Blood Flow Restriction in elite sport with David Young - Lead S&C for Australia Women's Rowing Team.

Welcome to this month's episode of BFR Radio. 

In exciting news, gyms are back open!

During the COVID period a lot of people may not have had all of the equipment necessary for "traditional" strength training. So during the COVID period  I challenged myself away from more traditional high load lifting to create a hybrid strength program that worked around the constraints of not having access to lots of weight. The program involved combining  low load training (the max I lifted was 40kg). As I knew that this would be enough external load, I delved into my bag of tricks and used the addition of Isometrics (use of a tie down strap), lifting bands, Blood Flow restriction and Plyometric exercises with a goal to improve athlete performance.

As I‘ve always advocated, there is no substitute for higher external load (i.e. mechanical stress) and therefore the addition of bands and isometric straps provided an additional external loading with the “minimal equipment” challenge and then the addition of BFR was using metabolic stress as a proxy for the mechanical stress that was missing.  I’ve been collecting both upper and lower body testing for a few months that has actually predated me even starting this type of training so my preliminary findings are quite interesting. Once I’ve put them together I’ll share with you the results.

In other BFR work, I’ve been working on BFR use framework. Consequently I’ve been increasing my literature reading. There is so much is so many different areas, so if there is anything of particular interest that you want to hear on the podcast let me know and I’ll review those papers.

Today’s guest is NSWIS Senior Coach, David Young who is the lead S&C coach for the Women’s national rowing team based out of Penrith in NSW. As I usually preview a paper before we go into this segment, I actually wished I’d waited for the Rowing Paper I reviewed a few episodes ago. With the information that David will share with us today, I feel that we could have really had a BFR rowing special. And add last month's episode review from Sam Halley on the effects of IPC on kayaking performance (with a potential for it to transfer to rowing performance) then this would have been a really sports specific episode. 

I am sure you'll get a lot out of today's episode. David brings a wealth of coaching experience and he really brings some good practical take-aways for BFR use in an elite training environment.

Some more information:

David is a Senior S&C Coach with the New South Wales Institute of Sport, having previously worked at both the English Institute of Sport and the Sports Council for Wales. During his 16 years in High Performance Sport David has worked across a wide range of Olympic and Commonwealth sports. Since 2006, he has worked with rowing programs in the UK and Australia, being fortunate enough to support athletes to numerous World, Olympic and Paralympic medals. 

His current role sees him deliver S&C services to Rowing Australia’s Hancock Prospecting Women’s National Training Centre based in Penrith. David has a Master’s degree from the University of Sydney and ongoing industry accreditations with the ASCA, UKSCA and NSCA.

Contact him via LinkedIn or via email: [email protected]

For more information or to order your own set of BFR cuffs please visit my website: www.sportsrehab.com.au

Thanks for next listening and see you next month.

Chris