Jeremy Loenneke, Ph.D.: The science of blood flow restriction—benefits, uses, and what it teaches us about the relationship between muscle size and strength

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
I guess this week is Professor Jeremy Loenneke. Jeremy is an Associate Professor of Exercise Science at the University of Mississippi, better known as Ole Miss.
He has a Ph.D in Exercise Physiology from the University of Oklahoma and a Master's in Nutrition and Exercise from Southeast Missouri State University. He's also a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine and a member of the American Physiological Society. He's the Director of an Applied Physiology Laboratory and his research focuses on skeletal muscle adaptations to exercise in combination with blood flow restriction. Now, some of you may have seen me recently posting things on Instagram about blood flow restriction. I've been experimenting with it for some time recently and in this podcast, I even explained the first time I was exposed to it, which was a little over 10 years ago, it was actually in a swimming pool. Blood flow restriction is a general term that applies to occluding some portion of the arterial inflow to a muscle. We get into the very nitty gritty of this during the podcast.
And under these conditions, it becomes harder for the muscle to contract. And what it allows an individual to do is exercise with a lower weight than they would normally do unoccluded. Now, as we cover in this episode, there are lots of benefits associated with that. There's also other terms that you may have heard associated with that. The most common term associated with this from a brand perspective is Katsu, K-A-A-T-S-U, which is Japanese for basically training with restriction.
Anyway, we get into all of that stuff in this episode and more, but perhaps one of the most interesting things that comes out of this discussion, well, at least from an egghead perspective like me, is that blood flow restriction offers a very cool way to study the relationship between muscle size and muscle strength. And that's a topic we explore very deeply in this episode. We also start this episode off, assuming that you know very little about muscles. So we explain the physiology of the sarcomere, the micro anatomy of muscle fibers, the difference between type two and type one fibers. So even if you come into this and you don't know what an actin filament is and a myosin filament is, don't worry about it. We're going to spend quite a bit of time getting you up to speed on that. And of course, if you already have a Ph.D. in exercise physiology and know everything about that stuff and just want to get to the BFR, no problem, get to that too. So anyway, without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Jeremy.
Hey Jeremy, thanks so much for making time. I've been looking forward to this one for quite a while. Both personally and professionally, this is a topic I've wanted to learn a lot more about, something I've been playing with a lot myself, including this morning, particularly painful session this morning of blood flow restriction, which I might be doing wrong. So I'm looking forward to maybe the end of our discussion when we can get into the practical aspects of it. But I want to take a kind of a step back and get a sense about how you became interested in exercise in general. Obviously you've devoted your career to it. So when did that become a passion great enough that you decided it was worth all of your study?

**Jeremy Loenneke** (4:02)
Yeah, thanks for having me on Peter. I wrestled early on in my life. So I wrestled from probably the age of five through high school, but I wasn't really into training that much. I was into wrestling, but not really lifting weights or any of the conditioning. And my coaches would always tell me that you need to try to get in the gym. You just stay in the gym, get stronger, get stronger, get stronger. And I didn't really listen up until towards the end of high school. And then I started, one of my friends was really into bodybuilding and power lifting. So I started training with him. I do feel like it probably helped me a little bit in wrestling. And then I kind of got interested in just trying to see how to make a muscle get as big as possible.