Cycles before and during the strength-training session
* finish off with some KAATSU Training
* increase the SKU pressure of the KAATSU Air Bands in the KAATSU Cycle and KAATSU Training mode instead of adding resistance (weights) to your lifts2

1 As shown with New York Mets' Yoenis Céspedes in the ESPN report above.
2 If you want to feel some resistance, you can use very light weights (e.g., water bottle or light dumbbells) and/or contract your muscles in the both the positive and negative directions.

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