The acute muscular response to blood flow‐restricted exercise with very low relative pressure

To investigate the acute responses to blood flow‐restricted (BFR) exercise across low, moderate and high relative pressures. Muscle thickness, maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) and electromyography (EMG) amplitude were assessed following exercise with six different BFR pressures: 0%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 50% and 90% of arterial occlusion pressure (AOP). There were differences between each time point within each condition for muscle thickness, which increased postexercise [+0·47 (0·40, 0·54) cm] and then trended towards baseline. For MVC, higher pressures resulted in greater decrements than lower pressures [e.g. 10% AOP: −20·7 (−15·5, −25·8) Nm versus 90% AOP: −24 (−19·1, −28·9) Nm] postexercise. EMG amplitude increased from the first three repetitions to the last three repetitions within each set. When using a common BFR protocol with 30% 1RM, applying BFR does not seem to augment acute responses over that of exercise alone when exercise is taken to failure.